Preface

This essay starts from a few initial assumptions:

Life on Earth is facing human-caused existential risk. Video games are important to human culture. It is valuable for human culture to adjust itself to avoid existential risk.

The purpose of this essay is not to argue any of these assumptions, but to ask how video games can be connected to existential threats and what the most effective points of service can be.

Background

More and more, the possibility of all life on Earth being wiped out by human decision is a real and imminent part of our awareness. Assuming most people are hopeful toward the survival of Life, this is a confusing perspective; we don’t really know what Earth is going to look like in 100 years. If we’d like to find ourselves in a future that includes survival, we’re going to need to start exploring and preparing for what that future might look like.

One problem with realizing this on a large-scale is that the future is complicated. There are not that many people that fully understand each individual problem that we’re facing; whether that’s climate change, biotech, nuclear war— they are intricate, interconnected systems that often take lifetimes of specialization to fully grasp the mechanics of. This is where video games come in. We can create detailed, computationally consistent systems that are mostly safe to interact with. We can ask “what if-” questions from imaginary systems and get relatively true answers; this is a philosophy that has been explored in video games pretty successfully. Marc Ten Bosch, designer of 4-D game Miegakure, illustrates the process:

Any system of interactivity can of course be explored: If X happens, what are the consequences? What are all the ways in which pattern Y expresses itself, and to what do those expressions lead? By inspecting the structure of a system in this way, we can find the core ideas of the system, and see how those ideas illustrate fundamental truths of our universe.

How can game developers be most useful?

Given technology’s tendency toward eventual democratization, I think we’ll see a point in our lifetime where it is relatively common for average individuals to be directly responsible for the fate of Life: climate change is a somewhat clear-cut example of this. The technology that our society is built on — that lays the foundation of many people’s lives — is destroying the global ecology, and most humans don’t have the social framework to understand how we fit into this whole mess. The stakes really couldn’t be much higher, yet we still struggle to make radical changes in our personal lives because we don’t fully realize the detailed connection between our personal lives and the global community.

There isn’t time for the entire globe to learn how technology works once it’s here; it takes a lot of mental training to grasp the network of influence that we are increasingly a part of. One thing we can do is allow the average person to play with and explore these systems before there is a life-threatening need to interact with them. Even if everybody can’t learn fully how the technology works before they get access to it, we can at least give them some experience with how they will eventually wield the influence of it.

Summary

Video games are a tool that we can use to force our imagination into relative consistency, which is an incredibly powerful quality. Rigorous imagination is something we desperately need as a species of we’re going to survive the next hundred years. Video games can provide an environment where we explore impending existential responsibilities in a safe way, and I think we owe it to Life to understand the power that we intend to hold.

With this awareness, I offer a few rules to guide game development in a more humanitarian direction. I have also included a few links to serve as a starting point for each step.

Thanks for reading.