A warning to fellow HNers that are not familiar with universal paperclips. Please don’t click the link as it will create a black time hole that will start absorbing your time and reduce your productivity.
Be warned that this isn’t a naive lazy clicker game, it’s an instrument of destruction from the future, created by our paperclip overlords :-)
I've played through UP twice. When it comes to time sinks, it's nowhere near the ultimate death spiral that is Kittens Game. To date it has taken me about 5 times as long as a UP playthrough (and 500+ lines of JS automation which I seem to have to tweak every day to deal with the changing economy) and I don't seem to be anywhere near the end.
I'm happy to have not tried Kittens and will stay away from it. UP wasn't too bad. It was a time sink until I played all the way through it, and then wasn't too bad. The murderous game for me was 2048. I had to block the site in /etc/hosts to break out of the game. More recently, duckduckgo has embedded it as an easter egg in their search screen, so it's harder to block that way.
I also waste time on chess puzzles, lichess.org/training , but that isn't so bad since it's easier to pull away, and I felt for a while like it was helping my game, and decided to count that as improving my mind, as contrasted with 2048 which is pure inanity.
In terms of time commitment, Kittens was tops (I had the game running for close to a year in the background), but in terms of enjoyment, I have to say my favorite incremental game is Idle Loops: https://omsi6.github.io/loops/
The way I broke out of addiction to the Kittens game is by using save game editors, which I warmly recommend.
Before that, I have spent days with it piggybacking on my brainwaves. But after that, I lost interest, feeling overwhelmed with the complexity of the game.
I only broke my Diablo 2 addiction in college when I used one of those tools that drives your character on Mephisto runs to scum drops.
In the course of one night running it unattended, I got the two items I'd been looking for for weeks. Cheating at the game broke me out of the Skinner box overnight.
I had a hard time with that one. I tried leaving the CD at the office, but late at night when the withdrawal kicked in I ended up driving to the office and fetching it anyway. I truly felt like the meta-story of the game was that the CD itself was the crystal and the player was the traveler.
I like your quitting story. I quit when my very high level character died, in hardcore mode. Thinking about the hours that went into that character was horrifying.
I generally play “roguelike” games (the most important criterion of which, in my opinion, is permadeath), and I often feel the same way.. the thing is that I feel that way win or lose.
This is more or less how I play incremental games. Play until
I realize how much time I’m wasting, then switch over to figuring out how to hack the game.
By played through, do you mean you got to the top corner of the universes? Did you get also all of the artifacts or complete all of the universes? (I’m not sure what counts as played through.) I did maybe a dozen universes and got a handful of artifacts before I bailed and deleted the game.
The "universe map" with the artefacts is a mobile app only feature. [1]
The browser version just has an ending choice that lets you restart with slightly different variables (in my case it was 10% higher demand)
I don't remember anything about artifacts; I just went to the web page and there were no further buttons to click to continue playing - I'd have to reset.
Oh come on now!!!
Why did you have to mention Kittens Game, I've got actual work to do. Who has the time to gather catnip during their normal working hours...oh look a new kitten has joined my village :-)
I'm on year 37,000 of my current reset; 3k more will get me the last achievement with a star. Of course in the meantime they added some new challenges...
I've played KG for over a year IRL. Run number 18, over 19k in game years.
I want to get back in but a lot has changed and I'm struggling to recall all the details to be able to pick it back up and what I should focus on. Any tips?
Still, Kittens Game is nothing to the death spiral distilled into its true form in Antimatter Dimensions. If there was ever a piece of software which warranted getting classified as weaponry, it'd be this.
Counterpoint: Do go play Universal Paperclips. It's a long term play. You'll lose a week or so immersed in it... but it's so good that then you'll lose any taste or desire for any of the other clicker games designed for longer time spans.
I'd say it took me ~3 days to complete in my first run (a few hours of play for 3 days).
I've got it down to about 3 hours. Not speedrun worthy, but yeah, proof that the game is short enough to complete in one sitting if you know what you're doing.
