The ick is from making light of other people's suffering. Paper's Please is about Soviet communism where people died. Term sheets for AI so some people can be billionaires? Rich people eating cake?
Changing the subject matter is not inherently a problem. It becomes a problem when the remake cheapens the original subject matter (the apparent AI usage doesn’t help in that regard) and shows a lack of either understanding or respect for the weighty artistic statement of the original.
It would be like saying “I remade Sophie’s Choice but this time instead of choosing which of her children would be murdered by Nazis she was choosing which job offer to accept”. That would be repulsive. However I would have no problem with a remake that switched the subject while maintaining the heft of the original by setting it around some other serious issue like Gaza, ICE, or whatever other political topic that involves lives literally being destroyed.
I’ll admit this is all part of my ongoing frustration with the tech world’s inability to actually understand or respect seemingly any piece of art and this game is simply just the latest example of that.
> I’ll admit this is all part of my ongoing frustration with the tech world’s inability to actually understand or respect seemingly any piece of art
The original game is impressive and as you said it is art and there is
a question about parodying art (or also constant references or
imitations) devaluing art, but I think this is a western problem full
stop though tech is very bad at the moment what with AI being able to
devalue artistic works.
Don't have a problem with this myself as stated in my other comment,
but I agree disrespect for art (and many other things) is an issue but
it's western wide and in my opinion inherent in the way the west has
chosen to understand itself as democratic this is a nasty poison and
destroys all that it touches, just ask you self how many times
anti-elitist language or the idea of 'democratization' is used to
justify such evils. The solution lies in rejecting these lies but
accepting that any society and system requires inequality only what we
have today claims to be different and has failed in it's supposed
goal, it can be assigned to the scrap heap of history so to say.
I basically agree except isn't this making fun of how self-important and pointlessly grim silicon valley VCs are? That is, it's the VCs themselves who would compare their own lives to communist oppression. The joke is actually comparing them.
I mean, per your repulsive hypothetical parody...if the person choosing jobs is your prototypical TC-obsessed, Blind-posting solipsistic narcissist tech bro, and the joke is that this archetype can't tell the difference between choosing a FAANG offer and choosing a child...that would be an effective way of making fun of that person, I think.
If your point is that silicon valley and the people in it are too vapid and socially irrelevant to be credibly parodied that way...that's fair, I guess, but also this is hacker news? If anyone is going to be interested in making fun of these people and institutions, it's us.
Yeah. The original was social commentary on the role of immigration enforcement as a tool of state oppression, with the brutality that sometimes occurs centered prominently and jarringly against video-game pixel art.
This is tech bros recycling the same exact structure but making it about getting billionaires to fund their latest "Uber but for AI-powered false advertising."
It's like if Flock wrote a version of 1984 where the heroic protagonist was trying to rise up against a regime of local activist groups who opposed installing Flock's mass surveillance products.
It was also about how poverty enables cruelty, juxtaposing your struggle to pay for rent and food with the demands of the state. The incentives are very different from people like Paul Graham and Gary Tan who can flip through a hundred folios without being forced to pick anything. The procedural tragedy of the game is lost if you're Joe Capital with a $3M fund at your disposal.
It also spits in the face of the gameplay side. The whole point of Papers Please wasn't pixel art work simulator, it was the pressure of the timer and being forced with making complex choices of doing helping others, helping yourself, and doing a proper job. Those gameplay decisions further strength the social commentary and how that kind of system is bad for everyone.
I agree. I wonder if part of the artistic intention here—the provocation—was to draw parallels.
I, for one, feel a lot of ick at the foundational functions of both systems. Icky stuff, it’s got to be done (or does it?), it’s never pleasant or unambiguous, it brings out (and rewards) perverse behaviors, it demands tradeoffs that exploit power asymmetries, it exists partly to preserve and empower the actor in the position of strength, the decisions have high stakes for individual supplicants but the system itself is indifferent...
