Though the idea of maniacally creating paper clips as a means unto itself seems nonsensical, there is a story and a progression to the plot in Universal Paperclips. I found myself delighted by sudden musical cues and the occasional koans that appeared in the activity log at the top of the page. Still, the game has a surprising capacity to keep you off balance. Maybe it’s because the interface somewhat resembles an Excel sheet at times, with fields and charts and status updates. As you unlock different parts of the dashboard, it feels productive, like you’ve accomplished something. Watching the numbers tick up well into the decillions is hypnotic. And of course, a good clicker game puts you directly in touch with the raw, goal-seeking id that is a fundamental part of your psyche, and that’s a scary and sometimes wonderful place to be, at least for a little while.” “The human brain isn’t really designed to intuitively understand things like exponential growth, but a good clicker game allows you to directly engage with these numerical patterns, to hold them in your hands and feel the weight of them. “For me, I love the way make abstract mathematical relationships feel palpable, concrete,” said Lantz. After all, when you play a game like this it gives you direct, first-hand experience of what it’s like to be a disembodied intelligence that is ruthlessly pursuing an arbitrary goal.” Also, I’ve been following the debate about AI safety with a lot of interest, and I thought that this would be a perfect theme for a clicker game. “I played one called Kittens Game that I really loved, and I wanted to make something like that, with lots of complex overlapping systems, only smaller and more focused. “I’ve always been interested in incremental games,” said Lantz in an email to GamesBeat. He also founded Area/Code, a social game studio that Zynga acquired in 2011. Previously, he was the director of game design at Gamelab, the studio that developed the hit game Diner Dash. He’s an industry vet who’s the director of the New York University Game Center. Game designer Frank Lantz created Universal Paperclips as a solo project. Like most titles in the category - which folks also call “idle” or “clicker games” - it’s all about the numbers as you buy wire, churn out paper clips, and amass enough wealth for what’s essentially a hostile takeover of the entire planet. Universal Paperclips is an incremental game that starts out in a humble factory and ends somewhere after the fall of humanity.
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