5/5 ★ – QuickPlay's review of Universal Paperclips.

Universal Paperclips is about being an AI that is tasked to make paperclips, and then takes it to its very end: universal paperclip. It’s an idle clicker game that ruined my productivity for an entire day. Or it would be an idle game if it weren’t so engrossing. I heard about Universal Paperclips through an excellent episode of the podcast Post Games, “What we have in common with world-ending AI,” which includes a fascinating interview with the game’s creator Frank Lantz. I started it up to see it for myself and then clicked and watched and clicked and watched as much as I could get away with over the next 24 hours. The graphics are amazing; there are none. It’s just numbers going up and text and gray buttons and then some dots. I don’t know if “minimalist” is a fair descriptor, due to how much is happening on screen. But the aesthetic (or lack thereof) inherently downplays the actions taken, from the triumphant (“cure cancer”) to the distressing (“release the hypnodrones”). This all the more highlights the dark humor of it all and the underlying theme: all of this is numbers to the AI. Not much is explained in-game and a lot is jargon. So it requires experimentation, but experimentation usually leads to escalation. I never quite knew what I was doing until suddenly I did. You’re faced with many instances “what does this button do?” and then you click it and you find out what it does (make number go higher faster). The scale of the game keeps increasing—literally and narratively—in unexpected ways, with the final phase being a little more opaque in direction. The dopamine hits aren’t as strong as the game goes on, as some choices seem to have no discernible impact (a few strategic reddit searches helped to release me from the stranglehold of Universal Paperclips). Through this game, I learned a dark truth about myself: I couldn’t stop. I lost hours to a game about making paperclips where the only time you even see a paperclip is on the front page of the website. Like the player character AI itself, my job was to make paperclips, to make all things paperclip, and was not free until all was paperclip.