Please wait forever

How to play Please wait forever

Please wait forever is a fake loading screen to leave on somebody's laptop while they are away. First you set it up. Pick a flavour: a software update, a virus scan, a file transfer, an AI that is thinking or a printer getting ready. Type the victim's name if you want it dropped into some of the messages, and choose how fast the bar should pretend to move, from glacial to hopeful. Start the wait and the page goes full screen with a calm progress screen from Tarrybox, an operating system that does not exist. The bar crawls toward 99 percent and stops there for good. Every click, tap, key press or wiggle of the mouse gets a new line under the bar, and the lines escalate: polite at first, then a little odd, then openly cheeky. Now and then the percentage slips back a few points, and the time left gets less believable the more they poke. The first couple of seconds ignore input, so you can walk away without setting it off. To leave, hold Esc for three seconds, or tap the four corners of the screen in order: top left, top right, bottom right, bottom left. The teal dot in the logo grows while you do it. You then see a score card with how long they waited, how many times they clicked, pressed keys and wiggled the mouse, and the rudest message they got, ready to share.

Tips

• Hopeful reaches 90 percent in about two minutes, which is perfect for a quick coffee run
• Glacial takes about forty minutes to reach 90 percent, so it looks real from across the room
• The messages get cheekier the more they poke it, so a patient victim only ever sees the calm ones
• A name makes it personal, but the messages read fine without one too
• Some browsers leave full screen on the first Esc press, the wait keeps covering the page and the next click puts it back
• Closing the tab always works, so it stays a prank and never a lock

About Please wait forever

Progress bars have been keeping people calm for a long time. In 1985 the researcher Brad Myers published a study showing that people prefer waiting with a percent-done indicator over waiting without one, even when it is not very accurate. Please wait forever leans on exactly that trust and then quietly abuses it. The screen belongs to Tarrybox, an operating system invented for this game, with its own pebble logo, its own wordmark drawn from strokes, an oat, plum and teal palette and a serif voice, so it never pretends to be a real system. Each flavour has its own heading and more than eighty reaction lines written for this game, split into five steps from calm to cheeky. The bar moves in a seeded rhythm of stalls and bursts, slows down as it nears the end and stops at 99. All of it is harmless: no fake payment demands, no warnings from made-up authorities and no claims about real software. Everything runs in your browser, nothing is sent anywhere, and the only things saved are your setup and the longest wait so far.

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