Universal Paperclips doesn’t make a noise until about 5 hours in.
I start a project called “Threnody for the Heroes of Austerlitz.”
This song plays:
A threnody is a kind of elegy.
It’s for mourning the dead.
The music makes sense in the context of the game’s plot. There’s a war playing out in space, and sometimes your troops are defeated. The threnody is in remembrance of them.
The music is surprising in the context of the game’s form. Why now, after 5 hours of silence? And why Four Tet, (with permission, say the credits) when the rest of the game is so homespun, so un-needing of credits?
Maybe somehow this threnody is the thesis of the game. Or its heart.
I win; it takes me 6 hours, 13 minutes, 21 seconds.
Universal Paperclips is an “incremental game” — a simplified, magnified, usually ironic take on resource management. Make paperclips. Spend paperclips to make more paperclips. Repeat.
Most incremental games are indie. Ironic. In an essay on incremental game Cookie Clicker, Roisin Kiberd writes:
The game uses its own form as a critique of the larger structures of expectation and reward. Its pointlessness has a point.
What’s the point. These incremental games have a way of evoking many things. For me this one evokes: capitalism, consumption, climate change. Avarice, sloth, gluttony. God, the void. The Big Bang, the apocalypse. Behaviorism, evolution. Depression, obsession, distraction, malaise. The Game of Life.
What’s the point. What’s the critique.
If Kiberd is right and an incremental game delivers its critique through its form, then maybe an effective incremental game is the last one you ever play.
Maybe Universal Paperclips is mourning the failure of its predecessors.
I write this up and put on the song again. Threnodies are supposed to be sad. This song doesn’t make me sad. It reminds me of Myst. It’s a little pensive, a little spooky, a little whimsical.
I guess it does bum me out. I feel alone. My pinkies are numb from sitting in the same position for a long time.
Stop wasting time. Get off your ass.
Maybe it’s mourning all those wasted minutes. 6 hours, 13 minutes, 21 seconds. Dead and gone. In vain?
I listen to the song and I wonder what well-spent time looks like, and I wonder if it’s maybe this, exactly this.
