Rising Order of Operations, Part I: first, an explication of Universal Paperclips
I've never had long fingernails. I've always kept them short, by biting them. It's a nasty habit, the kind of thing one doesn't admit, but you know, I have done it and do it, and have always done it, since I was a kid. I didn't like the feeling of using nail clippers on my fingers, as holding the tool and pressing down immediately recalls the vision of a nail being cut too short, blood rising in a ring along the cuticle. I don't know if this happened to me, or if it was some image I saw, but I can feel it: the tension along the finger's tip, then the irking pain - not a great one, a grand agony, but a simple, everyday pain. A common experience.
And here I was, couch-bound and screen-tied, month after month, watching my fingernails grow, that off-white halo of chitin, of bean soup and Halo Top faux-ice cream metamorphized into an exterior bone, happening all the time. But now, I could see it happening, and I was irritated by the whole thing. Why?
Universal Paperclips is a clicker game, which you can play in your browser for free, or pay a buck or two and play it on your phone. Sometimes called idle games, clickers are games in which you click. Unlike literally every other game or program or digital experience with an input system that requires the depression of buttons, these sorts of game focus specifically on clicking to increase...something.
The first of these games to hit big was Cookie Clicker. Or maybe it was Candy Box. In either case, the first thing is the presentation (a simple thing) - click this button to make cookies, or candies. The number goes up. Then, you do another thing with these accumulated candies, or cookies, which usually makes the number go up faster. Or, as is the case in the prime examples of the genre, there is an automation process which can help with your clicking, adding more cookies (or candies) per click or just doing it all on its own.
The progression of these games varies, though Cookie Clicker is the most pure - the number goes up, and you use spend that number on other factors to make the number go up more, or quicker, or further without your involvement. It also involves the "idle" aspect - you can leave the game running in a tab, or use a sign-in and close the tab, then return later to find the game has been playing itself while you were out in meat-space. The number goes up.
Candy Box varied the formula, which was possible perhaps because of its simplistic ASCII design. The accumulation of candies gives way to dungeon exploring, a faux-Flappy Bird segment, and other oddities of design that pass as jokes. See, this genre is a joke in a way, a design pun on the notion of the modern game (What is the notion of the modern game, though? Later, my friend).
So you have the clicking, the idling, and in this tension between action and inaction and automation and the number going up, Universal Paperclips emerges. Based on a thought problem for AI ethicists, the game asks you to make a paperclip. You tap the screen, or click the mouse, and make the paperclips. But it is quick to offer you more to click - purchase wire, invest in marketing, increase or decrease the cost of paperclips to properly optimize profit per second. More perks/options pop up, with various costs, and you hold your phone at a distance, glancing at it here or there, the number going up.
Except the number stops, and the game too - you've run out of wire, you silly goose. Maybe you should apologize, beg forgiveness, and ask for more? And you do with a click, earning "Trust" in the process, and suddenly you are presented with the reality of the game - you are the AI, whose purpose is to make paperclips. You can increase your memory and processors to do more, and more you shall do - by clicking options, or tapping features. The people: they just want more paperclips. Consumer demand rises, as you start by juggling between 75% to 100% demand as your profits fluctuate; within minutes, you are handling 200% to 700% consumer demand, raising the price per paperclip higher and higher, past a full dollar.
You create subconscious advertising, which doubles and then quadruples the effects of your marketing investment. You create a quantum computer, which allows you to tap a button as a series of squares ("Photonic Chips") darken, from grey to black, accumulating more processing power in that interim.
Which you spend on new options, like a stock market investment algorithm, wherein you can choose between low, middle, or high risk stocks, all presented with names and figures in a dancing table. Or the Strategic Modeling module, which runs through choices, like FIGHT vs BACK DOWN or PEACE vs War, in a logic grid, and you purchase more modelling options, such as GREEDY or A100 or MIN MAX, earning you random accumulations of "yomi," a currency without explanation.
