SuperShopaholic App
SuperShopaholic is a tiny game that is really a sociopolitical statement aboutthe pointlessness of consumerism. You steer an infinite shopping cart through
an infinite mall, frantically swooping goods off the shelves into a cart that
never fills.
There is no finish line. There never was.
The "rewards" are the joke: you grind to unlock the ability to consume faster,
and the prizes are absurd status symbols that, once bought, change nothing.
Mechanics:
* Grab everything. Emoji products fall down the mall; catch them for cash.
* Power-ups are the fantasy. Grab a GOLD card or a rarer BLACK card to shop
faster with a 2x / 4x money multiplier. The reward for consuming is the
ability to consume harder.
* Status symbols. Periodic BUY NOW events offer a Ferrari, Yacht, Mansion or
Private Jet. Buy it and it joins your trophy shelf, and then absolutely
nothing changes. You keep shopping.
* A STATUS meter fills up and, as the game helpfully notes, it doesn't do
anything.
* No win state. The speed only ever increases.
Controls: tap or drag to move the cart. A hardware keyboard works too
(left/right or A/D, P to pause).
Technical notes:
* Fully offline. The app requests no permissions and makes no network
connections. The whole game is a single self-contained HTML page bundled in
the app and rendered in a WebView (HTML5 canvas, vanilla JavaScript, Web
Audio for synthesized sound effects; no audio assets, no tracking, no ads).
This game critiques the enclosure of things; its license resists the enclosure
of itself. SuperShopaholic is free software under the GNU Affero General Public
License v3.0 (AGPL-3.0-or-later). The AGPL's network clause means anyone who
hosts a modified version must also share their source with players. Source is
always one click away: https://gitlab.com/jave/supershopaholic
