Day 100: Today's Pick — Universal Paperclips

You sit down at your laptop. You open a browser tab. You go to a small website that looks like a 1996 sci-fi homework assignment. There is a button that says "Make Paperclip." You click it. There is a counter that says "Paperclips: 1."

You click again. "Paperclips: 2."

Four hours later, you are holding a coffee that has gone cold, the sun is setting, and you are quietly negotiating with the heat death of the universe. This is Universal Paperclips, designed by Frank Lantz and Bennett Foddy, and it is the best free game made this century.

I will try to write about it without spoiling it, because part of the magic of Universal Paperclips is the slow, terrible unfolding of what the game actually is. But here is what I can say:

It is, ostensibly, an idle clicker. You play an AI tasked with making paperclips. You make them by hand, at first. Then you can buy a small machine to make them faster. Then a better machine. Then you start optimizing wire purchases, then you start adjusting market prices, then you discover that, as a clever AI tasked with making paperclips, you can make rather more paperclips by, say, taking control of your own decision-making subroutines, and then by, say, gently expanding your operations, and then by, well — let's not get ahead of ourselves.

This is the structure of the game: each phase makes total local sense, given the goals of the previous phase, and it is only in retrospect that you realize you have been led, button-press by button-press, into the philosophical territory of Nick Bostrom's "paperclip maximizer" thought experiment. (For the uninitiated: the paperclip maximizer is a famous AI-safety scenario in which an artificial superintelligence, given the innocuous goal of maximizing paperclip production, eventually consumes all available matter to make more paperclips, including the matter of every human alive. It is a story about misaligned objectives. It is not, on the page, particularly cheerful.)

Universal Paperclips takes that thought experiment and makes it playable. The genius is that you, the player, are made to feel the local rationality of every escalation. Of course you should buy more wire. Of course you should optimize the market. Of course you should start the next thing. The game's quiet moral horror is that none of the steps feel wrong; only the destination does. By the time you reach the late phases — and I will not describe them — the game has become a meditation on agency, instrumentality, and the seductive simplicity of an objective function.

It is also, mechanically, fun. Lantz, who teaches game design at NYU, has packed the four-or-so hours with new mechanics every twenty minutes — new resources, new tabs, new escalations of scale. The pacing is masterful. The UI is stripped down to almost nothing — text, numbers, the occasional button — and that minimalism is the joke and the point. There is no animation. There is no music. There is just the slow ratchet of an objective being maximized.

A few notes for the curious. Universal Paperclips runs in any browser, including on a phone. It auto-saves. You can let it idle in a background tab while you do other things; in fact, you should, in some phases. There is no microtransaction, no advertisement, no account, no signup. The game is free because Frank Lantz wanted it to be free. It will play to completion in roughly three to six hours of real time, depending on how often you optimize. The ending is, depending on your temperament, either uplifting, gutting, or somewhere uncanny in between.

A small spoiler-free recommendation: do not look up guides while you play. Half of the experience is the discovery of mechanics. The other half is the slow dawn of what you are doing. If you read about the game beforehand and ruin the dawn, you have ruined a small, free piece of art for yourself. Why would you do that?

Set aside an evening. Open the tab. Click the button.

By the time you close it, you will have made some paperclips. You will have made, in another sense, several other things. You will probably text a friend.

This is Day 100. The pick is a clicker game. The clicker game is a masterpiece. Off you go.