About Gawkin
Gawkin turns the world's oldest playground game into a live online sport. Two players lock eyes over live video, a countdown hits zero, and the first one to blink loses — with each player's own camera acting as an incorruptible referee.
What you can play
- Live 1v1 — match a stranger for a best-of-3 staring duel with live chat and trash talk.
- Blink Rush — the opposite challenge: rack up as many blinks as you can in 10 seconds.
- Try Not To Laugh — both players watch the same clips; the first to crack a smile loses.
- Solo warm-ups — practice your stare against the clock and chase your personal best.
- Tournaments — up to 64 players in one bracket, joined with a simple room code or invite link. Last eyes open wins.
- Watch Live — spectate ongoing battles in real time.
- Leaderboards — global boards for best stare, total stare time, and total wins, shared between web and iPhone.
How the referee works
Blink detection runs entirely on your own device. In your browser, on-device face tracking watches your eyes and calls the blink the instant you crack; on iPhone, Apple's TrueDepth camera does the same job. Your face data is processed frame-by-frame on your device and never uploaded — only the result ("a blink happened") is sent to the match. Because each player's own hardware judges their own eyes, nobody can bribe the ref.
Matches use live peer-to-peer video, so you're really staring at a real person in real time. Nothing is recorded on our servers.
Web and iPhone
Gawkin runs free in any modern browser — no download, no login needed to play. There's also a Gawkin app for iPhone on the App Store, and both share the same matches, leaderboards, and accounts. Create a free account (email, Google, or Apple) to keep your name, stats, and gem balance across devices.
Who makes Gawkin
Gawkin is built by a small independent team that thinks the internet needs more games you can play with your face. We started with a simple question — could a staring contest work online, fairly? — and the on-device referee was the answer. Everything since (tournaments, spectating, Try Not To Laugh) grew out of playtests with friends who wouldn't stop rematching.
Get in touch
Questions, bug reports, press, or partnership ideas: see the contact page or email support@gawkin.app. Community rules live in the guidelines, and how we handle data is in the privacy policy.