The Internet has blessed us with a new obsession — One Million Checkboxes. Make no mistake, the browser-based game has no intention of improving minds but once you begin playing the game, you will hum Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now. It’s a game with one million little boxes spread across rows and the user has to click on a box to make a check mark. Here’s the catch: The box gets checked (or unchecked) for everyone who plays the game.

A counter on top of the screen keeps track of the number of boxes that have been cumulatively checked. How can that be fun? People love to make their presence felt, so they are unchecking boxes as fast as others could check them only to watch the counter go backwards.

For ’90s netizens, the design has a beautiful retro feel, minus all bells and whistles. All you see is a sea of tickboxes in a game that’s highly addictive and surprisingly exasperating.

Created by eieio.games, developer Nolen Royalty deliberately kept the premise simple. Some try to check boxes that are at the top of the screen while others scroll deep into the page to find their comfy corners where they can check boxes in peace. Royalty spent two days coding the website and hoped a few hundred people would try it.

So far around 500,000 people have played the game, according to Royalty and “they’ve checked or unchecked boxes roughly 200 million times”.

It’s costing Royalty $60-$70 a day to keep the game running but that’s going to add up to a lot of money if the creator decides to keep the game running for a long time.

Needless to say, playing the game is pointless and you may end up spending plenty of time like you do on Reels. And the speed at which boxes are getting checked and unchecked can make you anxious. But some can take comfort in the fact that it’s mostly humans trying to compete against each other in some kind of pursuit in the age of AI and chatbots.