Play This Paperclip 
CLIPPY'S REVENGE
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​Life is a game of numbers. Universal Paperclips, the latest creation from NYU Game Center director Frank Lantz, is also a game of numbers. Your objective is simple: Make paperclips. 

You will open it in a new tab, remark "Hey, it's just a page full of numbers," and then the numbers will consume you. Nothing will matter but the numbers of paperclips you produce. Work responsibilities, emails you should read, text messages you should probably answer and external stimuli you should probably react to will fade into a dull buzz as the number, speed and efficiency of your paperclip production ramps up and and up and up.

In simple terms, Universal Paperclips is yet another spin on the popular web-based "clicker" genre of games. From a mechanics perspective, if you have played Cookie Clicker, you have, in some sense, played Universal Paperclips. But trust us when we say that you have not played a game like Universal Paperclips.

 

Through small tweaks to mechanics and use of language, Lantz created perhaps the only playable version of the Paperclip Maximizer thought experiment. "I always thought the paperclip maximizer was a very good thought experiment in this sense, it's genuinely weird and cool to think about," writes Lantz in an email to Digg. "When you play a game like this you get first hand experience of what it's like to be a disembodied intelligence driven maniacally to pursue an arbitrary goal."

It might be a cop-out to say that no amount of writing can describe how this unfolds in Universal Paperclips but: No amount of writing can describe how this unfolds in Universal Paperclips. At the risk of spoiling the experience, it's something that's better experienced than summarized.

It's certainly a fun game, for what it's worth. Seasoned veterans of the clicker genre will find some mechanical tweaks that make playing something like this a little more active than just checking a tab every 15 minutes or so. And just the way the game plays out, feels like Lantz is toying with you in ways beyond what flavor text can convey.

"It is meant to be a light and funny game, but at the same time it does represent something truly horrific," writes Lantz. "I hope that the pleasure that people get from dipping into this experience is made richer by the ideas and the context, that they come away with a little bit of insight into the ideas behind the conversation about AI safety and the values-alignment problem."

Unlike other clicker games, it is possible to "win" Universal Paperclips. But at what cost?

<p>Steve Rousseau is the Features Editor at Digg.&nbsp;</p>

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