On mouse clicks and paperclips: the dark, frustrating pleasures of tedium games
Since it was released last October, Frank Lantz's AI-centric existential nightmare-turned-browser game Universal Paperclips has been played by about 1.2 million people, its developer says.
Put it another way, for the last five months over a million people have participated in an extensive, repetitive clicking experiment. One where the act of clicking on a box produces a single paperclip at a time and the aim is to convert all known matter in the universe to paperclips, and in which the game ends when the player reaches 30.0 septendecillion paperclips, resulting in the total destruction of the universe.
The success of Universal Paperclips as a viral browser game is a surprise, but not because it isn't completely consuming. According to Wired, it was a qualified viral hit with around 450,000 players at launch, most of whom completed the game in its entirety. What's surprising about the success of Universal Paperclips is that, at least on paper, it's pretty much as tedious as games gets. Universal Paperclips is a clicker game, occasionally known as non-games - a genre where game mechanics are boiled down to their most basic components, clicking or tapping to fulfill arbitrary goals. Like Cow Clicker, an iOS app by Lantz' friend and colleague Ian Bogost, Universal paperclips exists in a kind of limbo between games-as-entertainment and Skinner box experiments.
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