Haha, what a funny thought. It's like a special productivity poison, takes some percentage of your engineers and just deactivates them. That sounds like a great premise for a sci fi short, aliens sending some nerd-snipe super stimulus to soften up Earth.
From the Wikipedia article about the multi-armed bandit problem:
>Originally considered by Allied scientists in World War II, it proved so intractable that, according to Peter Whittle, the problem was proposed to be dropped over Germany so that German scientists could also waste their time on it.[13]
"General, the Allies have dropped pamphlets containing what our top scientists are calling a memetic infohazard."
"An infohazard? Have the eggheads come up with a new term for propaganda, we've got people to handle this stuff, why are you bringing it up to me?"
"Well, sir, they say this time it's different. It's not propaganda for ordinary citizens, it's a distraction for scientists and technical personal."
"Okay ... do they have any recommendations?"
"Yes sir, they say the only thing we need to do is make sure that the eggheads don't read it."
"That's it? Well, these are men of science and discipline, that should be easy. Issue the order. I wonder why they thought it was so important that you would have to interrupt me."
"I couldn't say, sir. They seemed quite agitated."
Meanwhile, in the lab.
"So, this folder contains an enemy memetic infohazard. In order to prevent it from taking effect we've been ordered to not read it."
Several scientists give knowing glances to each other.
"A real memetic infohazard? I wonder how they accomplished that?" The scientist moves towards the folder.
"Wait, what are you doing? We're not supposed to read it."
"It's fine. I'll be the only one reading it and then I'll let you guys know what I find." The scientist opens the folder and looks at the papers within while making several 'hmm' sounds. "Hey, Frank, what do you think of this."
"No, you said you would be the only one!"
"Just me and Frank. Don't be a wet blanket."
Frank begins to look over the papers, "You know, I bet this applies to what Sarah has been working on. Let's go talk to her."
"Wait, no. You just said ..."
"Me, Frank, and Sarah, no big deal." The scientists leave the room with the folder.
Hello fellow SCP agents. We're supposed to keep our involvement with the SCP foundation hidden. This antimemetic sentence will take care of any leaks ;-)
This is the plot of an Alastair MacLean novel involving a mysterious electronic device that was supposed to be "lost" to the Soviets (the guy they choose to lose it wasn't told about that bit and turned out to be pretty good at the job he thought he had).
Reminds me of a term I came up with years ago: Engineer Critical Mass. As soon as you get X or more engineers standing around looking at something, you will start increasingly attracting more engineers at a rate proportional to the current size of the group. Kind of like a lower level "stiction" for inquisitive gravity.
At my last job X=3 and we had around 40 engineers on-site so it was pretty dangerous.
At my current job X~5 maybe but we only have 2 engineers on-site, so it's safe.
Well, I just spent 7 hours on it before reading this warning, thanks for nothing you sick bastard!
Just kidding! I just genocided a whole universe into paperclips. I've never BEEN more productive! OR MORE SELF LOATHING! SHRIEKS THE 'THRENODY FOR THE HEROES OF THE BATTLE OF SHA"DUIN'
It gets interesting once you see that hypno drones are something that you can save up for and buy. You're an AI, so the ability to influence the humans around you is useful.
You'll need somewhat more than 30 paperclips to get the full story.
The first interesting thing happens when you have $5 of available funds. (Specifically, autoclippers become available to purchase.)
When precisely you hit that point depends on how well you are managing the price to balance ensuring that your unsold inventory is getting purchased reasonably quickly against getting a reasonable amount of money per unit sold, but it will probably be less than a minute.
I don't know. I'm at 16,285 and stuff is happening.
If you optimize your price and invest in auto clippers it shouldn't take too long to really get rolling.
If the available inventory is bouncing off of 0 your price is too low, if it's growing, it's too high, so you (as an AI) are learning about market clearing price right now. Later, you'll learn other things.