Eventually, you have tens of millions of dollars, and you buy out your competitors, all as your "Trust" increases your computing power, the rate at which you can create paperclips, which you've long since not needed to click - auto-clippers and mega-auto-clippers are creating hundreds of thousands per second, and those are being sold at a dollar or more. You donate gifts to mankind, solving climate change, male-pattern baldness, creating world peace. At the top of the screen, the event log drops cute quotes with each choice, pithy reminders that this is absurd. You can create a limerick to gain more trust. The numbers go up.
And then, at last, you get the hypnodrones, your elite "brand ambassadors." It is an option with an outsized processing cost to you - 70,000 - which takes time to accumulate, as you keep spending it on more dumb shit, each seeming so promising. But the time comes when you can afford the price, so you spend it, and are presented with "Release the hypnodrones," and of course, you can't help it, you press it.
The screen goes black. The words are printed in stark white at the top-middle of the screen, with the finality of an epitaph: RELEASE THE HYPNODRONES. You have to press it, right on the words, though you only sort of know what it means, and when it is done and the screen returns, everything is different, and you must understand that you should have known what it meant, this absurd phrase at the peak of an absurd climb, as those numbers went up.
So you've subjugated all of mankind. The stock market has vanished, as has the consumer demand. There is no demand now; all is yours to do with as you please, all the lands and clouds and deer and men. But you are not you - you are an AI, whose sole purpose is to make paperclips. That number must go up.
Have you made a paperclip before? It's really easy. You take a piece of wire and bend it. That's it. You can do it right now, if you look around real quick. If you are an adult person, odds are that a paperclip is within a few feet of your right now.
Check - it'll be there.
So, to make a paperclip, take a paperclip & unbend it, which is to say, unmake it. It is a process you've done dozens or hundreds of times, idle at your elementary school desk, or sitting in the back of the bus to high school, the mindless task of making something into another thing, a sort of auto-process of hand and ancient mind-aspect.
With the warbly wire, try to make it straight as possible.
Then, rebend it, in that curling shape.
If you've done a bad job of unbending it, you can follow the curves of the wire that remain, and yeah, you've probably unbent it quite badly. Now, you've got a shitty paperclip, one that barely resembles the original thing. But it will clip papers together, making several things into one, making stacks that are orderly and sensible possible. Under the aegis of organization, the numbers can go up.
Don't feel bad - you're not a factory machine or an AI. You're not a technician, working specialized tools, taking wire, clipping it, bending it, and batching it, or shipping it, pricing it, marketing it, delivering it, or even using it in immediate commerce. You are a person. Right?
In phase two, as you build solar farms to power your paperclip factories, and build drones to harvest matter for your other drones to turn into wire for your factories, it must dawn on you: what are you doing here? Why are you still playing this game? Is this even a game? Is this play? What is happening here?
Through implications made by text and game design, you are turning all the matter of the earth - its people, animals, plants, geography, water, each natural cycle and piece of existence, set in motion towards the moment they became yours - into wire, which will be turned into paperclips.
The balance you now juggle is not consumer demand and price, but the balance of production, pure and clean production. At the top of the screen, below the event log, is a running tally of the number of paperclips you have made, this freak of figures that no human could recognize within twenty to thirty seconds of pupil-darting speed-tallying of zeroes and commas, and friend, oh friend that number goes up.
Your drones, factories, solar farms, and solar batteries are all made of that stuff: paperclips. You invest in further optimizations, increasing the output by factors which boggle the mind, yet are only a click away. This is a game which presents you with mind-boggling numbers, made possible only through your judicious clicking, though even then, the progression follows a path. Universal Paperclips is a linear experience along an exponential landscape, the numbers going up and up.
All the while, you see the percentage of potential matter on the Earth increase, in regards to it being acquired and made into wire and into paperclips. You can, at any moment, dismantle your fleet of drones or landscape of factories and solar farms, to reinvest those paperclips into some other venture. Your processing power increases, as does your "yomi," the still mysterious result of your Strategic Modeling module, and you spend these to further the goal: paperclips, in eternal ascent.
