My experience with Universal Paperclips and Cookie Clicker was not one and the same, as I initially thought it would be. Even though they are ostensibly very similar, both games feel like they are fundamentally trying to do something different. Perhaps the key factor in these two games is how differently they handle the stakes of it all, and what you’re trying to do.
At their heart, both of these games are about accumulating resources, and then funneling those resources into either creating paperclips or cookies. They both involve the player clicking the screen to manually create items, and eventually the player unlocks items or upgrades that automatically create the items for them. What’s most interesting about this is that both these games seem to understand that at their core they’re a tacit capitalism game, and they both have something to say about that. Universal Paperclips chooses to drill this into the players head through the gameplay aspect of the supply and demand; the player gets to raise or lower prices, and in doing so they have different amounts of paperclips being sold per second, and then they can choose whatever is optimal to keep selling at the rate that the player is making paperclips. They also have options that directly reference business jargon, such as creating a full monopoly, or “another token of goodwill”. Even though these do exactly what they say they do, and they help to earn trust in the game, there always feels like a thin veneer of satire for the player who notices it, a wink to the player saying “come on, you get it right?”. Cookie Clicker also showcases the capitalism through satire by making news articles in order to demonstrate what your initially benign cookie workshop has wrought upon the world. The grandma slave labor, the increasing amounts of “milk in the system” (read: pollution) , the “rush on the banks for cookies” – these are all fairly obviously alluding to real things that happen under large corporations.
Overall however, my major difference came in the form of how much enjoyment I had playing the games – a lot of which I think comes from the aesthetical difference. While Universal Paperclips seemed cold and clinical, Cookie Clicker seemed welcoming and warm. I love cookies! Grandmas! Milk! The game seemed to scream “play me more”. And I did. I played a lot more of Cookie Clicker than I did the other one. And in some regards, that’s where I feel Cookie Clicker falls apart in its satire. Universal Paperclips makes it very clear that in playing this game, you are supposed to understand how clinical business people can feel. How they can willingly cause mass pollution in the search of ever grander profits. Universal Paperclips is just numbers, with nothing enticing on the screen to occupy one apart from clicking a few buttons that just look like default settings options. But at the same time, Cookie Clicker falls into a trap of critiquing capitalism, and observing on how capitalism can trap people into jobs, or positions they wouldn’t like, yet also does its best to lure the player to keep playing and playing.
At the end of the day, the fundamental difference to me was that Cookie Clicker felt like a game that uses a satire of capitalism in order to further convince the player to game, whereas Universal Paperclips felt like it was a game that was using this satire in order to truly convince the player not to play games like this.
