Yet another Hacker News

Show HN: I recreated Papers Please but you're deciding which YC startups to fund

82 points bolau 1 hour ago 44 comments

slg 1 hour ago | parent

This feels icky considering the topic of the original.

bigfishrunning 1 hour ago | parent

Doom had demons, chex quest did not; derived works change subject matter all the time, I don't see why it's icky

solyin 58 minutes ago | parent

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?

Emotions are weird.

CookieCrisp 22 minutes ago | parent

Won't someone think of the children?

slg 11 minutes ago | parent

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.

ubertaco 1 hour ago | parent

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.

bigyabai 59 minutes ago | parent

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.

GloriousKoji 17 minutes ago | parent

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.

nancyminusone 56 minutes ago | parent

Don't worry, the original is widely described as an 'empathy' game. Not something you'll need to consider here.

alwa 52 minutes ago | parent

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…)

tuberreact 1 hour ago | parent

damn at least here i can be post economic

cyanydeez 1 hour ago | parent

Is post economic a term billionaires use to describe not having to care about the actual value of a dollar?

bitwize 1 hour ago | parent

Yeah, it's what happens when you're agentic enough.

solyin 34 minutes ago | parent

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.

jimbo456 1 hour ago | parent

This incredible; i will have a lot of fun with this

contingencies 1 hour ago | parent

Missing the music :)

bolau 1 hour ago | parent

turn up your volume! there should be music haha

butlike 1 hour ago | parent

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.

CookieCrisp 56 minutes ago | parent

Almost everything ever created is "like x but y", let people create what they want without trying to steal their joy

Applejinx 50 minutes ago | parent

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.

sublinear 46 minutes ago | parent

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!

CookieCrisp 38 minutes ago | parent

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

Fraterkes 45 minutes ago | parent

People can and do use ai to create what they want for themselves. When they drop their stuff on showhn it obviously invites feedback.

CookieCrisp 43 minutes ago | parent

And those comments invite their own feedback.

sublinear 37 minutes ago | parent

And, it's feedback turtles all the way down.

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 31 minutes ago | parent

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

Fraterkes 14 minutes ago | parent

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.

dude250711 56 minutes ago | parent

I wonder if first photographers were saying "I painted this picture".

zdragnar 20 minutes ago | parent

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.

throwuxiytayq 45 minutes ago | parent

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?

zdragnar 20 minutes ago | parent

It's more honest, if nothing else

ben-gy 26 minutes ago | parent

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…

rmah 1 hour ago | parent

So nostalgic. I had fun declining founders because of their various frauds/schemes.

smlavine 42 minutes ago | parent

Doesn't credit the original creator at all in the actual website?

sbergot 30 minutes ago | parent

Lucas Pope (the author of papers please) has stopped publishing devlog for this exact reason.

prophesi 12 minutes ago | parent

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.

sbergot 5 minutes ago | parent

This is more about his future games: https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/papers-please-creat...

happytoexplain 10 minutes ago | parent

Can you elaborate? I can't immediately see the connection between publishing a devlog and people not attributing one's work.

sbergot 7 minutes ago | parent

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.

happytoexplain 6 minutes ago | parent

Ahh, I see.

impendia 19 minutes ago | parent

Strongly agree.

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/

Fraterkes 41 minutes ago | parent

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.

logicallee 30 minutes ago | parent

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.

Game was very fun, thanks for making it.