In Clickolding Nobody and Everybody Has the Power
Clickolding, a new game from the El Paso, Elsewhere developers Strange Scaffold, only takes about 40 minutes to finish, and consists mostly of pressing the spacebar. Despite that short time and limited action, though, it offers a lot to chew on, interrogating the power dynamics of videogames and the relationship between creator and player.
Yes, Clickolding is a clicker—perhaps the most mindless, repetitive, and cynical type of game—but one with a point. It flips the traditional power fantasies of games on their head while exploiting the pointlessness of the clicker. You’re not clicking for your own pleasure or the benefit of your character; you’re fulfilling somebody else’s fantasy—namely the masked pervert paying you to click a tally counter exactly 10000 times. It’s the guy’s dream, and there’s no doubt it’s sexual; he has that mix of anticipation and impatience that goes hand-in-hand with living out a fetish in real life, and gives directions to speed up or slow down, to change positions, to look at him or look away, as you click on. He talks about his double life, his secretive nighttime assignations, his wife and children at home oblivious to his kink, from behind an almost featureless brown mask, as you aimlessly click and walk around a small, cramped, dingy motel room.
Most videogames flatter the player. We’re the chosen one, a super soldier, a pro athlete, a sociopathic criminal who never gets punished; we rescue the princess or win the war or beat up everybody else. Clickolding absolutely does not flatter anybody. It comments on games’ traditional relationship with the player by making it feel dirty and sordid. We’re helping somebody else live their fantasy—or, more accurately, their fetish—while they wear their home-made, Joe Camel-looking mask, with a gun occasionally pointed our way.
I had interacted with everything in the room well before I hit 2000 clicks. I had inspected all the artwork, found a hidden key, turned the TV and AC on and off several times. I had exhausted every possible decision I could make less than a fifth of the way through the game, essentially reducing myself to a robot in this almost prank of a game.
Of course, we still have power in this scenario. The only way to assert that power is to just not click—to choose not to play at all. You can’t interact with Clickolding without willingly surrendering your own autonomy—and that, as anybody who’s ever had to read any essay ever written about Bioshock can tell you, is also true of most games.
If you want to be reductive you can call Clickolding another game about the illusion of choice and lack of actual power on the part of the player. Another designer who thinks they’re being clever by reminding us that everything we do in a game is engineered by them. That’s such an elementary reading of games, though, and downplays what Clickolding is trying to do. Yes, the designer is ultimately the one with the power, but what is their goal in using that power? What do they get from it—what kind of pleasure, fulfillment, or satisfaction? When the game designer watches or thinks about the audience playing their game, are they that creepy stranger in the corner behind a mask, being driven into ecstasy by giving us orders—deciding when we speed up, when we slow down, when we perform tasks, when we access new areas like the hotel room’s bathroom? The answer seems pretty obvious.
Still, the question here isn’t who is the one being clickolded: the player, the designer, or the on-screen character deriving sexual satisfaction from somebody else pushing a clicker? Well, the latter isn’t real, but here they serve as a stand-in for the designer. Ultimately both the creator and the consumer are beholden to the click—one because their work wouldn’t exist without it, the other because the very act of playing a game is subjecting yourself to the designer’s whims. Inside that relationship the two sides fundamentally clickold each other, both simultaneously subservient and superior to each other in different ways, a tangle of asymmetrical power dynamics that can—and, in Clickolding, do—counterbalance each other.
Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, comedy, travel, theme parks, wrestling, and more. He’s also on Twitter @grmartin.