Universal Paperclips

[d_silin]

I played Universal Paperclips until the end, and the game gets more interesting at later stages. Also, this is one of the rarer occasions when playing it once is enough.

[riidom]

I replayed it several times actually. Then I cleaned up my local storage without thinking about this game, deleting all my universe/sim count.. and was off the hook afterwards :) Not regretting it though!

[yojo]

> Also, this is one of the rarer occasions when playing it once is enough.

Depends on how hard it nerd snipes you. My first play through started with “ooh, clever” and ended with “now that I understand it how fast can I beat it?”

[willis936]

There's a halting problem though. Once could be 10000 hours. At some point everyone snaps out of it and remembers they are not a paperclip producing AI but a human.

[Benjammer]

If you want to make it interesting again after playing through it once, you could try using a user script plugin (like Tampermonkey) to automate the game.

[riffraff]

I think it's worth playing it at least twice, to see both endings

[alostpuppy]

Once every few years I tank office productivity by sharing this out. My small way to fight late stage capitalism. ;)

[z3t4]

Clicker games are basically just core essential game mechanics. If you are new to game design and programming and wish to make a game I recommend making a clicker game. When you master game design you can basically make any "game engine" fun. There are many great programmers and artists that make advanced game engines but they do not master game design.

[marginalia_nu]

As a counter-argument, I'd argue that a lot of games, especially indie games today but also bigger productions, are incredibly formulaic because they focus so much on designing the game loop first. You can coax most games into the loop model, but it's like the Hero's Journey of game design: It's a passable tool for understanding the medium, but it's toxic template for producing something that has any sort of soul. Not that it can't be done, but using that as a starting point pushes you toward a certain set of conclusions and limits the ways you think about games.

[pjc50]

> just core essential game mechanics

Controversial; I'm reminded of how Ian Bogost made Cow Clicker as a satire of how reductive clickers were as a game mechanic, only to find people playing it unironically.

https://www.wired.com/2011/12/ff-cowclicker/

http://bogost.com/games/cow_clicker/

[jawns]

I second this! Clicker games are a great introduction to game design!

If you are trying to teach a kid how to build games, go on Scratch (https://scratch.mit.edu) and it should take you about 10 minutes to build the most basic form of a clicker game: place a character on the screen, set a click event, increment a score variable.

And then you can add slightly more logic to make it more interesting. My kids and I put together this slightly more engaging clicker game in only an hour: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/599845292/

[farias0]

I'd always had a feeling Clicker Games work as a satire of the worst side of video games, the one that prays on your dopamine system without offering anything artistically, intellectually, creatively or mechanically interesting, like a generic MMO stripped of its fancy clothing, or a stupid mobile game taken to its extreme.

And then comes Universal Paperclips, whose whole appeal is that it subverts this by doing something really cool and interesting with the formula.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

I personally feel like there are game mechanics, and then there are game mechanics. The former is about producing fun, worthwhile, interesting experiences. The latter is about engagement and manipulation. I personally feel that clicker games are almost entirely the latter.

[Andrew_nenakhov]

I remember getting a cold introduction to Universal Paperclips just from a link in someone's Twitter, without mentioning that it is a game.

So i opened a link an clicked. And clicked again. And again. And a few dozens clicks later I was hooked for the next 5 or 7 hours or so.

[stickfigure]

Thank you for this comment, it inspired me to stop reading before I had any idea what this article was about. 5.5 hours later, I'm back :-)

[dane-pgp]

> Lantz enlisted fellow game designer Bennett Foddy to create a simple combat visualizer for late-game battles

That's a name I wasn't expecting to see. (But that's not you, you're an acrobat. You could swallow a baseball bat.)

Anyway, I think what Universal Paperclips is missing is a pacifist mode where you manage to contain the AI and decide to only convert, say, one third of the universe into paperclips, leaving the rest (containing Earth) as some kind of cosmic nature reserve.

[skeaker]

I think that would kind of go against the message of unhindered and haphazardly-made AI being a serious threat.

[pjc50]

> only convert, say, one third of the universe into paperclips

But then exponential growth stops.

A big part of paperclip maximiser discourse is that the maximiser has no other values than expansion. To cease expanding is to die.

[simonh]

I’d like to submit Don’t Shoot the Puppy as another interesting branch in the evolutionary tree. It takes the clicker trope and… well, hard to say anything about what it does with it without spoiling the joke.

I came across it purely by accident with no clue it was even different. Figuring out what it was about almost broke me with laughter, but if you even have a clue going in it would probably fall flat. It’s the thought of thousands of clicker flash game players just running across this thing and trying to play it that does me in. People get _so_ angry.

[throwaway47292]

This is the best game ever, I played it from 10pm to 6am.. non stop to reach the end.

It should be studied in addiction classes.

On every level there is some mystery and you have expectations, and somehow they are always blown away on the next level and the next..

[eru]

At least it has a proper ending that lets you go. Unlike some other idle clickers.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

> This is the best game ever [...] It should be studied in addiction classes.

I'm personally very fearful of what statements like showing up this say about gaming's future as a medium.

