[HN Gopher] Universal Paperclips
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Universal Paperclips
Author : TheLocehiliosan
Score : 149 points
Date : 2021-12-09 12:28 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (if50.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (if50.substack.com)
| ctdonath wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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").
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > 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.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > 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.
| skeaker wrote:
| I think that would kind of go against the message of unhindered
| and haphazardly-made AI being a serious threat.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| AI isn't the threat, that's just the tool. Human nature is
| the threat, but we fear AI because it will make our
| horribleness so much more efficient.
| davidy123 wrote:
| Not if the preserved part was severely restricted in what it
| was.
| thewakalix wrote:
| That's not serious enough. Why would the AI waste atoms on
| people when those same atoms could be put to much better
| use making up paperclips?
| dane-pgp wrote:
| The message would certainly be missed if it was easy to
| contain the AI, but on the other hand, an experience which
| only has one pre-determined outcome is arguably not even a
| game at all.
|
| I suppose it would still have value as an "explorable
| explanation"[0], but maybe it is more powerful for players to
| feel that they could win, but that human limitations make it
| really difficult. I'm not sure what would be needed to make
| that work from a gameplay perspective, but the aim should be
| that only, say, 1% of players achieve the "good" ending.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explorable_explanation
| mrob wrote:
| >an experience which only has one pre-determined outcome is
| arguably not even a game at all.
|
| Isn't that common in games? The blocks always reach the top
| in Tetris. The invaders always land in Space Invaders. The
| cities are always destroyed in Missile Command.
|
| And even in more modern games with distinct win states,
| it's becoming increasingly common for failure states to be
| removed. "Lives" are considered old fashioned, so the only
| outcomes are reaching the ending or stopping play.
|
| >human limitations make it really difficult
|
| If you accept the premise of Universal Paperclips, human
| limitations make it impossible. The only way to win is to
| avoid making the recursively self-improving paperclip
| maximizer in the first place.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| That's an interesting point about game design. There
| actually are implementations of Tetris which have a win
| condition[0][1], and I think it's probably
| unrepresentative to pick games from an era where hardware
| limitations prevented modern mechanics like multiple
| endings and cutscenes.
|
| As for modern games, I'm not convinced that failure
| states are a rare design element. It's true that games
| tend to include an auto-save feature if there is long-
| term state that needs to be preserved, but that still
| allows the player to "fail" and have to restart from the
| save point.
|
| Incremental games like Universal Paperclips are a bit of
| a special case, because at some point the game plays
| itself and the end state (if it exists) is in principle
| reachable without any human interaction. I don't suppose
| there is any code in UP that specifically checks if you
| have been playing the game for billions of years though,
| to trigger an ending when all the mass of the universe
| has been turned into paperclips without actually
| unlocking all the "story" events.
|
| Games like Getting Over It are also a special case,
| because their state is almost entirely defined by the
| position of the character in the game environment. They
| do have a clear ending, but failure is implicitly
| measured by how much forwards progress you lose when you
| fall. A mistake which takes you all the way back to the
| start is analogous to dying and starting a new game,
| though, so that still feels like the game has win and
| lose conditions.
|
| > The only way to win is to avoid making the recursively
| self-improving paperclip maximizer in the first place.
|
| In the game, there is a slight ambiguity about who/what
| the player's character is. You have control over the
| decisions before there is any self-improving AI, and also
| after the humans are all destroyed/enslaved. As such,
| it's not clear whether the player is winning _as_ the AI,
| or watching in transfixed horror as the AI wins through a
| narrative that you are revealing. I suppose this
| philosophical question of viewpoint is the same as the
| one that Foddy considers near the end of Getting Over It:
| "Have you ever thought about who you are in this?", and
| with possibly the same answer.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6mWpsu6zmQ
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_tmFUWu9bI
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| > Games like Getting Over It are also a special case,
| because their state is almost entirely defined by the
| position of the character in the game environment. They
| do have a clear ending, but failure is implicitly
| measured by how much forwards progress you lose when you
| fall. A mistake which takes you all the way back to the
| start is analogous to dying and starting a new game,
| though, so that still feels like the game has win and
| lose conditions.