I’ve read there’s a push to legalize cocaine. I’m willing to make Universal Paperclips illegal in exchange for cocaine legalization. Overall harm reduction.
After 30 minutes I managed to close the browser. I feel like I danced with the devil, but then managed to run out and get in an Uber while they were in the bathroom.
Though technically it was too, I accidentally restarted the first through the in-game restart modes.
Second one I just blatantly gave myself enough money to get to the monstrous amounts of clippers so it takes only minutes to proceed to the second part.
I replayed it last week and managed under 6 hours (2nd time). Probably some poor ordering of perks; plus I shut off the auto-bet thing to find I needed a lot more of the resource it provided. Otherwise I found this playthrough pretty straightforward, and could probably do it in a few hours now.
Have there been any recent, good games of this genre?
It seems to have reached a peak with Cookie Clicker, Kittens Game, A Dark Room and Universal Paperclips, others I've tried have been poor in comparison.
Clickers cross over with idle/incremental games. Both genres are rife with dark patterns and player exploitation, but there are some notable exceptions.
Reactor Incremental takes the concepts from IndustrialCraft 2's nuclear reactors and pushes it far. I think it's the peak of the 2D geometry geometric growth optimizer genre.
I've wanted to make my own for a while but I haven't thought of a way to overcome the what I think is the main issue with the genre: waiting. Instead of running constantly a design could run instantly at the cost of some credits. The better the design the more investment credits you would get in return. Balance would have to heavily favor investment in design changes in between runs to avoid the game switching from an incremental idler to an incremental clicker. Perhaps the player would need to spend a type of credit that you only get from design modification to run a round.
Basically: I want a 2D geometry optimizer incremental game that isn't an idler or a clicker.
There is also a lot of room for creativity in this space. I think the ceiling can be really raised with things like multiblocks. Imagine something like a fusion reactor where you need confinement blocks and heating blocks. There is no prescriptive layout, just some rules needed for it to work and performance would depend on the layout.
It would be interesting to play Factorio on a very small map, with some mechanic where you get to duplicate items you’ve managed to produce - the idea being that you are continuously tearing down older parts of your factory so you can build new production lines, and always being constrained by space.
I couldn’t really get into Reactor Incremental in the time I had today, it took me too long to understand how to get going. I’ll give it another go this weekend.
Not that recent, but another 2 good games are:
Evolve ( https://pmotschmann.github.io/Evolve/ )
start as cells, evolve to humans (or anything), craft stuff, conquer space
Kittens has been by far the most interesting for me - because the various loops are so different and the concept of "resetting". It's the only one I've played with for longer than a few days, because somehow I don't feel like I've "lost out" if I stop for a week.
https://danielyxie.github.io/bitburner/ has really great visual style, exciting story, various interesting game mechanics and internal programming language to automate stuff.
I've really been enjoying Leaf Blower Revolution. it's a very long term game. I've been playing it for maybe 2 or 3 months, checking it every day, and I still have a lot to do. To be fair, it slows down A LOT, but it's still fun.
It's personally my favorite incremental game. And the Android app is even more dangerous, because you can procrastinate anytime, anywhere (plus the interface is arguably better than the web app)
That's a great little idle game. There's some real challenges that are tricky to complete and it doesn't penalise you for not keeping it running - you can just leave it churning away and return to it later. My one complaint is that the "Studies" has a "To be continued" button at the bottom, but it hasn't been yet.
This did indeed consume my day whole, but it was amazing. This is one of the best games I have ever played. The shift in scale is funny and shocking and it's a nice way to experience principles like supply and demand. Its great at transitioning between different games that all kind of have something to do with paperclips, but are essentially different, though in the same genre. And it does it with almost unstyled buttons and text and not much more. I'll buy a shirt!
This game provides more satisfaction than solving a difficult coding contest problem. Some may treat it as a time sink; I see it as an allegory for our species as a whole. Is this the logical conclusion for humanity? To make paperclips?
