The game is, just as the author says, basically a model of our own capitalist system. Or maybe a model of the conquest and exploitation of the new world. It f

The game is, just as the author says, basically a model of our own capitalist system. Or maybe a model of the conquest and exploitation of the new world. It features conquest, growth, exponential expansion, -and resource depletion. I’m not sure that makes it bad though, from the sounds of it the game creators were quite conscious of what they were doing- in fact they may have been subtly making the same sorts of points as the author of the article. After all the game of universal paperclips is not supposed to leave you with the impression that converting the whole universe into paperclips was a good idea. Exponential expansion is fun and feels like winning, even though from the point of view of the people on the receiving end of historical examples of such projects, it was no doubt no fun at all.