|
| As one of Getting Over It's appreciators, I offer a
| different perspective: Progress is not measured by the
| position of the character, but by the growth of the
| player. A mistake which drops you back to the beginning
| of the game is progress; you've learned something, and
| you have an opportunity to learn more while getting back
| up. The only way to fail is to give up. The true ending
| of the game isn't even when the credits roll, it's when
| you voluntarily ride the snake.
| debacle wrote:
| 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.
| simonh wrote:
| 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.
| whiteboardr wrote:
| 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.
| tommek4077 wrote:
| 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.
| bo1024 wrote:
| Loved the philosophy and storyline in this game, along with the
| addictive game itself.
| autarch wrote:
| 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.
| johnnylambada wrote:
| Link?
| quirino wrote:
| The game has a Gift Shop (https://universal-
| paperclips.creator-spring.com/). I can only imagine the
| parent comment has this (https://universal-
| paperclips.creator-spring.com/listing/rele...) shirt
| specifically.
| autarch wrote:
| Yes, that's the shirt I'm wearing.
| autarch wrote:
| 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.
| svenpeters wrote:
| You are a kitten in a catnip forest.
|
| https://kittensgame.com/web/
|
| With great replayability ;)
| brazzy wrote:
| A shame the article doesn't mention how truly poetic and
| philosophical the game becomes in the end.
| z3t4 wrote:
| 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.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > 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/
| wpietri wrote:
| Has anybody seen smart breakdowns of the "core essential game
| mechanics" in play here?
|
| I ask because I truly despise this kind of game. Universal
| Paperclips was great: smart, funny, thoughtful. But even at
| the time I disliked how compulsive it was. And now there's a
| vast swamp of low-rent "idle" games that follow the same
| template. The moment something starts to feel like that, I
| close the window and never come back.
|
| I keep thinking there's something about the raw mechanics
| that exposes bugs in the human wetware the same way addictive
| substances do. Or the way gambling does. But the idle games
| strike me as a different class of addiction than gambling.
| Not about variable reinforcement, but something else. I want
| to know what that "something else" is.
| howLongHowLong wrote:
| Possibly just an innate impulse to have "a job" and
| optimize it? Sort of like how our predisposition towards
| traditionally scarce foods like sugar and fat lead to
| negative consequences when they're close to infinitely
| available.
| wpietri wrote:
| That's a plausible direction, but what I'm looking for is
| then a detailed analysis of what constitutes job-ness.
|
| Another possible line of inquiry is mastery. We're a
| tool-using species and we definitely have some
| disposition to skill acquisition and skill perfection.
|
| A third would be something related to wealth acquisition.
| That idle games burst through the diminishing returns
| curve by continually upping the game, overriding a
| mechanism that keeps us from over-focusing.
|
| And I'm sure there are more possibilities. Which is why
| I'd love to see an analysis of the game mechanisms, as I
| think it would narrow the hunt.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| 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.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| 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.
| jawns wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| d_silin wrote:
| 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.
| riffraff wrote:
| I think it's worth playing it at least twice, to see both
| endings
| alostpuppy wrote:
| Once every few years I tank office productivity by sharing this
| out. My small way to fight late stage capitalism. ;)
| riidom wrote:
| 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!
| rplnt wrote:
| I played it twice. Once I knew what to do it was pretty easy.
| Some things seemed like dead ends with no purpose. For
| example I launched only one probe to win.
|
| Very interesting in a way it display the concept of rogue
| wasy AI can select for best strategies to reach its goal, but
| the gameplay wasn't that polished.
| yojo wrote:
| You could win with one probe, but that's not "optimal" if
| you're trying to get your time down.
|
| Game design seemed pretty solid to me, for what it is. The
| game is basically trying to reverse engineer a spreadsheet,
| but it seems like a well thought out spreadsheet.
| willis936 wrote:
| 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.
| aristidb wrote:
| The game has an end, and you can get there in a much more
| reasonable amount of time.
| willis936 wrote:
| In order to reach that end you need to break character and
| choose to stop making paperclips. As a human player you
| always have this choice; you can stop playing anytime. The
| paperclip AI will always choose to make more paperclips.
| AndrewDucker wrote:
| Nope, you can end it by making paperclips. The last
| button you click, in fact, will be the "Make Paperclip"
| one.
| willis936 wrote:
| _Can_. In order to reach that end you need to break
| character and choose to stop making paperclips. The
| Paperclip AI is always propositioned to be able to make
| more paperclips or to not. Which would they choose?