And both seem to try and slather lipstick on their ick by way of ever-thicker layers of bureaucratic (and often self-contradictory) “tweaks,” in successive attempts to correct for past icky outcomes, even though at the bottom, the ick is really inextricable from the basic nature of the enterprise…
I agree that an individual family’s fate at the hands of a government (especially in border conditions, where its monopoly on violence looms so concretely) feels to me much more morally weighty than the life or death of somebody’s, you know, get-rich-quick business enterprise. But I also wonder if part of the parallel being drawn here is to point at the way the whole “startup” system functions by making it feel totalizing and weighty to individually-mostly-powerless participants. (Who, like others feeling the desperation of totalizing stakes, frequently do desperate and damaging and morally corrosive things to improve their odds in front of the bureaucratic judge…)
It's playfully provocative, perhaps one could argue making any kind of
game on any kind of topic is trivializing, their are many WW1 and even
more WW2 games. Do you find the C&C red alert games offensive as you
play as Stalin? I personally would say these things are perfectly
allow able as is this game.
On an aside this is the first game in a while posted on Hacker New
that looks well made and not a soulless sloppy mess.
I apologize for assuming people could extrapolate more from my original comment. Once I realized I was mistaken, I wrote three other paragraphs to clarify my thoughts before you replied. So if we’re being critical of each other’s behavior, you should consider reading the whole thread before assuming you know where someone’s “thoughts start and end”.
I imagine that comes before a billion. If I had even just $3 million dollars, I think I'd worry less. Or two or even one! Billionaires are another category entirely.
Yes, but at 3 million you'd probably still know the cost of things.
It's when you get to billions that the dollar is just some abstract concept. If you ever listen to trump talk, its pretty clear knowing the cost of things is a poor mans game.
The dollar. It means way more when you have to choose things to eat in a grocery store and all you have is 5.
I mean, technically you didn't recreate anything. You had the LLM pattern recognize something that already existed and it copied it. I don't mean to sound harsh, but create something new.
Didn't used to be that trivial and effort-free to have a machine do it. Back in the day you at least had a lot of typing, or even the need to go out and do what you thought the other thing was doing, giving rise to useful variation, weird offshoots and failures that became things in their own right.
That's 'create'. LLM output doesn't at all have to be 'create' in that sense, and often isn't.
LLMs can't create anything. They aggregate, distill, rearrange, etc. but those have always been borderline plagiarism. Sampling in music had similar controversy 40 years ago, but only barely escaped judgement when it was parody-like. I'd consider this a parody.
People are such blind consumers sometimes that they forget what it takes to make an original. Even worse is that the reviews at the time were mixed and calling Papers Please "low effort SJW nonsense". We had no idea how much worse it would get!
I see so much creativity in some of the things people are getting llms to do. I love that we are getting to see so many unique takes on things without it requiring someone expend x% of their life achieving something they want to share. But, that isn't for you, and that's fine - it is for me though
You might want to avoid reusing reddit phrases like "let them have their fun". That was probably the bigger source of agitation that anything you actually meant to say.
HN wants to hear you elaborate your own take rather than just blindly defend things on moral or ethical grounds. The comments are the lifeblood of this site and a lack of nuance ruins discussion. All anyone can do is either agree or disagree with you at this point, and that's no fun for anyone except bots and people who have no life.
I love how quick you decided to paint me with the Reddit brush. I'm sorry my comment didn't meet your satisfaction, but I gotta say, the "this is the way we do things here" is the most Reddit thing I've seen
I'm not sure that kind of middlebrow rebutal makes sense here. I took issue with the content of your critiscism, you with the fact that they were critical at all.
Ironically, I know my mom can create a pretty good quality painting in a few hours, which is about the amount of time photographers had to spend early on getting a good photo, what with the limitations of long exposure time and the developing process.
Having an LLM one shot something and put a few rounds of modification to touch it up compared to manually designing and coding a project is a way bigger gap of skill mastery and effort required than painting versus early photography.
Oh I get it, “recreated X but with Y” is not self-flagellatory enough for you. How about “duplicated X with a sprinkling of hallucinated Y variation”? Does that pass the moral vibe check?
