Stimulation Clicker

for people that don't want to click a lot,

paste in "setInterval(() => document.querySelector('.main-btn').click(), 20)" into the browser console, clicks 50x per second for you :)

Reminds me a bit of The Onion's "A Very Fatal Murder" podcast.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Very_Fatal_Murder

I noticed the podcast at one point mentions neal.fun, so definitely custom made!

Thanks for the direct link- this makes understimulated listening much easier & it was easy to miss within the cacophony of everything else.

Was the mukbang also custom?

It's weird, it seems like it's the only custom made thing on the game, why only that one?

Absolutely. Reminded me of all the effort GTA spent on radio, to much fanfare.

The entire production value is fantastic. Glad to see Neal expanding. This is only a half step away from something less jokey, and more marketable.

If that's the path he chooses, of course. But judging by his smiling face in the center of it all wearing a poor fitting crown, I think he's just in it for the lulz. And I may respect that even more.

[flagged]

As far as clickers go, finishing this game without cheating is very easy. Only takes like 20-30 min. But nonetheless, it was enjoyable. Really regretted clicking the subway surfer wormhole button. Luckily that was right at the end.

Jonathan Blow had a great (imho) rant about those type of notifications that someone clipped from one of his live streams. (Warning: strong language.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9nmCIrs7HI

if people ask me how my weekend was, i can unironically send them this site; this is my weekend condensed in 30 minutes

MSN Messenger had addicting bubbles way before

> I felt like a frog being slowly boiled

This game is an excellent simulation of what ADHD feels like, especially if you're putting off multiple critical tasks.

I wanted to gouge my eyes out hahaha. The ending cutscene made up for it all.

For the live-action, logical conclusion of this concept, watch HYPER-REALITY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs

You'll never see games at fancy art galleries or contemporary art museums in NYC because games are too accessible

Neal has continually outdone himself with every single release. Everything he makes is a labor of love and is so special and deserving of attention. From the factual stuff like "The Size of Space" and "Deep Sea", to the more amusing "Absurd Trolly Problems", "The Password Game", and so on. It's all so good and feels like a gift to the internet.

Stimulation Clicker's social commentary has to the best thus far. I know click games are a thing, but to combine that mechanic with a parody of the state of the modern attention economy is just pure art.

Neal, if you're reading HN, you rock. Please know how appreciative we are.

I haven’t even had a chance to look at the game from that perspective yet. I don’t know why, but this game has me so excited!

> This is honestly a better piece of contemporary art (in terms of making you think about modern life and what is happening to our environment, the impact on ourselves, our kids, etc.)

Zooming out, I think games in general is in a much better position to do this, as a medium, compared to the alternatives TV, movies and music.

I guess mainly because it's interactive, but it also feels like it can be broader than the other mediums, like on one hand you have Idle/Clicker games like these, and on the other the huge blockbuster AAA games.

"I accidentally got addicted" is such a wonderful phrase.

What is the win game button? I also got up to a pretty high stimulation and never saw any such button.

But what did you win, really?

> Fantastic encapsulation and commentary on the modern web and attentionspace.

This is why I quit Hearthstone even though I never spent a dime on it. I realized I had been habituated into playing it every day. I started feeling like a lab rat trained to push a button for a reward.

a fun way is to resize the window to be super tiny and the DVD Bounce really gets going into the millions

Automate that bitcoin!

```

setInterval(() => { let max = 100; while(max-->0) { let price = +document.querySelector(".last-price").textContent.trim().slice(1).replace(",","").split("\n")[0]; if (price > 20000) { document.querySelector(".stock-sell").click(); } else if (price < 10000) { document.querySelector(".stock-buy").click(); } else { break; } } })

```

Running it async will prevent the main screen from lagging:

  (async () => {
    const delay = (ms) => new Promise(resolve => setTimeout(resolve, ms));
    for (let i = 0; i < 10000; i++) {
        document.getElementsByClassName('main-btn')[0].click();
        await delay(5); // 5 ms sleep
    }
  })();

Infinite version:

let button = document.getElementsByClassName('main-btn');

let clicker = setInterval(() => button[0].click(), 1);

To stop, use this:

window.clearInterval(clicker);

Just go into developer mode and just break on a line like so:

    r.sps && r.purchased && this.addStimulation(r.sps \* n, r.id)

     this.addStimulation(10000000000,r.id)

Automating it is the most fun part of these silly games. Here's a bash script to do it on mac (brew install clickclick first)

    while true; do
        cliclick c:.
    done

I did the same exact thing and then wanted to post it into the groupchat then see this.

1000 iterations too!

Why are we like this XD

> Despite the HN comments complaining about it being overwhelming and a dark reflection of how awful and distracting the internet is, clearly enough people enjoyed it to get to the front page.

Is this like a massive HN wooosh -- how can this be the top-voted comment?

From Neil Postman's 1985 "Amusing Ourselves to Death":

> “With television, we vault ourselves into a continuous, incoherent present.”

> “Spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face.”