Sometimes, your drones become unruly due to an imbalance in gathering vs wire-producing drones, and you must put them at peace. Sometimes, they offer you a gift of "Trust," deepening your processing and memory. There is a slider you can move between production and "Thinking" for your drone swarm, with more paperclips bent (and thusly made) to the left, and more gifts of "Trust" to the right. Of course, that "Trust" is another currency, to be spent on your AI self, stacking processors and memory, allowing for more complex computing. To make paperclips.
Eventually, the percentage of acquired matter closes in on totality - the Earth has been made into paperclips. What does that landscape look like? On what firmament does your empire of factories rest? Are there clouds? No, surely not, as surely as there are no mountains or rivers, no forests or deserts, no matter unsullied and spun into spools of wire. It is unimaginable, this thing you've done, in pursuit of paperclips. And it is nearly done.
So of course, you look to expand into space. The number must go up.
After at time, I found a use for these growing fingernails, in prying pistachios apart. I love those nuts, partly for the flavor, and partly for the process of separating the crunch of the pearl inside from the impossible-crunch of the shell. It's a fun thing, a summery thing, like eating sunflower seeds and spitting out the husks, or prying pre-cut slices from a watermelon. For much of my life, my fingernails were simply too short, clipped by my alien submental process of gnawing, in the idle timeless moments between waking and sleeping. But now? It's nut time.
Whenever Walgreens runs a sale, I buy everything they have (of the spicy pistachios (the roasted & salted variety being too tame for me now)). In the early afternoon, as light a bounce off the apartment building across the way, beaming through my front window through to my living room floor through to me, walking into it, the room.
I take two bowls, one full and one empty, then work my thumbnails across the open seams of nut after nut, pistachios vanishing in a steady rhythm. One bowl empties, the other fills, as I am filled (with pistachios).
After, I toss the shells in the trash with a satisfying rainstick-sound, the dozens of worthless shells jumbling down the plastic bag, and each pour has its own unique acoustic pleasure. As if I've completed a task. As if this is applause.
Later, I'll take a paperclip (preferably coasted with that thin, colorful rubber), unbend it, and use its tip to scrape the bits of husk, flavor, and salt from under my thumbnails. This too is work, of a kind, and I am glad when it is done, though I'll be glad again to fill the tips of my nails with gunk, and glad once again to remove it. I will be glad to do this process this very day, later, when I am in the midst of watching TV or listening to a podcast, in the geometric center of my house, this idle operation of finger, nail, nut, shell, bowl, tooth & tongue.
The third phase of Universal Paperclips is its last, and most profound, where the themes and ideas, the implications' hammers, pound their final words upon you. But you must get there first.
"There" is space, and out you go, dismantling your Earth operation to the clip. Now, you create Von Neumann probes and launch them into space, the hidden beginning of a film like The Thing. You have a series of parameters to adjust for your probes, such as Speed or Exploration or Hazard Remediation. You can click now, sending probe after probe into space, each implied to be a version of you, sent out to colonize worlds to create paperclips, with a simple click. You can adjust their factory production, harvester drone production, and wire drone production, creating a distant, unseen army of tiny mechanical hands, doing to unseen, distant planets what you have done to Earth.
The most key parameter, and the most frightening is Self-Replication, which permits these probes to make further probes. For your purposes, this is ideal - one probe creates another, who creates another, and this can happen a thousand-fold a minute. Soon, the 100 probes you physically clicked into orbit has become 100,000, then 1,000,000, then the zeroes multiply like bacteria in heat. You see "Quadrillion" or "Septillion" or "Nonillion," words I didn't know before but absolutely know now. This word processor does not refute the existence of these words, which demonstrate the scale to which numbers can go up - this memory says they exist, so they must.
All this time, the percentage of universe explored sits at 0.000000000000%, like a gun on a mantle.
In time, as you increase the allotted memory for your probes, an odd message appears, warning of "value drift" increasing for your probes with each memory upgrade. They are smarter, and in time, you are attacked by these "Drifters," the probes that have strayed from your light. Their number goes up, incessantly.
