Help the AI 2027 team make an online AGI wargame
The AI Futures Project, the team behind AI 2027, has developed a tabletop exercise (TTX) to simulate AI takeoff where we facilitate people going through an AI 2027-like scenario with different people taking different roles, like POTUS, China, or the frontier AI company CEO. Reviews have been positive and people have found it useful for building their own models of how AI will go.
We’re interested in developing an online version of this game, with the goal of eventually getting millions of people to play through takeoff and better understand the dynamics and risks involved. The other game characters could be driven by LLMs so we don’t need to facilitate it. The online TTX could be based on our scenario and background research alongside LLMs and various game elements.
To this end, we’re looking for a full-stack developer with game design and UX experience/interest and a deep understanding of AGI risk. We previously worked with the Lightcone Infrastructure team for the AI 2027 website and might work with them again for this project, but first we’d like to see if anyone else is interested.
We expect that the ideal online TTX would ultimately look and feel very different from the in-person experience, but would successfully convey similar content.
If you’re interested, please fill in this quick form, message me, or comment below, we’d love to hear from you!
I’d like to strongly assert that you’d want your design spec to be multiplayer from the start so that you can have virtually any arbitrary mix of LLMs and people. You’ll probably want this later and there are likely to be some design decisions that you’ll make wrong if you assume there’s never more than one person
I strongly recommend posting in the Metagame 2025 Discord, or potentially trying to recruit people in person at Metagame (https://metagame.games) at Lighthaven this September if you haven’t filled the role by then. It’s literally just a bunch of game design nerds collaborating on building out a giant game together with online and in person elements, a bunch of whom also have lots of AGI risk knowledge.
Also possibly you guys want to run the TTX at Metagame, or beta test the online version there?
Do you have plans in place for music? I’m a rather decent music writer in the domain of video-game-ish music. I can certainly do better than AI generated music, I think AI music generation is really quite bad at the moment. Music with solid/catchy themes can do wonders for the experience—and popularity!
(plus honestly it’s been a while since I’ve gotten to write anything and I’d enjoy doing something creative with a purpose)
No current plans, and not sure if it should have music at all. But it’s good to know we can reach out to you if that becomes important; appreciate you letting us know!
If you’re aiming to get millions of players, I think [no music at all] would be counterproductive. There’s a reason almost every non-trivial game in existence has music. Of course it’s also nice if it’s simple to turn off / customize / replace—but it’s usually a mistake to expect that a high proportion of players are going to significantly customize things.
Music is a way to get some immediate emotional engagement without making meaningful design concessions (most other mechanisms imply some more significant design constraint). If you want millions of players, you want immediate emotional engagement.
If the target audience is (up to) millions, I would highly recommend at least something in the way of a soundtrack, even if it’s just a collection of ambient noises (which is honestly not my wheelhouse). Games feel weird if they’re completely silent, even Plague Inc. has something.
If you do have the budget and time to look for one, the very best composers (the likes of Toby Fox, Christopher Larkin, DM Dokuro) have written tracks so compelling and catchy that they get used all the time outside of the game and become a different form of marketing.
Given you’re not sure, do feel free to reach out, especially if you’re at a stage of “Oh shit we actually might want to have music and we have no time to sort things”. I’d be very happy to just throw together a rough test track so you can get a feel for things.
Best of luck!
Hi, we had been working on a single player TTX for the past couple of months, do check it out—https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/epn73xEkeu5T4sZa5/rehearsing-the-future-tabletop-exercises-for-risks-and
I would like to register that I think this is very vibe-codeable given the right tools, and if there’s an interested game designer that doesn’t have full stack experience I would be willing to help them get up to speed on vibe coding best practices for this project.
I can’t help with developers, but I can probably help with a dozen gamers (mostly teens, twens) who would probably like to do playtesting.
I’m interested in doing this; I quite enjoy gamedev and would love the opportunity to dovetail that interest with something actually important. Is there a writeup anywhere of what specifically the tabletop exercise entailed? It seems like the AI-2027 summary contains precious little mechanical information.