Author’s Note: This piece discusses internalized homophobia, suicide, and the power dynamics of gay intimacy. This piece also has spoilers. Clickolding takes an estimated thirty minutes to an hour to complete, so I encourage you to play or watch it first. If you—or someone you know—is in crisis, you are not alone. I care about you. HelpGuide.org’s directory can point you toward help that is free to use.
Friends and former Fanbyte colleagues LB Hunktears and Elise Favis worked on Clickolding. LB handled social media, and Elise did PR. I sincerely did not know about either until the end credits rolled. For this reason, this piece is unscored in order to uphold our editorial standards.
Strange Scaffold’s Clickolding hides a heartbreakingly mundane tragedy underneath a clicker game with a provocative title. It’s destined to be misunderstood—already the YouTube thumbnails are piling up. “Weird Horror Clicker!” “Bizarre Game Where A Real Freak Wants to Watch You Click!”
But there’s a second layer to the exchange. Who has control, who takes it. How the masked man can’t stop talking, why his moods shift. Clickolding is a purposeful frustration of player expectations.
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Clickolding, click number 0000: Carbon Dioxide
I sit on the hotel bed in front of him. Rain spatters against the window as the man reclines in a red armchair, fingers tensing and loosening. His face is obscured by a mask with glowing eyes. There’s no mouth, but I can still hear his mumbling underneath.
The man’s untucked button-down has a few telltale coppery stains, and his hands grip the armchair a little too tightly. He wants to watch me click, he says. The money is under the bed. I hold the clicker in my hand. Well-worn, yellowing, four glowing LCD digits.
How did we meet? That’s not important. Visit almost any town, and you’ll find his profile lurking in the corners of gay networking apps. No profile picture. “DL. 46. Can’t host.” Yet the man wants. He wants to set the terms of the engagement, to feel in control. It’s an unfair trade. But we’re both consenting adults who need a release.
Of course it’s transactional. That’s just how this works. I get the compensation. And he gets to watch. It’s safer for him that way. Plausible deniability in case the wife finds out.
Gay intimacy has its own rituals of protection. The masked man takes charge, and I let him. He starts with small, bits of feedback on my clicking technique, directing me around the small room. He’s checking that I’m taking this seriously. But I am silent and pliable, like a good boy should be.
Structure means I don’t have to overthink the situation. It’s easy, soothing even, to retreat into the shared fiction. We both pretend the masked man has full control. I just have to stay obedient and quiet, clicking until the digits on the LCD flicker. 0000 to 9999, then one more. Ten thousand clicks.
Clickolding, click number 5555: From Off to On
The masked man lets his guard down in fits and starts. He waves the gun he has stashed behind the armchair before his commands grow more specific. The thermostat’s not right. Try standing by this painting. Try adjusting the clock. Click faster. Faster. All the while his chest heaves.
He’s clearly enjoying this. And despite myself, I’m enjoying being watched. As a younger man, these little cracks in the armor were what I craved. Any inkling that the person underneath was real.
The masked man is anxious, almost needy. He’s started to submit to my silent obedience. The masked man tells me about past judgments, the dream of a man in a white void. He made the mask to resemble his dream man. His chest fills and contracts. I watch it intently.
Clickolding, click number 8888: Forest Families
The stakes of this encounter are so impossibly high, but if the masked man’s enjoying himself, I suppose that’s enough. He eventually regains his composure for a moment. He says I can leave if I want to, but I can’t come back. I take it as a challenge and drag the next few clicks out like nails on chalkboard.
I sink into the practiced calm I learned in the early days, letting my mind stay at a distance. The structure of this meeting still stands. Be quiet, be good. Do as he says. However, the masked man doesn’t pick up on his transfer of control. It’s his first time doing this, so maybe he’ll learn. The masked man is all nervy physicality, clutching fingers and swelling breaths. He begins to understand that this is real, not a fantasy he can push away.
Clickolding, click number 9999: What They Call Us
I realized that my internal calculus was different at an early age, but that didn’t spare me the pain of mapping out my equation of desire. I struggled through it like an Algebra II worksheet, desperately trying to get the two sides to balance as “man and woman,” just how I was taught.
Five states and fifteen years away, I can still feel those common denominators weigh on me. The masked man feels this pressure too, but he has no distance from it. He tells me what his wife and two kids would think. If he told them.
That “if” hangs in the air between us. The masked man realizes there’s no way our single encounter will balance out his decades of longing. The years show on his hands. I’m suddenly thankful he wears his mask. Neither of us could bear to see what’s behind his eyes.
Despite all that’s happened, the man will have to go back out into that same world afterwards. The one that knows him as a father, a husband, a falsehood. I struggle to keep my composure. If nothing else, I can give him this steady click-click-click.
The LCD numbers draw close to 9999. With each click, his voice grows frantic. I sit back on the bed as he commands. The masked man points the gun at me, then himself. He’s yelling now, telling me to finish this.
I retreat back into our fiction: he’s planned this out, that these heightened circumstances are part of the fantasy. I click one more time, and the gun fires. The masked man slumps to the floor.
I feel numb. I’m quiet and still, like a good boy should be, and keep clicking. The painting behind the masked man shudders, glowing an eerie white. I hear his voice, telling me to keep going, egging me on when I stop. And this is what breaks me. The masked man’s voice comes out of the white static of the void. Despite that white void, he cannot take his desire by his own hands and make it real. And I cannot give it to him.
Clickolding, click number 0000: Still Light
Clickolding takes the broad contours of the clicker genre and deliberately warps them. The numbers go up with your actions, but there is no dopamine release waiting. It’s just you, the masked man, and the steady noise. Some will dismiss this game as a morbid oddity because that’s the only vocabulary they know. His desires are not like theirs. His moods do not follow a familiar structure.
Every time I see the terms “bizarre” and “weird” festoon another playthrough thumbnail, another article headline, I bristle. From the outside, the mechanics of queer desire must look like a neatly solved theorem. We are in the news, in popular culture, the people who are not like you.
We have rights (that are systematically being taken away) and pleasures (that get pared down to their most reductive even now). Loved ones are baffled that we should still want more, beyond the bare-bones respect and personhood society sometimes offers us.
You’ve met the masked man, talked to him, even built a tentative friendship. He is real, he is hurting, and there are so many of him in your country, your state, your neighborhood. His desires are not strange. He is doing the best he can in a society that has left him bruised.
True liberation is not full absorption into societal norms. It is liberation of even these blank-faced men with their deep scars. Of every person you dismiss as weird and strange. And we have so far to go.
