Getting Help: Universal Paperclips & Reddit

During the week that Universal Paperclips was assigned, I came down with a cold. While sick in bed with a fever, I thought a mindless clicker game would be the perfect thing to help pass the time. Unfortunately, I found out very quickly that Universal Paperclips was far from “mindless” and with my critical thinking skills at an all time low, I found myself looking up guides for how to progress through the game. 

While playing, I was constantly switching between the tab with the game open and a reddit post by u/thunk_stuff. This emergent moment of social connection between me and individual who had compiled solutions for people struggling opened up a unique kind of play. It was almost as if a new rule set had been imposed upon Universal Paperclips by this guide I was interacting with. 

It was when I was playing Stage 2 of this game that I became most aware of how this guide was restricting my play. The advice given to me said that I needed to accumulate a particular amount of processors and memory before I proceeded to the next stage. I was terrified of becoming stuck during the next stage, so I refused to unlock the Space Exploration project before I had met the requirements listed out by the post. If I had not be playing alongside a guide, I definitely would have unlocked the project immediately, but since I had been informed by this external community about the dangers of unlocking the project too early, it was as if I had to complete the guide’s requirements before the Space Exploration project was really available to me.

So, I waited hours building up to the amount of processors and memory that the guide requested of me, only to get stuck. I had an excess of the materials they had deemed necessary, but absolutely none of the Yomi I needed to progress through Stage 3. For a moment, I felt betrayed by this social connection I was relying on to get me through the final stage of the game. That is, until I scrolled up and saw that Yomi instructions were in the guide, just at the top. I had begun using the guide after I had completed Stage 1, so I did not bother reading through the earlier instructions. 

This experience led me to consider how the social connection between players and guides is made tenuous by the player’s desire to only start receiving help when they become stuck. The natural inclination to scroll through a reddit post to find a solution to the exact part you are stuck at, or to skip through a let’s play to see the puzzle solved, necessarily fragments how guides exist as holistic bodies of work themselves. Unless the player decides to follow a guide from the start of the game, the social connection between the player and their guide is necessarily underpinned by when the player finds themselves stuck. In this way, the sections of games that swaths of players struggle with become origin sites for the relationship between a player and a guide. 

While some guides circumvent this fragmentation by only addressing one stage or puzzle in a game, many guides are structured as a walk through of the game in its entirety. I would be curious to track how guides have modified their information structures in anticipation of this kind of player behavior. Is critical information listed multiple times throughout the guide? Are there creator notes telling players to go check the top of the guide in all the sections? Has players’ reliance on guides transformed how players “blame” games when they get stuck? Has there been a shift away from blaming poor game design toward blaming guides which led them astray? 

Works Cited:

thunk_stuff. “R/Paiperclip – How to – Strategy to Complete Game in under 2h 20m.” Reddit, https://www.reddit.com/r/pAIperclip/comments/783a2i/how_to_strategy_to_complete_game_in_under_2h_20m/.