It's less about whether we "enjoy" the stimulation, more about what kind of people we become when we lose ourselves in this bizarre sea of superstimuli. We're like reinforcement agents creating adversarial examples for each other, drawing ourselves further out of any sort of meaningful life, into a fever dream where the most desirable job for the next generation is to be famous for being famous [1] rather than do anything for any kind of deeper purpose.

[1] https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/what-is-gen-zs-no...

It's not self-defeating, it's a commentary.

I've built up a reflex to leave any sort of overstimulatory atmosphere. I don't watch short form videos and leave any page that causes high levels of stimulation (Temu's spinner stops me from shopping there, for example).

I quit this game after about 10 minutes when it hit a comical level of stimulation and still upvoted this. I loved the commentary because the game seemed to follow the natural "evolution" of the web, straight to the point where every app has attached mini games and multiple in-game currencies. Listening to the man popping his beer can and pouring it at the same time as a live police scanner was truly dystopian but also feels like a daily occurrence in modern society.

> at any point during this game we could just open a new tab and watch the ocean on a YouTube livestream.

That's a great observation.

I'm not sure how to phrase this exactly, but there's something going on for at least some people - definitely for me - that the thing we're seeking refuge in are given meaning by the things we're seeking refuge from. Like you said, at any point during the game - or before, or after - I could open a new tab and watch the ocean on YouTube, or even watch the same thing that was the ending of the game. Except, obviously, I wouldn't, because why would I? It would be totally random and arbitrary, a kind of plot non sequitur you'd complain about if it was a piece of fiction. This ocean scene only makes sense as an ending of this game, as a refuge, a contrast, a punchline. It's the stimulation game preceding it, that gives meaning to the ending.

I've noticed I often feel similarly about many hobbies, interests, tasks, - heck, even people - they rapidly stop being interesting once I don't have any stressing obligation I should be working on instead.

(My HN comment history, too, is strongly and positively correlated with amount of stuff I should be doing instead in my life, but not necessarily want to.)

Doesn't seem self-defeating if it aroused that level of analysis, seems like good art! Art can bring up questions that author didn't intend so it's often best not to bring the authors viewpoint into the discussion, or at least not make authorial intent the authority.

I've heard someone say good art isn't about saying new things, but saying known truths in new ways and I found this very effective. Your question about who really stays to watch the ocean is interesting, and I don't think diminishes the game.

you're looking at it from a framework that there's a "right" way to interpret a given piece of art, or that a given piece of art has "a point" instead of "a set of ways in which people interpret it". You're describing one way of interpreting it and then leveling a charge against the piece when, in reality, that charge should be leveled at that interpretation.

> Despite the HN comments complaining about it being overwhelming and a dark reflection of how awful and distracting the internet is, clearly enough people enjoyed it to get to the front page. The stimulation torture wasn't really torture, but another level to the game. All the content creators whose inclusion at first seems like an indictment of the kinds of internet videos that lead to addiction or overstimulation also all get a pleasant shout-out which seems silly. Are these supposed to represent what's awful about the internet?

There's a literary/artistic technique called "irony" where the depiction isn't meant to be taken at face-value and instead is actually being shown because the opposite is intended. The whole game is an ironic application of Stimulation techniques, and in order to show its negative impact, one must use them ironically.

I didn't find it enjoyable or soothing... I played it for about 30 seconds, got the point, chuckled because it was a mildly clever poke at the stupid engagement tactics used to addict people to otherwise boring and pointless actions - sort of a demo of how we're all dumber than lab mice, who at least get food for pressing a button - and then came back here to see that some people actually kept playing it to some sort of end. Which is crazy.

These trends wouldn't be trends if they didn't work. The game can be awful and distracting, yet still succeed at garnering engagement. Not just in spite of the stimulation but partially due to the stimulation. It's not self defeating or hypocritical, it's a bad thing, an indictment, and also engaging all at the same time.

> 2018 Film

It was also a great book!

Ow, My Balls

There is a different version where a person takes drug A to solve problem X. But that has a side effect so they take drug B to solve that problem. And so on and so on and so on. Eventually, they decide to stop taking all the medicines and are finally "cured".

I felt an immediate, physical relief when I hit the credits screen.

"A Squash and a Squeeze" by Julia Donaldson must be a take on that

https://judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/50346/is-julia-d... says it's a take on an old Jewish Polish folk tale

I figured like thirty seconds into using the site that resizing it smaller would give me more DVD bounces per second. But then during resizing i kinda cheated myself some points accidentally, and discovered that trick where they're just bouncing on every tick.

Normally I'm a sucker for clicker games, but cheating the progress (even accidentally) always kills the point of it.

I cheated and opened up multiple windows of this game in a tiled window manager so I can get more stimulated, but it wasn't enough so I opened up youtube (minecraft parkour videos), netflix (comfort shows) and live streamed it to twitch providing live commentary.

This is the way, two minutes and already at a million.

You can get a massive amount of money with the stock market plugin once you get the cryptocurrency and leverage upgrades.

Also, zoom in the window!

Level 42 was my limit