I remember starting this game at mid-day and having no idea that I would end up building paperclips well into the night.
What impressed me the most was how the "secret" gradually unfolded, so that you were already hooked and felt a compulsion to continue game play, even after it became clear that this wasn't the innocuous game you thought it was at first.
It led me to build a clicker game that also has more to it than meets the eye. (Shameless self-promotion starts here.)
Whereas Universal Paperclips explores the dangers of letting A.I. take over, my game (Unaware, https://unaware.pressbin.com) explores the moral status of people who exist in a simulation.
I played for 30 seconds before my screen got plastered by a long and heavy handed essay.
I prefer games not be so heavy handed but, If it must, I’d rather the message be part of the game (eg, papers please) than an essay on top of it. It just immediately turned me off, hard.
This was my impression as well. I don't feel the game explores the moral status of people who exist in a simulation at all. The game mechanics themselves don't have anything interesting to say, particularly given the false losing state of the people recognising that they're in a simulation.
It would've been much more interesting to play a game where the characters are aware. An interesting inspiration could be the characters in the old testament who are generally aware of the existence of a deity that can change their world as will, but continue about their lives and even occasionally willingly disobey the deity. And an even more interesting scenario to play through could be inspired by Eliezer Yudkowsky's "That Alien Message"[0], which I don't want to spoil.
Clicker Heroes is a shameless clicker-clone, but one of the better ones.
I think universal paperclips is definitely one of the best idle games, but I'd give Clicker Heroes (the original) a strong contender. I know Clicker Heroes 2 is out, but I haven't tried it yet myself.
Clicker Heroes goes for the shameless simplicity of growth, but its got the biggest numbers and the most "acceleration" out of any clicker game I've seen.
I've lurked the incremental game community for nearly a decade now. Some good ones to google if anyone is looking for more:
A Dark Room, Shark Game, Idling through Loops, Idle Skilling, Trimps, Idling to rule the gods, Derivative Clicker, Factory Idle.
A friend and I wrote "Dungeons of Derp" an (semi-unfinished) idle/incremental dungeoncrawler - "diablo 2 but with autonomous hero": https://idle-dungeon.firebaseapp.com/
I tried A Dark Room. Then i realized it was everything addicting about RPGs distilled down to some bars that you click to fill. It reminded me of my days being addicted to Diablo 2. They are straight up skinner boxes. Clicker games are the video game equivalent of crack. They're basically dopamine stimulation buttons. Keep clicking and you'll eventually be rewarded by that little burst of feel good juice when you reach the next level.
That's certainly one way to think about clicker games, and it probably applies to most clicker games I know of.
However, a GOOD clicker game (such as one with Universal Paperclips) recognizes that the genre is not about dopamine rushes. Instead, a good clicker game is really a management simulator.
Factorio is probably the best example: build your factory correctly, and you never have to lift a finger to do any work at all. Of course, Factorio is a management game, but at its core, its a clicker game (click to mine Iron / Copper / Stone).
Factorio becomes recognized as a good Management game because although the "clicker" mechanic exists to mine stuff, it isn't actually how the player is supposed to play. The "clicks" are there to give a sense of scale (it takes ~2 seconds for a beginning player to mine 1-iron).
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In a similar way, Universal Paperclips is a management game, and with an ending to boot. So you're "free" once you see the ending (unlike a lot of other games). Which is why I consider it to be one of the better clicker games.
Clicker Heroes also manages to make the jump into a solid management simulator. As you purchase heroes, the game is more about figuring out the optimal distribution of hero levels. Clicker Heroes does have an infinite grind however, so it loses points in my eyes.
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All in all, a clicker-game is simply a management game, like Sim City. There's just a "click" mechanic to connect the player with the absolute baseline activity of the game. In Universal Paperclips, you build a few paperclips one-at-a-time at the beginning of the game.
Honestly, the dumb skinner-box grind is far more present in mainstream games (MMORPGs, Loot Crates). Some clicker-games have this awful behavior, but the good ones tend to avoid it.
I've gotta admit, I've avoided anything with clicker in the description these days because of that experience. I've realized through personal experience, I get too into games with experience, status bars and things to manage.
I can't do RPGs any more since skyrim. I realized one day i'd played for several hours but had done nothing but craft things and organize my storage and inventory.
I get into dwarf fortress and CDDA every once in a while until i start to realize how much time i waste on them. I'll play fortresses until it takes ten minutes to do shit from fps death or spend several evenings in Cataclysm building a base and collecting food and resources and crap. I can't do it any more. It sucks me in too much.
I try to limit my gaming to platformers and arcade type games these days. I've spent way too long playing games about managing numbers, but i fail to do this effectively in life and i realize i end up spending way too much time sucked into imaginary worlds and not enough time focused on things i should.
I've wasted a lot of time on things like that. Years of my life cumulatively. Games like the diablo series and other action rpgs, the civilization games, a whole bunch of real time and turn based strategies, just about every jrpg on every console, a good majority of earlier computer rpgs and some recent ones, 4x strategy games, space sims and lots more. Thousands of hours thinking about and managing imaginary numbers. For me at least, the last thing i need is a bunch of numbers and bars with a button to fill them.
