About the game
No Cookies for You
A game demonstrating the things that annoy me most about using the modern web.
PlayBasic premise
You're trying to read an article a friend/relative/colleague just sent you, but there are so many annoyances that it becomes impossible to actually do what you went there to do: inform yourself. The absurdity cranks up the more you try to declutter the content. It's inspired by Safari's "Hide Distracting Items" utility.
How to play
Just like Safari's tool, you simply click a distracting element to eliminate it. And then keep trying to read to the end of the page. That's it, that's all you have to do. Simple, right?
Watch out for scroll stops, full page takeovers, popups that make you click multiple times to dismiss, and close buttons that actually spawn more things in their wake.
Run up combos of rapid eliminations to get combo points for a higher score.
Keep an eye on your score meter, which shows you how close you are to game over.
How it works
Scoring
score = Σ (item points × combo) + 10 × seconds survived
Different types of distractions are worth different amounts of points. Combo runs multiply that amount. How long you manage to hold on for is added as a bonus at the end.
Combos
If you can dismiss multiple distractions within 0.9 seconds of each other then the combo multiplier will step up all the way to a 5x multiplier.
Difficulty
As you dismiss items or as time goes on, the game's' difficulty increases by presenting distractions at a faster rate:
| Difficulty | Max duration | Max dismissals | Distraction generation interval |
|---|---|---|---|
| Normal web | 10 s | 3 | 5 s |
| Busy | 9 s | 4 | 2 s |
| Aggressive | 8 s | 5 | 1 s |
| Absurd | 7 s | 6 | 0.5 s |
| Unreadable | 6 s | 7 | 0.35 s |
| Madlad | for ever | — | 0.1 s |
Distractions are chosen using a weighted randomization from the a set assigned to each difficulty level. Distractions unlocked by new difficulty levels are more likely to appear.
Distraction placement
The location of a given item is determined by what kind of distraction it is, and where there is free space on the screen that's appropriate to place it. This way you don't simply get a big stack of dialogs right on top of each other, which would never end the game by filling up the screen.
Game over
The game ends when the visible article space reaches a critical low threshold for a certain amount of time.
No cookies, seriously
- This page doesn't use cookies of any kind.
- Your high score is kept in your own browser's local storage. It never leaves your device. If you clear webpage data, you'll lose your high score. Oh well.
- The autoplaying video ads are fakes, drawn in HTML and CSS. The game loads nothing from any other site.
Colophon
This game was built with help from Claude Code in Typescript compiled to regular ol' HTML/CSS that's served from an AWS S3 bucket behind a Cloudfront cache. Animations are SVGs.