TOMO KIHARA / 木原 共

Game of Possible Lives is a game where players make life choices for an individual from beginning to end. Players guide an individual through major life crossroads such as marriage and career, and experience the consequences of each decision until the very end. Each playthrough is generated in real-time by a large language model running locally within the arcade game cabinet, referencing societal statistics. Large language models are trained on massive datasets of online text. As a result, the worlds they generate tend to mirror contemporary social realities, including their biases and inequalities. The work thus becomes an experiential archive of our current moment, inviting players to navigate and confront the systemic forces shaping life today.
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After a life concludes, players can return to earlier crossroads to explore alternate futures, revealing how different choices lead to different outcomes. By making decisions within another person's life, the work prompts audiences to imagine the lived time of others and to re-examine the forces shaping their own.

In the exhibition version at Mori Art Museum's Roppongi Crossing 2025 in Tokyo, the game draws on Japan's 2020 national census data.  Players begin as a randomly generated person whose age, gender, income, work status, marriage status, and nationality are determined to reflect the statistical makeup of the population, a person who could plausibly exist in Japan today.

→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.}