A few highly addictive browser-based MMO management games came out in the early/mid 2000s.
OGame, Travian and Inselkampf were three I spent some time in. On top of the simple clicking to maximise your holdings in-game, there was an additional layer of alliance/guild participation and meta game much like EVE Online. You tended to spend more time outside the actual game: discussing strategy, diplomacy and building tools.
'A Dark Room' is what we'd call an _incremental_ game, because it's not as much about clicking as most 'clicker' games tend to be - it's a game that unfolds, shifting mechanics and goals over time.
Most clicker games don't do much unfolding, and instead just become time management toys, trying to maximize rate of growth between extended periods of idleness. And - this is key - most clicker games aren't incremental games. Incremental games at least have some interesting draw: the game isn't what it at first appears to be. Clickers, on the other hand, are exactly what they appear to be.
Currently have 2582.2 hours played on the Android version according to its stats.
The game is amazing. There's an active subreddit as well where the dev is active.
Just as I think I'm getting to the next phase and finally to "late game" someone comes in and posts something insane like "I now am net positive on unobtainium from resetting even after buying everything and maxing chronospheres."
My jaw literally dropped as I'm finally hitting the infinite time crystal smash loop and even that took forever.
Clicker Heroes was my first exposure. It sounded ridiculous but people kept playing these games so I gave it a try.
Ended up deep enough to install AutoHotkey. Steam says over 500 hours played. Oops.
Universal Paperclips is great, and I like that I can "win" in a few hours. It wasn't really difficult, except once the drifters started killing me off. The balance of resources into my drone army was confusing and I needed the wiki for that.
That game really made a huge splash awhile ago, I just so happened to have played through it again on the iPhone. It's just a great game and shows how the idle/incremental genre has a lot of room to grow.
If you like that game I recommend buying A Dark Room, which has a good story behind it and some interesting gameplay elements. Like Paperclips the gameplay changes as you progress.
Could have been a lot more about Bostrom's ideas in this article, given the title. But my hunch is that the kind of philosophy enthusiast who writes for the New Yorker doesn't want to dwell on Bostrom's ideas (or those Less Wrong guys) in any way; it's a question of seriousness.
Good way to make your article about games and AI (fun and cool stuff) very depressing.
The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else. The AI runs on a different timescale than you do; by the time your neurons finish thinking the words "I should do something" you have already lost. - Eliezer Yudkowsky
I don't think the omission is because discussing Bostrom or Yudkowsky's ideas would genuinely be depressing. It's because the writer is a snob, or at least doesn't rate them as intellectuals. I kind of agree with him.
I would have to agree with you there - after flicking through Bostrom's latest "work in progress" thesis I came away thinking it was quite underwhelming.
I never got past the later stage... "competition". I should look up to see if there was much more after that and what I missed, since I doubt I'll go through it all again.
There's a bit after "competition" comes into play. And for me, that was the hardest part of the game. You had to grow faster than the competition, which is pretty difficult.
I've done two playthroughs. The 1st playthrough was pretty lucky and I had no issues... but the 2nd playthrough of mine was "deadlocked" behind those Drifters for a long time.
Its very punishing to fall behind the drifters: it takes a lot of effort and optimization to catch up to them and overtake them. But I assure you, its possible, even if they kill all of your probes.
I would imagine that a lot of players get unlucky, and then get "trapped" there. Its the first time you see your numbers drop, since the adversary actually kills off your means of production. Growing (and out-growing the adversary) takes a very different strategy than the rest of the game up until that point.
Yeah, I looked it up earlier right after my comment. Maybe I'll try to do an optimized play through (or use the cheats) to see the ending. From looking at the wiki I got something like 97% of the way through to the end, which is honestly kind of annoying to leave unfinished.
I was past that. By competition I mean the drifters. I was very close to the end, I was just having problems optimizing enough to deal with that specific problem and also running out of time for the day.
Prioritize replication. You can win with 1 in Speed and 1 in Exploration. Hazard Remediation should be 3 to 5 depending if you have the upgrades. And a 4 or 5 in Combat when you get it. Everything else should be put in Self-Replication.
You want to be over 10 Probe Trust when you start thinking about putting anything into Speed or Exploration.
Also, take one out of Hazard Remediation to put into any of the three Production skills as needed.
Once you see the percentage of universe explored start ticking up on the screen, the game is over. With a high enough Self-Replication, your growth is closer to exponential than linear. Doesn't matter if you're slow and don't explore far, you will just occupy the entire universe.
My friend and I played at the same time. Unplanned, they invested in heavily Marketing, and I in Research. They beat it much more quickly, and I had to "cheat" or give up. I exploited Quantum Computing by writing a function in the console that clicked rapidly when the QC was primed, at which point it became quite easy to finish.
