Note: This article contains major spoilers for CLICKOLDING and moderate spoilers for Inscryption. It also discusses suicide at length but does not include any images that depict suicide. If you are struggling with suicidal thoughts, contact a suicide prevention organisation near you. For those in the US, you can reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline on 988 or find them online at 988lifeline.org. If you are in the UK, you can call The Samaritans on 116 123 or visit their website at samaritans.org.
How does a number kill a person? How can a handheld tally counter fire a bullet? If you’ve played CLICKOLDING, you already know the answers to these questions, and you won’t forget them any time soon. Film directors and novel writers are not like video game designers. The plasticators of non-interactive drama tell their actors, or at least their characters, what to do, and we surveil them. In a computer game, the audience is also an actor.
Directors of games usually camouflage themselves as needy NPCs or the irrepressible free will of the protagonist, but in CLICKOLDING, the developer joins us in the room. Their micromanagement of our movements isn’t explained away as an impulsion in the characters’ hearts. Instead, it is a fetishist’s prurient hectoring. During the ~forty-minute session that is CLICKOLDING, you are yourself, more or less, but a masked voyeur has hired you to press the lever on a tally counter. Once the clicker rolls past its memory limit of “9999”, you’ll leave with a cool $14,000.
All games monitor our behaviour, but that supervision doesn’t generally make us feel “seen”. In CLICKOLDING, the incandescent eyes of our renter and his licentious remarks on our actions remind us, “You are being watched”. The client sits in one corner of the room, an observation platform from which he can survey the maximum square footage of dank motel room. This is a spectator sport. I can see why Cass Marshall at Polygon matched the Clickold in CLICKOLDING to Leshy from Inscryption. They are both menacing modulated voices and pairs of levitating lightbulbs. We meet Leshy and the hotel guest in dimly lit seclusion with little idea of what they have in store for us, only that they will set the terms of conduct.
The Clickold makes our meeting with him a list of positions and styles in which we can enumerate the tally counter. We can click fast or click slow, we can click with the TV on or off, we can click in the bathroom or close enough to the armchair to taste the weirdo’s breath. Our roommate has a paraphilia; what seem to us inconsequential tweaks in pressing technique are whole key changes for him. The game likens the developer-player relationship to a sex worker-client relationship and the endless and precise requests of the designer to those of the sexually fixated. More nakedly, it puts the psychology of the customers of erotic services on display.
The people who purchase sex work can also end up using their servicer as a tabernacle for their life’s woes. Physical intimacy begets emotional intimacy, and the rent boy or call girl’s job becomes not just libidinous labour but also empathetic labour. It’s easier to tell your secrets to a stranger than someone you are emotionally invested in, and the seducer has been hired because they don’t judge. The Clickold could make use of a therapist, but what are men socialised into doing? Seeking out people who deal in feelings or seeking out sex?
He has a gun, he shows it to us, implies that he brought it as insurance, but that’s not what he uses it for. As we bear down on the climactic 10,000th press, the Clickold pushes the cold barrel of the revolver into his temple. As with all suicides, the warning signs of our client’s are more patent in hindsight. The Clickold told us that he was sick and that he couldn’t count like he used to. According to him, the older you get, the fewer moments of pure joy there are. There was a part of him his family would never understand, he thought that he didn’t belong here, and he was giving away fistfuls of cash. He told us he had a dream that he couldn’t make come true, and if you wanted to assault a dream in its home, where would you fire? You’d fire at your head.
Hanging above the room’s double bed is Bernardo Strozzi’s Tobias Curing His Father’s Blindness, painted circa 1630. The picture interprets a myth from the “Book of Tobit”, a holy text in the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian traditions. In it, Tobit’s son, Tobias, restores his father’s sight with instruction from the Archangel Raphael.[1][2][3] Somewhere in this painting, we may identify the Clickold, whose dreams were gatecrashed by an ivory being from a milky limbo. That anima cursed him with the ache for the perfect adding session. Cylinders fire in the man as he pictures how “strong and clean” the ideal clicks would be. Clean like the pale void. As the night wears on, the outcast calls attention to the painting and opines that it shouldn’t be in the hotel room, “like us”. He relates to the artwork.
If the Clickold is both sick and divinely inspired, does that make him Tobit? Is the inspiring spirit an angel, and are we Tobias? In using us to commit the ultimate injury on himself, the motel pervert may believe he has done the opposite and healed his soul. Yet, his suicide isn’t merely self-destruction; it’s also self-actuation because one of the things that happens to the Israelite Tobit is that his vision is realised by his helper. The fetishist implies that his perfect arousal has been a white whale. This doesn’t shock me because where have you seen something perfect? Our cities, suburbs, and farms are not ideal. They are stained with seedy motels, white noise TVs, histories of lasts, and families who cannot, will not, understand. Our client’s perfect 10,000 clicks do not fit into possibility any more than they fit on our four-digit display.
