Admittedly I didn't play Universal Paperclips this past week.
When I looked at the syllabus of the class back in first week, I clicked on all the links to the various games to check out what we would be playing for the rest of the quarter. Most links I closed immediately after being taken to a Steam page or a flash game that didn't interest me at the time, but Universal Paperclips caught my eye. At first, I was somewhat shocked that we would have to play 7 hours of this one game for class, but upon opening the link to an interface I immediately tagged as "idle clicker" my surprise was quelled. "I'll just play a little bit and check on it every few hours or so, it won't be too bad at all..." We all experienced how untrue those words were.
I had played a little bit, obtaining a few autoclippers and figuring out the basics of the selling/price system, before bringing it to my house table at Cathey midway through first week. My housemates, an assorted group of gamers and non-gamers, econ majors and non-econ majors, all seemed to be immediately as fascinated as I was in the game, but for different reasons (I take no shame in sharing that I asked the econ majors at my table how to set the optimal selling price). Some recognized the format as something akin to cookie clicker, while many of the non-gamers who weren't familiar with the idle game genre were perplexed by the absurdist desire to continuously produce paperclips. Egged on by the intrigue of my housemates, I found myself increasingly invested in my paperclip-producing venture. At one point, I had scrambled to finish some assignments for a class despite it only being first week, owing solely to the amount of time I was dumping into Universal Paperclips every time I opened my computer. I was simultaneously curious and afraid--I was motivated to play the game not only because I wanted to know how the game differed from other games in the genre (besides seeming generally more active, with the photonic chips and all), but also because I was afraid to lose my data by closing the tab (I was unsure, and still am unsure if closing the tab restarts the game) and having to return to beginning should I need to finish the game for this class later in the quarter. By the time I had reached the third stage (drones, etc.), my efforts into the game were purely motivated by the desire to finish the game (the possibility of which I discovered through the wiki), the desire to rid my life of the overwhelming influence of this tab which captured my attention every time I woke my computer. Universal Paperclips was a scary experience; I felt helpless as my weak willpower was seemingly exposed by a black and white interface counting upwards. Having played the game before discussing themes like procedural rhetoric, gamifcation, and completionism, I now look back in retrospect at the game as a clever usage of all these elements/concepts to make something out of seemingly nothing, and hook me into an engaging experience.
I remember on the first day of class you showed me that you'd opened up the game and started playing already! Knowing that we were supposed to stare at this bland screen full of numbers for seven hours inspired me to also start playing early, and I think I lost a few hours of my life to making paperclips. I got hooked pretty quick.
What struck me in reading your blog post and reflecting back on my own experience playing, is that once we "finished" the game, our desire to keep playing immediately went away. Up until I reached the point where the game told me I had turned everything in the universe into paper clips, I felt a compulsion…