TOMO KIHARA / 木原 共

Game of Possible Lives is an arcade game where a locally running AI narrates the life of a statistically plausible person. Players guide this person through major crossroads in life, such as education, work, and relationships, and follow the consequences of each choice to the end. When a life comes to an end, they return once to an earlier decision and follow the path not taken.

Each life is generated in real time by Gemma 3, an open-weight model running inside the cabinet. A fictional person is assembled from categories in a country's national census, such as age and occupation, into a combination that could plausibly exist there today. The version shown at Mori Art Museum's Roppongi Crossing 2025 drew on Japan's latest census.

The work joins a long lineage of games that compress a human life into a set of rules, from Moksha Patam in ancient India to Milton Bradley's Checkered Game of Life (1860). Each is a playable archive of its era's normative assumptions about how a life should be lived.

By running the model locally and preserving it as it exists today, the cabinet becomes an experiential archive of the present, a mirror that opens questions about the values and biases embedded in the society the model learns from, and how they might be reflected back to us. Living as someone else prompts us to reflect on the forces shaping our own lives — and on the lives these systems can never generate.

→More info on the game

_{*The images in this game are generated by an image generation model developed by pixel artists themselves. For its training, the model utilizes consented artwork data from a community of creators who are compensated for their contributions.}