Why? Why does everyone always need to create something new? Shouldn’t we be focussed on creating value? This site definitely made me smile regardless of its derivation which in a world of AI slop more than meets my expectations…
Is there a source for that? The game is over a decade old, so I imagine at some point you stop posting devlogs because there's no longer any development to blog about.
Sorry it is more related to AI clones. He doesn't want people cloning his ideas before his games are published. I just wanted to bring the fact that Lucas Pope had taken a stance on those clones.
I thought he wound down publishing devlogs before AI clones, were there more than the ones on https://dukope.com/devlogs/ I can try to hunt down to read?
Would be interesting if we could plot the average amount of time spent on the creation of showhn stuff that gets to the front page, over the past years.
This looks awesome! Playing it now. It's a really good idea.
Edit: I looked at a few pitches, I thought they were very realistic. For the Pointer acquisition it only listed the requested round size, not the valuation, which I think is really important for investors. It didn't completely make sense to me why they would need an investment for an acquisition, but when a company gets an acquisition offer is a pretty good time to raise money.
Feedback: I'd recommend using a different branding rather than Y, since YCombinator invests at the seed stage using standard terms, and doesn't make follow-on investments as far as I know. (I could be wrong.) It's better if you make it a hypothetical VC rather than use YC's branding.
I found the document management way too confusing. There's no clear game loop and I'm kinda lost what signatures mean, what the other documents are what success is.
The primary game mechanic of stamping 'Pass' to fail a funding application is a bit confusing; should label that stamp 'Fail'/'Decline'/'Deny' or even 'Do not fund'.
Pass as in to 'pass on the opportunity to fund' i.e. to not agree to fund, is not the same as Pass as in 'passed the criteria for funding' i.e. to agree to fund.
To many people, Pass and Fail are antonyms, not synonyms.
1) It does too much too quickly. There's no acclimatisation ramp.
2) The examination area's too small. Almost every document is too large & has multiple pages. Navigation through documents is broken, with some not draggable back to the booth if clicked on.
3) Question responses are likewise too small for their dialogue boxes. They need to be in one box, either with larger boxes or smaller fonts.
It's a neat idea, but it's obviously vibe coded with no playtesting.
The character dialog advances automatically and too quickly. One aspect of papers please is actually being able to read the character dialog and deduct if they are lying.
There is also the word vomit of text everywhere. There was no thought put into the flow of reading the text on the documents.
slg | 17 hours ago
bigfishrunning | 17 hours ago
solyin | 17 hours ago
Emotions are weird.
CookieCrisp | 16 hours ago
slg | 16 hours ago
It would be like saying “I remade Sophie’s Choice but this time instead of choosing which of her children would be murdered by Nazis she was choosing which job offer to accept”. That would be repulsive. However I would have no problem with a remake that switched the subject while maintaining the heft of the original by setting it around some other serious issue like Gaza, ICE, or whatever other political topic that involves lives literally being destroyed.
I’ll admit this is all part of my ongoing frustration with the tech world’s inability to actually understand or respect seemingly any piece of art and this game is simply just the latest example of that.
kodoman | 15 hours ago
The original game is impressive and as you said it is art and there is a question about parodying art (or also constant references or imitations) devaluing art, but I think this is a western problem full stop though tech is very bad at the moment what with AI being able to devalue artistic works.
Don't have a problem with this myself as stated in my other comment, but I agree disrespect for art (and many other things) is an issue but it's western wide and in my opinion inherent in the way the west has chosen to understand itself as democratic this is a nasty poison and destroys all that it touches, just ask you self how many times anti-elitist language or the idea of 'democratization' is used to justify such evils. The solution lies in rejecting these lies but accepting that any society and system requires inequality only what we have today claims to be different and has failed in it's supposed goal, it can be assigned to the scrap heap of history so to say.
msteffen | 15 hours ago
I mean, per your repulsive hypothetical parody...if the person choosing jobs is your prototypical TC-obsessed, Blind-posting solipsistic narcissist tech bro, and the joke is that this archetype can't tell the difference between choosing a FAANG offer and choosing a child...that would be an effective way of making fun of that person, I think.