If you really want to cheat, you can open your dev console and just type clipClick(<any number>) to instantly make that many paper clips, up to the amount of wire you have.
I wish Android required a revokable permission to hide the status bar and navigation keys.
Clever ad supported idle games on Android exploit this to hide the clock, making you unaware of how much time passed - for the same reason Casinos avoid having visible clocks like the plague, and I consider this rather morally problematic, and thus in need of a dedicated user controllable permission. (See Kongregate's Realm Grinder for an example.)
Oddly enough, I'm hooked on Kittens Game, which I consider far superior to the Paperclip game. The level of depth is astounding.
That said, I've used it to meditate on attachment, automation, abstraction, and other interesting concepts. It has also helped me think about prioritizing things at work in terms of the whole "build it quickly, or automate it for future gains" debate that often arises.
I missed out on Universal Paperclips, but I immediately love the idea. The notion of the Paperclip AI that destroys humanity to build paperclips is a sublime illustration of how badly computer scientists need to take a few philosophy courses to broaden their thinking, as is its facile allure. (Most reasonable fears of AI are fears around what we will use it to do to others, not what it will do to us, as all conflict is driven by resource contention and machine intelligences would be so profoundly different in their needs than ourselves that there would be almost no overlap to contend over. They don't need space, food, water, or even time. They could tick away at one cycle every 500 years and be perfectly content. What exactly will they want to take from us?)
I've always liked clicker games, and there is a very long-running instance of Cookie Clicker running in my browser at home right now. The thing that interests me in them seems to have only been tangentially touched upon, though. The mathematical tapestries that get overlaid on one another, that's what I find interesting. What is the optimal strategy to build cookie production fastest? Do you wait and save for the next available cookie production method? Or do you just purchase everything you can? Exactly how many of the lower level production means can you buy before the cost per additional cookie produced is less than if you'd purchased one of the more expensive options? If your goal is to build the cookie production as efficiently as possible, the thought and calculation necessary to figure it out is quite significant. And when you add in differing yield curves with the various upgrades and boosts and bonuses and whatnot... it gets very large.
Having humans being the ones playing Universal Paperclips is a very interesting phenomenon, though. What does it say about us that as we fear a paperclip automaton annihilating us, we find it irresistable just to see some numbers get bigger? Would anyone NEED to build a complex AI in order to get us to annihilate ourselves? Would calling it Universal Banknotes make it clearer?
The scenario that inspired this game includes the contention that an AI could harm humanity without anything that we would recognize as malice in human terms.
> For example, if you want to build a galaxy full of happy sentient beings, you will need matter and energy, and the same is also true if you want to make paperclips. This thesis is why we’re worried about very powerful entities even if they have no explicit dislike of us: “The AI does not love you, nor does it hate you, but you are made of atoms it can use for something else.” Note though that by the Orthogonality Thesis you can always have an agent which explicitly, terminally prefers not to do any particular thing — an AI which does love you will not want to break you apart for spare atoms. See: Omohundro (2008); Bostrom (2012).
I guess two popular ways of disputing this thesis are to say that no AI that we can build can actually become this powerful, or to say that we'll easily program AIs not to harm us. I think the first objection is more cogent because there are various ways that you could argue that we're far from understanding how to build AIs of this kind.
The second objection is a subtle problem; the Omohundro-Bostrom-Yudkowsky-Bostrom argument is very focused on the idea that there are so many hidden assumptions about what it means not to harm us, and what kinds of things are off-limits, that someone who tries to capture all of them algorithmically at one stroke is more likely to fail than to succeed. And quite a few of the toy game-playing AI systems have found ways to cheat by human standards and miss the essence of the human understanding of the task they were set.
I think your analogy to the banknote-maximizer makes some of that subtlety clear: if we don't know what things are off-limits, we could see how a banknote-maximizer could cause very severe externalities without malice.
(The earlier Omohundro argument points out that, whatever you want to accomplish, power and safety will help you accomplish it, so you always have a good reason to try to acquire them. Maybe an AI could be explicitly programmed not to want to acquire power and safety, but there, again, we'd want a very good way to describe exactly what those things do or don't consist of.)
Having humans being the ones playing Universal Paperclips is a very interesting phenomenon, though. What does it say about us that as we fear a paperclip automaton annihilating us, we find it irresistable just to see some numbers get bigger? Would anyone NEED to build a complex AI in order to get us to annihilate ourselves? Would calling it Universal Banknotes make it clearer?
It says that when it comes to a Skinner box, we’re the same as those poor rats. It also suggests that keeping humanity busy while an AI turns us into paper clips would be a more trivial exercise than some might hope.
What impressed me the most was how the "secret" gradually unfolded, so that you were already hooked and felt a compulsion to continue game play, even after it became clear that this wasn't the innocuous game you thought it was at first.
It led me to build a clicker game that also has more to it than meets the eye. (Shameless self-promotion starts here.) Whereas Universal Paperclips explores the dangers of letting A.I. take over, my game (Unaware, https://unaware.pressbin.com) explores the moral status of people who exist in a simulation.