My 2017 Games of the Year in Appropriate Suspenseful Ascending Order: #9
#9 Universal Paperclips
Clicker games will be the death of me: my productivity, my credibility, and eventually my ability to care for my own health. Universal Paperclips (created by NYU Game Center Director Frank Lantz) encouraged me to follow my impulses to the bloody end. As a result, it’s easy to view the game as a dark, cynical work; a commentary on how our desire to “watch the numbers go up” will lead to a game industry (and possibly world) stripped of all enjoyment, in favor of rising level meters. But the genre wasn’t always that way. Candy Box!, arguably the first clicker game, appeared crass and pointless at first, but slowly revealed deeper layers and mechanics over time. Paperclips returns to that initial inspiration, the drive to discover something complex behind a screen of black-and-white text. It reveals gambling and combat and a need to actually optimize the systems you’re creating. It recognizes that maybe this will all end somewhere bleak - but we can still have fun along the way.