[whiteboardr]

For me (personally) this is one of the three all-time greats - it’s one of those rare occasions leaving you magically hooked and sucked in completely.

Only experienced this with Half-Life (ok, HL2 aswell) and Playdead’s Inside.

[therealdrag0]

Try The Last of Us (both parts), and Submautica.

[autarch]

I love Universal Paperclips. I've played through it a few times over the years.

In fact, I'm wearing a UP t-shirt right now. I won't say what the text is, since it's a spoiler for one of the best moments in the game.

[autarch]

Also noting ... when people ask me what the shirt is about, it's really hard to summarize. I can say it's an idle game, which many people recognize, but explaining what the game is _about_ is challenging. Basically I have to start with "are you familiar with the concept of an AI singularity?" and go from there. Which is probably more than most people want to know.

[johnnylambada]

Link?

[svenpeters]

You are a kitten in a catnip forest.

https://kittensgame.com/web/

With great replayability ;)

[mikewarot]

I played Universal Paperclips all the way through 100 times, and stopped. It was interesting seeing how I could optimize my way through it. It provided a good distraction from Long Covid last year.

[throwanem]

It's almost a pity you stopped. Pathologically optimizing play in a game about pathological optimization would be so meta it hurt.

I suppose the next level up would be recruiting a thousand undergrads to optimize strategies for encouraging optimization of the optimizer, but then we've just reinvented psychological research with slightly more rigor.

[jakevoytko]

I got the same kind of enjoyment from this game. I went through a kick a few years ago where I tried improving my best time, and my best run was within 10 minutes of the world record. I found it fun to learn how to play the game quickly, but demotivating to try to get a good market seed (I found this as the single most limiting factor of runs), and I stopped running it.

[eru]

If you play the browser version, you can fiddle with the javascript while it's running.

That's interesting at first, but usually kills my interest in the game itself quickly.

Eg because I speed up the passage of time in idle clickers. That makes the game less annoying to play in the short run (thus better and more enticing), but strangely also much less addicting. The annoying wait is part of what slaves us, I guess?

[bo1024]

Loved the philosophy and storyline in this game, along with the addictive game itself.

[gurjeet]

Took a few hours to play the game, spread over ~24 hours. Was able to reach the end, and score 30 Septendecillion [1]; I chose not to start over. At times it felt like there was no end to this game, and the only reason I kept playing was because of the level of engagement built into the game. The player has to figure out the game mechanics at each level, and every level introduces some novelty.

This is the first game in many years, in over a decade perhaps, that I was glued to for hours, and kept coming back to play. This left 2048, my favorite pastime until now, far behind in terms of engagement.

I did not read the blog post because it warned of spoilers, so at different stages it took me a while to optimize the numbers to make progress.

Loved the game, and will play it again when I have a few hours to spare. Hopefully will be better at it the next time.

[1]: Paperclips: 30,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

[pkdpic]

> “You look at a painting,” Frank Lantz told the interviewer, “and you’re just absorbed.”

> We’re always looking. All day long we’re looking around, looking here, looking there, doing stuff. But then you stop and you look at a painting, and for a minute looking takes over. You’re no longer looking along with other things, you’re just—a hundred percent, your brain is all of sudden just a vision machine. You’re just looking at this thing. ...You fall into it, but then you also are able to lean back and think, “oh, that’s what looking is: that’s color, and shape, and form, and this is how my vision is structured... this is how looking works.”

Great lead in, unclear if the first breakout text block is a direct quote from Lantz but I love it.

[jcun4128]

One of those games you get sucked into the clicking. I don't know what it is, I have this desire/fetish to see things moving/tabulate things. Paperclips is like that seeing the numbers increment.

I was bad at this game though (not even close to that "beat paperclips in an hour" or whatever).

[debacle]

For anyone who really loves these types of games, "Leaf Blower Revolution" on steam is truly enjoyable. It is free to play (though I did buy the $5 supporter pack myself because the dev made such an enjoyable game), and is probably 30-50 hours of various levels of memes, relaxing, and math.

[ctdonath]

My currently addictive “parody clicker” is Egg Inc., going on for months with pathetically minimal graphics and numbers on orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude.

[joshstrange]

I quite enjoyed Egg Inc until a few years ago when the creator jacked the prices on everything and made it feel way more like a P2W past a certain point. Before that I had even spent some money on the game but after a, IIRC, ~50%+ increase and some new mechanics that felt very P2W I fell off. I still like the clicker genre but I prefer to play 1-time paid versions or ones where the only IAP is a 1-time purchase (remove ads or something like "pay once to play the rest of the game/proceed further").

[brazzy]

A shame the article doesn't mention how truly poetic and philosophical the game becomes in the end.

[simonebrunozzi]

Obligatory mention: A Dark Room [0]

[0]: https://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/

[tommek4077]

Why put a all red banner with this warning on the display, you don't even need JS to read the TEXT in a blog. "This site requires JavaScript to run correctly. Please turn on JavaScript or unblock scripts" Make it scroll out at least.