21–30 of 56 posts
I remember starting this game at mid-day and having no idea that I would end up building paperclips well into the night. 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 tha…
Maybe.
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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, so you're still only in stage 1 of the game. :-)
I never got past the later stage... "competition". I should look up to see if there was much more after that and what I missed, since I doubt I'll go through it all again.
https://universalpaperclips.gamepedia.com/Universal_Papercli...
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.
Vaguely clicker game related comment hijack: 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 control…
Vaguely clicker game related comment hijack: 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 control…
Ban fullscreen games from Google Play? That sounds like an overreaction.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never got past the later stage... "competition". I should look up to see if there was much more after that and what I missed, since I doubt I'll go through it all again.
The wiki can get you there, but I still recommend going through the stages (with the Wiki open to make it go faster) to see the ending itself. https://universalpaperclips.gamepedia.com/Universal_Papercli...
My friend and I played at the same time. Unplanned, they invested in heavily Marketing, and I in Research. They beat it much more quickly, and I had to "cheat" or give up. I exploited Quantum Computing by writing a function in the console that clicked rapidly when the QC was primed, at which point it became quite easy to finish.