Indie developer Neal Agarwal, better known as Neal.fun, makes video games that are very small but also very good. His latest, The Password Game, is the perfect example: it takes the hell of coming up with a password for an app or site’s account and somehow turns it into something as far from hell as possible.
It begins like the worst part of all account-creating processes does: asking you to create a password. Only the password you choose doesn’t have enough upper case letters. Then when it does there aren’t enough special characters. Then it’s not long enough. Then it’s too long. And all the while it never told you any of this in the first place, it just thought you would know.
“Just let Google choose your password then, why are you complaining about this in a blog about a little video game” OK sure but then a lot of the time Google saves it with the wrong username attached, or the weird app URL doesn’t match the name of the company/site and it’s a pain in the ass to find even the saved password again, and basically what I’m saying is that I used to laugh at my parents for writing down all their internet passwords in a literal notebook but now I can see maybe they had a point all along.
ANYWAY, sorry, this game doesn’t have the Google/saving drama attached, but it does definitely cover the password creation process itself in much cleaner and more concise detail than this post has turned out to be managing, so if you’ve got a spare few minutes today—and its playable in a browser so you can do this even if you’re at work—you can check it out here.