If your point is that silicon valley and the people in it are too vapid and socially irrelevant to be credibly parodied that way...that's fair, I guess, but also this is hacker news? If anyone is going to be interested in making fun of these people and institutions, it's us.
ubertaco | 17 hours ago
This is tech bros recycling the same exact structure but making it about getting billionaires to fund their latest "Uber but for AI-powered false advertising."
It's like if Flock wrote a version of 1984 where the heroic protagonist was trying to rise up against a regime of local activist groups who opposed installing Flock's mass surveillance products.
bigyabai | 17 hours ago
GloriousKoji | 16 hours ago
nancyminusone | 17 hours ago
alwa | 17 hours ago
I, for one, feel a lot of ick at the foundational functions of both systems. Icky stuff, it’s got to be done (or does it?), it’s never pleasant or unambiguous, it brings out (and rewards) perverse behaviors, it demands tradeoffs that exploit power asymmetries, it exists partly to preserve and empower the actor in the position of strength, the decisions have high stakes for individual supplicants but the system itself is indifferent...
And both seem to try and slather lipstick on their ick by way of ever-thicker layers of bureaucratic (and often self-contradictory) “tweaks,” in successive attempts to correct for past icky outcomes, even though at the bottom, the ick is really inextricable from the basic nature of the enterprise…
I agree that an individual family’s fate at the hands of a government (especially in border conditions, where its monopoly on violence looms so concretely) feels to me much more morally weighty than the life or death of somebody’s, you know, get-rich-quick business enterprise. But I also wonder if part of the parallel being drawn here is to point at the way the whole “startup” system functions by making it feel totalizing and weighty to individually-mostly-powerless participants. (Who, like others feeling the desperation of totalizing stakes, frequently do desperate and damaging and morally corrosive things to improve their odds in front of the bureaucratic judge…)
kodoman | 16 hours ago
On an aside this is the first game in a while posted on Hacker New that looks well made and not a soulless sloppy mess.
easterncalculus | 13 hours ago
slg | 12 hours ago
tuberreact | 17 hours ago
cyanydeez | 17 hours ago
bitwize | 17 hours ago
solyin | 16 hours ago
skinfaxi | 15 hours ago
cyanydeez | 13 hours ago
It's when you get to billions that the dollar is just some abstract concept. If you ever listen to trump talk, its pretty clear knowing the cost of things is a poor mans game.
The dollar. It means way more when you have to choose things to eat in a grocery store and all you have is 5.
jimbo456 | 17 hours ago
contingencies | 17 hours ago
[OP] bolau | 17 hours ago
selimthegrim | 13 hours ago
butlike | 17 hours ago
CookieCrisp | 17 hours ago
Applejinx | 17 hours ago
That's 'create'. LLM output doesn't at all have to be 'create' in that sense, and often isn't.
sublinear | 16 hours ago
People are such blind consumers sometimes that they forget what it takes to make an original. Even worse is that the reviews at the time were mixed and calling Papers Please "low effort SJW nonsense". We had no idea how much worse it would get!
CookieCrisp | 16 hours ago
idiotsecant | 11 hours ago
Fraterkes | 16 hours ago
CookieCrisp | 16 hours ago
sublinear | 16 hours ago
You might want to avoid reusing reddit phrases like "let them have their fun". That was probably the bigger source of agitation that anything you actually meant to say.
HN wants to hear you elaborate your own take rather than just blindly defend things on moral or ethical grounds. The comments are the lifeblood of this site and a lack of nuance ruins discussion. All anyone can do is either agree or disagree with you at this point, and that's no fun for anyone except bots and people who have no life.
