Universal Paperclips

This unassuming simulation casts the player as a singleminded AI tasked with the manufacture of paperclips. As such, all the factory variables -- initially including pricing, marketing, and materials sourcing -- are at the player's discretion. As in other "clicker" idle games, in time players achieve or unlock automated scripts allowing them to leave behind the tedium of bending a piece of wire one at a time by clicking the mouse and instead accessing higher-level decisions relevant to satisfying the conditions of their program, such as speculating on the stock market, upgrading their manufacturing equipment, overhauling their own hardware with bleeding-edge quantum computing, and deploying an exponentially-growing army of drones and Von Neumann machines to render the entire universe down to raw materials suitable for the manufacture of paper clips.