DOOMscroll

DOOMscroll

DOOMscroll is a browser game with a single, perfect mechanic: you scroll. That is the game. Created by filmmaker and Ironic Sans blogger David Friedman — who is openly not a coder — DOOMscroll uses ChatGPT (OpenAI) as its development partner to deliver a tongue-in-cheek meditation on the act of doomscrolling itself.

Gameplay

The conceit is simple. You scroll downward through a feed, and as you scroll, the experience slides into a DOOM-inspired aesthetic: a grim corridor of headlines, spiced with the chunky pixel feel and color palette of early 90s shooters. The "enemies" are real headlines pulled from The New York Times, which give the descent a queasy, recognizable weight. There is no jumping, no shooting, no inventory — just the act of scrolling, which the game gradually reframes as a kind of damage you are doing to yourself.

It is short, sharp, and clever in the way the best satirical games are. The joke lands almost instantly, but the experience lingers because it is also genuinely well-paced — the kind of project that a filmmaker would make.

Vibe-coded origin

Friedman has been transparent about the origin: he built DOOMscroll by prompting ChatGPT to generate the code, iterating on the design and the writing while letting the AI handle the implementation. Coverage in PC Gamer, Waxy, and Friedman's own Ironic Sans blog all underline the same point — a non-coder shipped a polished, conceptually sharp browser game by treating an AI as their development partner. PC Gamer's piece is especially candid, framing the game as a "deflating realization" that a neat little game was AI all along.

Why it matters

DOOMscroll is one of the cleanest demonstrations of vibe coding's reach beyond software people. The mechanic, the satire, and the headline integration are all the work of someone with strong creative instincts who would never have shipped a game in any other era. It is also a quietly pointed argument about the medium itself: a game made with AI, played in a browser, about the way we read the news.