The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing me that Universal Paperclips was an idle game.
That was my assumption at the outset - the mechanic of increasing automated production of a banal object was instantly familiar to me as the bread and butter of Cookie Clicker, AdVenture Capitalist, and all similar games that encourage you to let the game run in the background of your browser in order to accumulate resources. Idle games tend to encourage a supervisory mode of play, one where you make occasional tweaks but allow the game to "play itself" for large chunks of time. Their magic circles have really permeable boundaries in my experience, and the affordance of multitasking gets sort of woven into their procedural rhetoric.
So that was what I expecting after I bought my first few autoclickers. I was anticipating a point in the game where my virtual paperclip manufacturing enterprise would become automated enough for me to tab out and focus my attention on other homework for a while. But then I discovered that the price to restock wire would fluctuate over time, and learned that the savvy paperclip tycoon should keep an eye on this capricious number in order to avoid paying more than necessary. And then I learned to carefully adjust the price of my product so that I would never have too much of a surplus, but also never run out of stock. Then came quantum computing. And exorbitantly increased clipper efficiency. And that confusing "strategic modeling" module. The game just kept accelerating its pace, and I was afraid that if I stopped supervising its breakneck sprint towards paperclip singularity, I was going to miss something. As the number counters began to roll faster and faster, I became increasingly paranoid. The automation was actually stressful, and the more fast-moving information cluttered the screen, the more I felt a compulsion to make sure these whirring parts didn't spontaneously bankrupt me while I wasn't looking. The calculations became harder to follow, and the interplay between all the moving parts got more and more opaque. I was anxious for a pause button. I wanted to be able to slow down, take stock, be in total control for just a moment. Even when production and sales seemed to be in equilibrium, I would nervously click the price changer up and down to confirm on a moment-to-moment basis that I was running things at optimal efficiency. I played this largely while on shift at work, and when tasks came up that required me to step away from my laptop, I actually got pretty antsy. Even when forced to do other things, this game was still occupying the whole of my attention. It was making me totally irritable too - I felt trapped in the game's magic circle and just wanted the closure of an ending so I could stop obsessing.
This was the most potent aspect of Universal Paperclips' procedural rhetoric for me. It made me feel addicted, and not in a fun, escapist way. Thinking about it, I keep coming back to the conspicuously absent pause button, and how such an affordance would have changed my experience of the game. It would have allowed me to take a breath, close the circle for a moment, and consider how to manipulate the system while it wasn't running. The pause button allows for strategy and reflection, two things that definitely didn't characterize my experience with Universal Paperclips. That's why the game felt so tiring to me; I constantly felt like I was playing catch-up to a vehicle that was threatening to barrel off a cliff. What made this worse was the illusory possibility of stepping away. The game looked, played, and felt like an idle game, so why couldn't I let it run idle? The whole time I was glued to the screen, I felt a sort of guilt in knowing that I could -that I SHOULD - just step away and let the game do its thing, but a sort of shameful obsession kept me hovering miserly over my figures, micromanaging what really didn't need to be micromanaged. I know that a lot of people have stated that they were able to leave the game running unsupervised, so maybe this doesn't differ from other idle games in a meaningful way after all. Maybe I just really didn't want to do other work. Who knows. Ultimately, I was kind of disturbed at how effective this game was at getting in my head. It was an effective critique of the rampant accelerationism and greed of late-stage capitalism, and I think I enjoyed it, but it was stressful in a way that felt more direct than other games I've played for this class. I'm so glad that tab is now closed.
This is very insightful, and one thing i would like to bring up in relation to this is the tradeoff between attention and progress. You mentioned a lot of the mechanisms which can be optimized by player attention, but in most of these cases, players can still derive some progress even if its open in an invisible tab. Players need to decide how much they want to invest not only of game resources, but their own consciously directed time as well.
First of all, really a terrific post. You earnestly captured the anxiety of playing a game that wants to convince its audience that it is something that it isn't. I found myself less stressed and paranoid and more addicted: I didn't fear for my automation, but I wondered about it. I wondered about it to the point that I would switch windows instinctively to check on progress, and would sometimes not even comprehend what I had glanced at, returning to the window deliberately this time.
However, I did (accidentally) let it run rampant. Stage 1 is comparable to most idle games; unless you're investing in high risk stock, there's no reason to check on it. I had become comfortable with…