I’m sitting in the computer lab at Palomar College. I just witnessed something so ridiculous that I could hardly believe my eyes. Everyone already knows that 95.7% of computer lab usage is checking MySpace. Although that’s ridiculous, that’s not news. While I was reading digg doing my homework I was interrupted, as is so often the case, by the rapid mouse clicking associated with playing a stupid flash game. Rapid keyboard activity can indicate work (or blogging), but mouse clicks can only be one thing. Usually when this happens to me the person doing the clicking is in a position that doesn’t allow me to see what they are doing. This time was different.

The girl behind me was clicking furiously for about 15 seconds followed by hushed rejoicing in her rapid-fire mousing abilities. It was so annoying that I had to see what all the noise was about. When I turned around to look I was astonished. She wasn’t playing a game. She was on MySpace! For those of us with the AdBlock firefox extension installed: MySpace is covered with little flash ads that you can’t see. These ads promise things like free ringtones as rewards for winning virtual tug of war contests. You “win” by clicking a red button on the screen fast enough that the rope puller starts overtakes his opponent. I say “win” because your reward for participating in this game is a popup ad. That’s right, a popup. People are playing games where you click forever just to get to an advertisement. But it doesn’t end there.

It soon became apparent that this girl knew what she was doing. She was having so much fun that she would click until her reward came. She would then immediately click the close box on the popup, reload the page, and play the next “game.” Apparently there are multiple “click here a thousand times and get a popup” games. The gameplay is identical, but the animations are different.

This takes me back to my original question. I always assumed that no one ever fell for the old “get a free NAME_OF_PRODUCT by (swatting_the_fly | shooting_the_prairie_dog | mashing_the_mouse_button)” routine. By the looks of things, those games are so fun that people will endure the ads just to keep playing them.

What has the internet come to?

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 15th, 2006 at 12:52 pm and is filed under Annoyances, Life, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.