Boing Boing has noticed an odd sort of player community coalescing on Reddit around The Button, a simple browser widget published yesterday (April Fool’s Day) that’s basically just a big button and a timer that counts down from 60 seconds.
Anyone logged in to Reddit can push the button once, and only once (ever) to reset the timer. The widget also seems to track how many users have pressed the button — and right now it’s at roughly half a million people and climbing.
If that’s accurate, it puts The Button well on its way to meeting or exceeding the number of people who participated in the original Twitch Plays Pokemon, a similarly oddball sort of communal play experience that caught fire last year and inspired many developers to rethink how they design games to support this sort of behavior.
While The Button isn’t nearly as interactive as TPP — you can only input a single command, after all — it’s already given rise to a TPP-esque slew of player-generated memes, cliques and speculation about what The Button is — and what happens if the counter hits zero.