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 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 so both seem to try and slather lipstick on their ick by way of ever-thicker layers of bureaucratic (and often self-contradictory) “tweaks,” in an attempt to correct for past icky outcomes…
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 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.
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 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.
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.
Gotcha! Sorry to only see this just now. I too would be hesitant to post anything of substance online since scraping anything on the internet is legal and/or easy to hide that a closed dataset LLM was trained with it after-the-fact.
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.
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.
I think they mean tested by asking people to play it and observing them + getting their feedback before release. There was a time when all software testing worked like that.
A great example of this is the developer's commentary on Portal. They had to slowly introduce concepts and subtly (and not subtly) draw the user's attention to important items.
"if you don't like me calling you names, maybe you shouldn't be here"
This is bullying.
You folks do not have to be so negative and sour and dismissive. Especially when you all are saying the same exact thing that adds absolutely nothing to the conversation.
If you don't like what someone is creating and you don't have anything nice to say, maybe don't say anything at all.
I don't think any of you realize what steering agentic systems is like because you haven't tried to do it yourselves. There is equally as much work, it just looks different to the work you're familiar with.
The game mechanic of clicking 'Pass' to mean denial 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.
83 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 51.0 ms ] threadIt 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.
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 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.
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.
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 so both seem to try and slather lipstick on their ick by way of ever-thicker layers of bureaucratic (and often self-contradictory) “tweaks,” in an attempt to correct for past icky outcomes…
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 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.
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.
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.
Man, what a bleak life: don't make something new, just keep coping the widget someone else laid down ages 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.
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/
("You're not wrong Walter, ...")
Why or why not?
There's not the faintest hint here of nefarious ripping off.
It's light hearted fun - this is not stealing Lucas Pope's game.
For example, Tailscale meets Supabase: https://studio.sonyasupposedly.com/startups/m/supabase+tails...
https://studio.sonyasupposedly.com/startups/m/deepseek+frame...
Papers please has a much simple mental model.
If you don't like it, just stay out of the comment thread.
This is bullying.
You folks do not have to be so negative and sour and dismissive. Especially when you all are saying the same exact thing that adds absolutely nothing to the conversation.
If you don't like what someone is creating and you don't have anything nice to say, maybe don't say anything at all.
I don't think any of you realize what steering agentic systems is like because you haven't tried to do it yourselves. There is equally as much work, it just looks different to the work you're familiar with.
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.
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.
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.