Indulge me, if you will, in a bit of meta-commentary about the use of games as tools to communicate ideas and themes, not just as devices for entertainment.
The idea struck me after I’d played 2 completely unrelated games which seemingly had the core theme of commenting on what a technology enabled, forever online world meant for our society writ large. Those two games were Stimulation Clicker and It is as if you were on your phone, both of which wouldn’t necessarily be classified as games but have many of the tropes of one. The former is very much in the same vein as Universal Paperclips with the latter being quite the edge case. I’ll hope you’ll accept my argument that neither of these would exist without much of the groundwork numerous games had done before them.
Stimulation clicker puts you in the driver seat of a dopamine deficient individual who’ll stack endless amounts of activities on themselves. You click, get stimulation, and so you click again. You keep doing this whilst unlocking more wild and varied ways of providing yourself stimulation, running the gamut of all manner of engagement maximising activities. What seemingly starts out as what the youth would call screenmaxxing rapidly turns in a cacophony of overlapping forms of stimulation, all of them competing for your attention. No longer are you simply seeking something to passively engage with, you have become a vessel to be filled with endless streams of content and meaningless interaction. All of this provided to you for free, for it is you who is the product.
It is as if you were on your phone is on the other end of the spectrum, instead of pushing you to maximise interaction and stimulation with all forms of content you are instead simply going to simulate it. Should you find yourself needing to appear like you’re using your phone but, for whatever reason you might have, you can’t then this is the app for you. Follow the instructions on screen and you will for all intents and purposes appear to be fully engaged in something, but you are not. No what you’re doing is even less meaningful which begs the question, why would you even do that in the first place?
So, I hear you ask, what could possibly be gained by engaging with either of these things? The first one seems obvious, you can create a modern day hell all of your own by trying to consume all the various types of content all at once. The overlapping audiovisual experiences negate each other, relegated to simply be there to be consumed when you’re not feverishly clicking away to unlock the next upgrade for even more stimulation. The latter though is more subtle, it’s more a commentary on how many people will use their phones to look busy, flitting between different activities in rapid succession because now that you can be reached anywhere, anytime, people will find reasons to do exactly that. It almost feels voyeuristic, like a mirror is held back up to you showing you what others will see when you’ve glued yourself to your phone to do…something.
It is at this point that I’m asking myself the question as what my point here is. I’m not quite sure honestly, but both experiences felt interconnected to me in some way. Like one of them shows us the engagement hell we’ve created by submitting ourselves to algorithms designed to maximise engagement. The other then is a simulation of how that manifests in the real world with someone furiously interacting with their phone, something that can be replicated with no meaning behind it. At one point I’m sure I had a clearer argument to make but it escapes me for now.
So, just for giggles let’s take this even one step further and let AI decide the argument I’m trying to make and put forward a semi-coherent conclusion to this all:
Together, these two experiences create a kind of dialectic: one pushes you toward maximal engagement, while the other reveals the hollowness of such engagement. They ask us to consider not just how technology shapes our lives but also how we shape ourselves in response to it. Are we truly in control of our digital consumption, or are we merely pawns in a system designed to extract as much attention and labor from us as possible? And what does it mean when the very tools we use to appear “busy” or “engaged” become so divorced from actual meaning?
This tension between engagement and emptiness is at the heart of both experiences. Stimulation Clicker shows us the thrill of endless possibility, but also its inevitable collapse into noise and chaos. It Is As If You Were On Your Phone strips away that thrill entirely, leaving behind only the hollow performance of engagement. Together, they suggest that our relationship with technology is not just about what we gain from it but also what we lose—our ability to focus, to be present, and to engage meaningfully with the world around us.
In a way, these experiences are not just critiques of modern life; they’re self-critiques. They emerge from within the system they’re commenting on, using its own language and tools to highlight its flaws. This reflexivity is what makes them so powerful. By presenting us with exaggerated versions of our own behavior, they force us to confront uncomfortable truths about how we interact with technology—and by extension, how we live our lives.
Not bad, honestly. I’d like to say that I’d get there all on my own, but it certainly would’ve taken me longer than it did to fire up LM Studio, load up Deepseek R1 Distilled 32b and give it the instructions.
