Show HN: I recreated Papers Please but you're deciding which YC startups to fund
termsheetplease.com
termsheetplease.com
Bo, this looks very cool, but I'd encourage you to immediately add "Based on Papers Please by Lucas Pope", with a link here:
("You're not wrong Walter, ...")
The request in comments above is to do the polite thing and share credit for those not yet aware of the game.
But I agree with the principle, you don't have to be nice only when it would be illegal not to be.
Why or why not?
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.
There's not the faintest hint here of nefarious ripping off.
It's light hearted fun - this is not stealing Lucas Pope's game.
Papers please has a much simple mental model.
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.
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.
For example, Tailscale meets Supabase: https://studio.sonyasupposedly.com/startups/m/supabase+tails...
https://studio.sonyasupposedly.com/startups/m/deepseek+frame...
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.
That's 'create'. LLM output doesn't at all have to be 'create' in that sense, and often isn't.
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!
Man, what a bleak life: don't make something new, just keep coping the widget someone else laid down ages 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.
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.
If you don't like it, just stay out of the comment thread.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Emotions are weird.
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…)
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.
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.