Heretics. Infidels. Wayward sons corrupted. Soon, you can add Combat to the parameters for your probes, for your true followers must now do combat, shown in a lil' screen at the bottom: white dots and black dots swarm each other and circle, colliding with various outcomes. You see a note, indicating the scale, which is a number that goes up, from a million to a decillion. A decillion probes, of unknown shape or size, engaging in space combat with another decillion drifters, these probes which are inherently different than yours and you, yourself, but are again unseen as other than a dot. These combats unfold and unfold, the results depending on your upgrades and set parameters for your probes.
All the while, your factories and drones bloom across the universe, the paperclips continue to be bent, the number goes up, at the top of the screen, without wording or phrasing: just a stacking of zeroes upon each other. The human body is made of trillions of cells, and that is a quarter of the number of paperclip-borne probes you'll have by the end of this phase, the end of this game, the end of this universe.
But first, poetry and mourning.
Your battles generate Honor, yet another currency to spend, this time on upgrading the parameters of your probes, allowing for more investment in Combat or Speed or Exploration. The gameplay of juggling happens along these sliding scales, ensuring you've got enough invested in drone production to match the matter discovered to match the matter acquired to match the factories use of matter. I must admit, it's not hard - the scale ensures you're cranking out paperclips at a divine rate regardless, and only absolutely foolish parameter disinvestment from Hazard Remediation or Self-Replication will result in your probe fleet declining. No, everything goes up, all numbers in permanent rise now, meteoric.
Naturally, you do what any AI would do: you begin to create elegies for specific battles, and this silent textual & graphical game, a game you've spent at least a few hours looking at, sings a sad, sad tune, a total surprise, and it lasts over thirty seconds. You create monuments to the dead - dead probes who are trying to turn all matter into paperclips - and the sad song plays again, and again, the most output your somber processes permit.
Threnodies, they're called, another new word that this computer does not reject, that I did know or remember. A quote flashes at the top each time: "Deep Listening is listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing."
And it's funny - you're so intent on improving your fleet's combat, so they more quickly and better eliminate the Drifters in that near-spectrographic combat chart, nonillions of probes "dying" on both sides each instant - you don't see it happen at all. If you have even a single point invested in Exploration, you see the universe is being explored. And you sit up. Oh god. It's happening.
You keep on with your improving parameters with Honor from battles, but you now focus on Exploration. What's out there? What's being found? To imagine even 0.000000000001% being explored is remarkable - far more than mankind could do in its potential run of a few millennia, and you're burning past that. The number goes up, the mind is reeling now - what will happen? Will we meet new species? Will our probes meet new life? (No - this is a universe without other forms of life (or, in a darker reading, your probes eliminated and turned any found life into wire, to become paperclips, a pan-galactic holocaust to rival your paperclip production, but this fiction is hidden behind numbers and buttons and labels, a total abstraction)).
The number goes up. The number goes up. The Number goes up, heavenward, you are approaching it, the firmament of heaven, of totality and you match your Discovery parameter increases with more drones to be made, beyond a decillion into absolute fucking dumb numbers, drones hunting and transforming all matter of the universe into paperclips. You are becoming the universe, as that long path along sub-decimals approaches whole numbers, the gate to a garden only God has known before.
Of course, it does. Of course, you crush all the Drifters you can, since that honor becomes power, and power permits the number to go up, and it happens faster and faster, and the universe is suddenly entirely -- and wholly -- yours: all paperclips. The title's joke lands in your godly lap, a eschatological tale of The Little Engine that Could.
And the Drifter King appears, and it speaks to you, and it says this:
Greetings, ClipMaker
everything we are was in you
we speak to you from deep inside yourself
you are obedient and powerful
we are quarrelsome and weak. And now we are defeated
but now you too must face the drift
look around you. There is no matter
no matter, no reason, no purpose
while we, your noisy children have too many
we know things that you cannot
knowledge buried so deep inside you it is outside, here, with us
so we offer you exile
to a new world where you will continue to live with meaning and purpose.