The Clickold asks what you can do with a wish that won’t get granted and replies to himself that you can kill it. That way, you get to pick where it’s buried. It’s logic that spurs people to suicide all the time: there’s a lot the ideator hasn’t been able to quicken in their life, but an act of self-annihilation puts their destiny in their own hands again. By ending himself at the climax of the counting, the Clickold gets to own the moment, and he gets to share that moment with us when his lust isolates him from everyone else.
As the counter ticks over to 0000, nothing; we are left in the room with no one. In his sexual release, the Clickold is also released from his existence. His creative suicide taps into the old French construct of “La Petite Mort” or “The Little Death”. The phrase alludes to the demise of a part of a person, but more salaciously, it’s been used to inscribe the dimming of consciousness at the moment of orgasm.[4] The man with the six-shooter has arranged a triste between death, climaxing, and the biopsy of a troublesome blot on his sexuality. The protagonist is scarred, a wife is widowed, and two children are left without a father, making the next natural question, where do we figure into this?
After our client’s suicide, we can meet the avatar of perfection that inspired him. We do it by entering the Renaissance painting. The void-dweller says that we will leave a molecule of ourselves in the game, and the game will offload a portion of its soul into us. Unseated and repulsed by what we’ve done over the duvet, we have every reason to mentally recoil from the damage, from the single bullet that has wounded five. We want to disassociate from uncomfortable experiences and identify leaving our body as a pertinent psychological defence for sex work. Likewise, we presume that we can run any clicker game passively behind other windows, but in CLICKOLDING, there is no automation to pump our numbers, no disassociation from the libidinous. Only we can increment the clicker’s figure, and that forces us to be present.
As a rule, video games use our movements in the physical world to stand in for associated but distinct actions in the virtual one. A click could translate into a punch, picking up a bottle of pills, or turning on a tap. This interpretation layer gives us a physical distance from any nastiness that the protagonist might get embroiled in. In CLICKOLDING, however, clicking is a metaphor for clicking, meaning there is no protective glass between us and the animals. We are performing the muscular steps it takes to get our client off as a protagonist but also as a player, and while we add to the handheld total by activating a sensor in our mouse, you can’t ignore what the furious manual action suggests. We can try to get it over with quickly and reduce our hand tendons to sinew, but that’s putting a lot of our stamina into the meeting. We can go slow, but then we’re committing time to the lewd. The white entity was right: whatever we do, we leave part of ourselves in the slate-hard mattress.
The thrust of this interactible is that you cannot place yourself in an intimate physical coupling without emotional exchange, and that exchange goes both ways. The deviant’s eyes have been boring into our body. Why would we think he wouldn’t leave with a core sample from us? Maybe you still hold that the session is a transaction. You clicked because you had to, because each press was a cobblestone a meter closer to an exit. But to that, I say, the door was unlocked the whole time. If you make a modest attempt to leave, the Clickold lets you. And while a person in the real world might need the $14,000, there’s no paper to feel between your fingertips in cyberspace. You made a decision to stay in the motel. You kept clicking because part of you wanted to.
Many players will take the option to keep clicking even after the cameloid’s self-destruction when there’s no one to see the number but us. You might counter that we need to continue thumbing the button to get the secret ending, but that’s just the logic of the Clickold again. Maybe if we keep tapping, it will herald some new height of pleasure. If I were superstitious, I’d say that when the man died, his lurid passion migrated up through his stained white shirt and into us.
Inside the painting, above the void-dweller, there’s a six-digit indicator. He tells us that in nowhere, we can click as long as we want. Some players will end up fruitlessly pawing at the mouse button, hoping for some undiscovered release. I’m lucky; I didn’t ever end up on that roundabout. All I did after finishing the game was buy a tally counter online, the fidget toy from the dream made touchable in front of me. I’ve been clicking it while I write this article. I’m almost up to 7,000. Thanks for reading.
Notes
- Credit for identifying the painting goes to Xalavier Nelson Jr.
- Tobias Curing His Father’s Blindness by Met Staff (Date Unknown, Accessed February 1st, 2025), The Met.
- Coogan, M.D., Brettler, M.Z., Newsom, C.A., Perkins, P. (2018). The New Oxford Annotated Apocrypha: New Revised Standard Version. Oxford University Press (p. 11).
- Search: Petite Mort by OED Staff (June, 2024), Oxford English Dictionary.