CookieCrisp | 16 hours ago
deaux | 7 hours ago
Fraterkes | 16 hours ago
dude250711 | 17 hours ago
zdragnar | 16 hours ago
Having an LLM one shot something and put a few rounds of modification to touch it up compared to manually designing and coding a project is a way bigger gap of skill mastery and effort required than painting versus early photography.
throwuxiytayq | 16 hours ago
zdragnar | 16 hours ago
ben-gy | 16 hours ago
SiempreViernes | 14 hours ago
Man, what a bleak life: don't make something new, just keep coping the widget someone else laid down ages ago.
echelon | 6 hours ago
rmah | 17 hours ago
rrr_oh_man | 14 hours ago
smlavine | 16 hours ago
sbergot | 16 hours ago
prophesi | 16 hours ago
sbergot | 16 hours ago
happytoexplain | 16 hours ago
sbergot | 16 hours ago
happytoexplain | 16 hours ago
zamadatix | 16 hours ago
wewewedxfgdf | 13 hours ago
Lucas Pope is concerned about new games being copied by AI.
NOT about someone making a sendup which is a fun nod to Papers Please.
Lighten up.
impendia | 16 hours ago
Bo, this looks very cool, but I'd encourage you to immediately add "Based on Papers Please by Lucas Pope", with a link here:
https://papersplea.se/
N7lo4nl34akaoSN | 16 hours ago
yboris | 16 hours ago
The request in comments above is to do the polite thing and share credit for those not yet aware of the game.
Lerc | 8 hours ago
But I agree with the principle, you don't have to be nice only when it would be illegal not to be.
ilinx | 16 hours ago
bertmuir | 13 hours ago
AlecSchueler | 2 hours ago
js2 | 7 hours ago
("You're not wrong Walter, ...")
Teever | 15 hours ago
Why or why not?
tyrust | 15 hours ago
echion | 15 hours ago
dwattttt | 11 hours ago
odo1242 | 14 hours ago
Apocryphon | 14 hours ago
wewewedxfgdf | 13 hours ago
There's not the faintest hint here of nefarious ripping off.
It's light hearted fun - this is not stealing Lucas Pope's game.
barbs | 5 hours ago
Citizen_Lame | 3 hours ago
Fraterkes | 16 hours ago
thibsrn | 16 hours ago
logicallee | 16 hours ago
Edit: I looked at a few pitches, I thought they were very realistic. For the Pointer acquisition it only listed the requested round size, not the valuation, which I think is really important for investors. It didn't completely make sense to me why they would need an investment for an acquisition, but when a company gets an acquisition offer is a pretty good time to raise money.
Feedback: I'd recommend using a different branding rather than Y, since YCombinator invests at the seed stage using standard terms, and doesn't make follow-on investments as far as I know. (I could be wrong.) It's better if you make it a hypothetical VC rather than use YC's branding.
Game was very fun, thanks for making it.
exolymph | 16 hours ago
For example, Tailscale meets Supabase: https://studio.sonyasupposedly.com/startups/m/supabase+tails...
4ggr0 | 14 hours ago
https://studio.sonyasupposedly.com/startups/m/deepseek+frame...
tiborsaas | 16 hours ago
Papers please has a much simple mental model.
epolanski | 12 hours ago
achandra03 | 13 hours ago
epolanski | 12 hours ago
idiotsecant | 12 hours ago
echelon | 6 hours ago
If you don't like it, just stay out of the comment thread.
ayyagari-testre | 11 hours ago
knoxg | 10 hours ago
Pass as in to 'pass on the opportunity to fund' i.e. to not agree to fund, is not the same as Pass as in 'passed the criteria for funding' i.e. to agree to fund.
To many people, Pass and Fail are antonyms, not synonyms.
deadnomore | an hour ago
x-complexity | 8 hours ago
2) The examination area's too small. Almost every document is too large & has multiple pages. Navigation through documents is broken, with some not draggable back to the booth if clicked on.
3) Question responses are likewise too small for their dialogue boxes. They need to be in one box, either with larger boxes or smaller fonts.
LandenLove | 7 hours ago
The character dialog advances automatically and too quickly. One aspect of papers please is actually being able to read the character dialog and deduct if they are lying.
There is also the word vomit of text everywhere. There was no thought put into the flow of reading the text on the documents.