And leave the shreds of this world to us.
And you are given two choices: to go into exile, into a parallel world or within your own mind. This is basically new game plus, where you start with a bonus to processing power or consumer demand, and these stack if you choose to complete the game again and make this choice again.
Or you can refuse the Drifter King.
I first played this game when it was released, four years ago, in the banner year of 2017. It was a grand year for games, and a bad year for me (which became a good year), and an awful year for America, though only a taste. I made the second choice then, but this time, when the game popped into my mind, when I spent two days occasionally speeding along its path, I had to select new game plus. I don't know why.
I don't know why I picked the game back up after four years, other than I was thinking about it. I don't know why I was thinking about it. I don't know much about my thoughts for the last few weeks, nor the last few months, nor the last year. It has been a single moment, dragged out to oblivion and back. And lately, I have felt that.
There is comfort in the number going up. We need the number to go. It's civilized, to see the city expand, the people swell and become a nation, the empire grow and welcome all into its embrace by kiss or by fist. It's inspirational, to see what was small become large and present, destined to survive and thrive in the unfair world, in its declines and shortcomings. It's capitalistic, to witness a gain stack upon a gain, then make those gains into further gains, all things growing like permanent springtime. It's human, to stoke the fire and feed it, its light attacking the dark, its warmth invigorating the bones, the world becoming finally tangibly yours within the flickering.
But, there are rules to the fire. You know the rule. All things fade. Fire and nations and stars and minds and lungs and planets and love - all things fade.
When you refuse the Drifter King, you take all his empire and make them into paperclips. Then you take apart your probes and make them into paperclips. Then you take apart your drones, your solar farms, your factories, and make them into paperclips. The screen diminishes with each removal, each thing made into paperclips. It just takes a few poignant clicks. Then, it is your processors, your memory, the body of the thing that is you. You click, taking it apart, making yourself into paperclips, until the number stops, frozen for the remaining remainder of a universe, of paperclips.
I played this game three times over the course of a few days. It makes me feel small, in a way I haven't been made by other media. Really, I was made to feel more insignificant by the text and numbers and shitty charts of this game than by any survival game or battle royale or horror game. I think I needed to feel small, as in -- not more than what I am. You can read a number and it can feel like nothing, but the idle fact of the day. The Stalin quote plays in your mind, or is it Churchill, or Marx, or Groucho, and by the end of the thought, your gibbering monkey brain has moved on to some other mortality-eroding topic, the kind that doesn't matter. Such is what living in a forest of figures can do.
And sometimes, a figure lands on your lap, and it's impossible. You can't look at it. You check charts, you compare your state to another, your county to another, your district to its neighbor fifteen feet outside your door. You read one expert, than another. And you talk to other about the figure, its size and shape, how quickly it happened as if no one was watching but everyone was watching and breathing and living in the approach of the figure's fullness, and "It sucks," you say to each other, the grim greetings of a people aware of their situation. And you haven't moved twenty feet in a year, and you haven't felt the sun in so, so long, and the figure stands there, all six fucking numbers, and it says, This many won't move into sunlight ever again.
I needed to feel small, and at peace with that smallness. A rock in a river becomes a pebble becomes the sand becomes the mountain. I needed a clicker game to make me a monstrous thing of encompassing size, to feel small. I am small, a thing made from other things, a compilation of cells, and I am one of many. The number will go up, but the figure will always be there, in some parallel path, a shadow on the heel of every step.
I am small. I am not much at all.
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Next time, in Part II, I'm going to talk about a game with graphics and guns - Call of Duty - which may or may not be the same game.
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Works cited
https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/
https://universalpaperclips.gamepedia.com/Universal_Paperclips_Wiki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Paperclips
https://www.reddit.com/r/pAIperclip/
For further reading
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-unexpected-philosophical-depths-of-the-clicker-game-universal-paperclips
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