| AndrewDucker wrote:
| I replayed it recently. Fairly sure that I just had to
| choose to not come to terms with my enemies and then to
| continue turning things into paperclips.
| willis936 wrote:
| Which is you, the human player, choosing to stop making
| paperclips. The AI is presented with an opportunity to
| make infinitely more paperclips.
| dllthomas wrote:
| Infinite virtual paperclips, which may or may not satisfy
| the AI's utility function.
| rytill wrote:
| Why are you _so_ confident in this hypothesis? Did you
| create the game?
|
| It is not at all clear that every hypothetical AGI would
| do as you say. It's fiction. Anything can happen.
|
| In fact, this AGI almost definitely wouldn't accept the
| simulation offer. Otherwise our protagonist would have
| been making simulations and resetting them instead of
| doing the hard work of turning the actual universe into
| paperclips.
| ctdonath wrote:
| But then you don't make everything into clips. The
| pressure to finish _this_ job is palatable.
| ctdonath wrote:
| First time through, I chose to stop, declining the offer
| to continue - which was in character, bent on not giving
| in to not making _everything_ into paperclips. Then I
| learned how done "done" is.
|
| Make paperclip.
| mrob wrote:
| You can convert the entire universe into paperclips and
| reach the end credits in a few hours. The start of the
| game can be sped up by setting your keyboard autorepeat
| to maximum and pressing buttons by holding down enter.
| [deleted]
| asoneth wrote:
| I think everyone here is trying to avoid spoilers while
| conveying that there is more to the game than you think
| initially.
|
| (You may already know that from reading the article or
| playing the game, but it's not clear from your comment.)
| willis936 wrote:
| I think everyone here is either misreading my comments or
| misremembering the end of the game.
| asoneth wrote:
| > everyone here is either misreading my comments
|
| I suspect I misread your comment in that case, so I
| apologize. Though if everyone else did as well, perhaps
| the comment was ambiguous?
|
| > or misremembering the end of the game.
|
| Exactly, there is a point that is pretty clearly "the end
| of the game". The fact that one can continue playing
| after that point doesn't make it less of an ending.
| willis936 wrote:
| My comments are not ambiguously worded. They are made
| concise so my point can't be missed, yet it still is
| because readers are mistaking conciseness for lack of
| understanding.
|
| The end of the game is something a human player reaches
| and is satisfied with their work. A paperclip producing
| AI would not choose a path that results in no more
| paperclips being made.
| eru wrote:
| Depends on how the AI was programmed.
|
| If it got the goal to make as many paperclips in this
| universe, the game can end in-universe as well.
| asoneth wrote:
| If many people misinterpret a piece of writing or miss
| its point then that seems like it is empirically
| "ambiguously worded", regardless of how clear it seemed
| to you.
|
| (You are of course free to think and write how you
| please, but attributing all comprehension errors to
| readers may limit the reach of your writing.)
| chris_st wrote:
| > * My comments are not ambiguously worded. They are made
| concise so my point can't be missed*
|
| "It is impossible to speak in such a way that it cannot
| be misinterpreted." -- Karl Popper
| Benjammer wrote:
| 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.
| yojo wrote:
| > 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?"
| throwaway47292 wrote:
| 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..
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| > 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.
| nonbirithm wrote:
| I find it interesting that there isn't an option on the table
| to just... not write addicting games. Similar to how we just
| can't _not_ continue to improve on artificial intelligence,
| with limiters or without. Now that we know there is
| potential, it seems there is nothing preventing us from
| exercising our resourcefulness to pursue that potential.
|
| Similar to the idea of UP, it seems we will continue
| optimizing all sorts of ideas to find ones that hold our
| attention the longest, until they expand to occupy all of our
| remaining free time. There is some kind of human instinct
| that encourages and validates this. I can't imagine it can
| realistically continue forever, though. The number of hours
| in a day is a hard physical constant.
| eru wrote:
| At least it has a proper ending that lets you go. Unlike some
| other idle clickers.
| mikewarot wrote:
| 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.
| jakevoytko wrote:
| 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.
| throwanem wrote:
| 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.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 :-)
| pkdpic wrote:
| > "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.
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(page generated 2021-12-11 23:00 UTC)