The Unexpected Philosophical Depths of the Clicker Game Universal Paperclips
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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 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.
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.
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/
Fork it! https://bitbucket.org/bseidensticker/bot-game/src/master/
They all remind me of this:
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5wMcKNAwB6X4mp9og/that-alien...
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.
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
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.
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.
https://universalpaperclips.gamepedia.com/Universal_Papercli...
Did not expect this, it's pretty amazing.
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.)
Or just ban games that do this from Google Play.
Maybe.
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'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?
https://intelligence.org/2013/05/05/five-theses-two-lemmas-a...
> 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.)
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.
Seems a bit hard to find something comparable to paperclips, most even deny advantage of understanding exp growth.