What Plays You? — Game of Possible Lives (2025) invites the audience to witness an individual's potential future unfold from beginning to end. The game follows the life of "someone"—a fictional person who could statistically exist in Japan, generated by an AI based on data such as the national census. Through a series of decisions at life's crossroads, players experience how choices become major turning points in this person's life. This page serves as a dev-log by the author, explaining the context and technology behind this project.
Photo by Aya Kawachi
This project stands as a continuation of the age-old attempt to recreate the complex endeavor of "life" within the format of a game. Beginning with Moksha Patam, which was born in ancient India to teach religious morals, to The Checkered Game of Life devised by Milton Bradley in America in 1860, and finally to the Game of Life by Takara Tomy that we know well today, this history has continued for a long time.
What is common to all these games is that the "ideal way of living" and "social rules" of that era are crystallized as game systems. The ethical views, definitions of success, and forms of happiness of the time become the game rules, and players advance along those rails. For example, the victory condition in The Checkered Game of Life was reaching a "Happy Old Age" at age 50. Considering the average life expectancy in 1860s America was in the late 30s, this can be said to have been a truly reasonable and earnest "goal."
The goal in The Checkered Game of Life was to reach age 50 in the upper right.
The first generation Game of Life sold in Japan (1968)
1980s America as Depicted in "Alter Ego"
A major catalyst for conceiving this project was the game Alter Ego, released by Activision in 1986. Designed by psychiatrist Dr. Peter Favaro, this life simulation game allowed players to re-experience life from birth to death—a groundbreaking attempt to create as a digital game what had previously been played on a board.
Alter Ego (1986)
However, playing it now, the intense values of 1980s America remain heavily imprinted upon it. Going to college, getting a job, marrying the opposite sex, raising children, and buying a house in your 20s (!). The more one follows this typical WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) success model, the more advantageously the game proceeds, while living outside of it is extremely difficult. And naturally, the difficulties of people of color who didn't live in urban areas at the time, or the lives of sexual minorities, are not depicted.
Alter Ego introduced in an article that came out in 1986. The New York Times Archives
When remastering this game recently, the Alter Ego development team recognized this issue but made the decision to leave the values and some discriminatory expressions of the time un-updated, preserving it as a historical archive. From a modern perspective, the game may lack consideration for women and minorities. However, precisely because of that, it serves as valuable historical material for re-experiencing what life was like (for some people) in that era.
2025: A Game of Life Where AI Becomes the Storyteller