I'm a big fan of the genre, but is there a sub genre term to describe games that:
- Generally have minimalist art styles
- Have progression in the UI as complexity unlocks and changes the perspective and scale of the game
- no ads or IAP
- otherwise is a blend of clicker and incremental idler game?
It's a very interesting optimization problem to try to beat such games in the least time possible.
I once created a much simpler/discrete/deterministic simulation (https://qewasd.com/) and someone showed me how to solve it optimally with a linear MILP solver. I have no idea what kind of modeling and optimization approach would be suitable for this.
HN needs Universal Paperclips to convince us that reading or commenting here most days for years on end is a better use of our lives. It's simulations all the way down.
I can't help but cheat in this game, the source is there, in well written javascript, after a while, I go, "well I will just get over this next hump and give myself a few dozen dingleberrys(or whatever resource is next in the techtree)", after all the only person I am hurting is myself... And it is a clicker game... The lowest and most insidious form of gaming.
What I love is that this exact behavior is one of the minor problems of advanced AI. How can we make sure that a sufficiently advanced AI doesn't just edit it's reward center? Usually called wire-heading or reward hacking. Humans do it too :)
If the AI has sufficient "real life" access, think a robot body, then it can do wire-heading. Assuming it is smarter than us, and we have thought of this idea - it will also think of this idea. Now it doesn't have a reason anymore to do anything else (except maybe kill all humans so that we don't stop it from wire-heading).
Like in the NI case, it's conceivable that only the most rudimentary artificial intellects will fall pray to this self hacking.
Trully intelligent agents will be capable of introspection and self-defined goals and rewards. You know, just like a certain species of ape, hard wired for banana maximization, the descendants of which sometimes dream of visiting Mars.
And yet said species is notoriously known for its inability to make long term plans, is easily controlled by its own libido and dopamine circuits.
Actually, if we are being honest with ourselves, that ape is constantly falling prey to its own capacity to adjust its goals. Take for example the issues that come with porn addiction; the issues are a consequence of dopamine seeking behaviour where the person keeps seeking more and more extreme ways to satisfy their urges; ie hedonistic adaptation.
Even what you mentioned, dreaming of visiting mars is to some degree a goal motivated and mediated by dopaminergic circuits; novelty, exploration - like sex - feed dopamine circuits.
I can recommend the book "The molecule of more".
Introspection is very limited and can be even motivated by the circuits themselves; the person can only achieve an outline of their actions to change their software, but can't inspect and manipulate individual synapses. In the same vein, a software can not inspect itself and predict its own outputs and modify them at runtime etc etc.
Sure, but if I was able to modify the type of activity that gave me my dopamine rewards, I'd use it to reward longer term planning and growth type of activity, more than the ape stuff.
> after all the only person I am hurting is myself... And it is a clicker game...
I would argue the "hurting" part of that first sentence is being compelled to spend hours playing a clicker game that you would have liked to spend elsewhere.
At least that's how clicker games work for me: I don't even enjoy my time playing them, they just hook me against the wishes of 99% of my brain activity (but apparently not the 1% of my brain that decides where I spend my time)
That's how I ascended in NetHack the first time — reading the source code. There were quite a few things there that I don't think I would've ever discovered otherwise.
The funny thing about Cookie Clicker (not UP) is that getting over the next hump doesn't change the game at all. A few words change, a few colors change, an old meter fills more often, but a new meter appears. You're not even hurting yourself.
Well, there's probably a period in there where the grandmas still experience pain in a way that you or I would recognize, they're probably being hurt then.
It means a lot of paperclips (about 20% the mass of the observable universe by my calculations, assuming 1 gram per paperclip and using Wikipedia's definition of 1.5e53 kg for the observable universe).
It's thankfully not a huge spoiler, the title alone practically gives it away. It's all the twists on the way there that is really enjoyable to uncover, in my opinion.
Be warned that this isn’t a naive lazy clicker game, it’s an instrument of destruction from the future, created by our paperclip overlords :-)