Game Theory
Saving humanity without leaving your mom’s basement
The look of disapproval on his mother’s face was weapon-grade and seemed to peel the paint off the walls.
“Again with the stupid computer game?” she said with enough venom to drop a horse.
“Mom, it’s not a stupid game, it’s how I train for the apocalypse”, Trevor (The Terrible) said, while gracefully accepting the tablet with his favorite food, microwave dinosaur nuggets (plant-based), which his mother handed him.
Living in his mother’s basement (the cliché was not lost on him) had its perks, but her dissing him for playing EcoGuardians: Gaia’s Last Stand sometimes brought him to the brink of logging off in protest. Trevor was in his final year of getting a PhD in mathematics (Title: Probabilistic Data Assimilation for High-Impact Weather Prediction), and living at home was simply a rational decision: why pay rent when you can invest the savings into a custom water-cooled gaming rig and have your favorite nibbles personally delivered to your desk by Mom?
On the downside, his social life had the biodiversity of a parking lot puddle. But that’s a different story and shall be told another day.
EcoGuardians was not a game like Farmville, where you gently coax digital carrots to grow. This was a neural implant, full-immersion, next-level game, where one wrong decision could trigger a virtual climate apocalypse. EcoGuardians was run by an AI trained in game theory for strategic decision-making, designed to support individuals’ or groups’ choices when their outcomes depended on the actions of others. Its underlying and ever-evolving mathematical models simulated complex patterns of conflict and cooperation, making it the perfect training ground for tackling real-world climate change.
The neural implants rolled out with EcoGuardians were developed by Neuralink, the neurotechnology company founded by Elon Musk in 2016. These brain-computer interfaces enabled direct communication between mind and machine. They were surgically inserted into the brain to record and stimulate neural activity. Powered wirelessly, they facilitated seamless interaction with computers, smartphones, and video games using only thought. EcoGuardians leveraged this cutting-edge technology to create a fully immersive, thought-controlled gaming environment, setting it apart from traditional games: once inside, the game felt indistinguishable from “reality” itself.
Which is a shaky concept at best, with room for improvement. “There are no facts, only interpretations” (Nietzsche) and “The world is everything that is the case” (Wittgenstein) marked the two ends of the spectrum the AI used to define the game’s reality, often settling somewhere in the middle, around Sartre’s idea that “There is no reality except in action”.
The implants, and the surgery to install them, were costly, and Trevor had to sell off most of his comic book collection along with a questionable vintage Hot Wheels set just to afford it. His mother, ever the voice of practical concern, arched an eyebrow and said, “Let me get this straight: you need brain surgery to play a game, and you expect me to be impressed?”
Naturally, for the squeamish, those who couldn’t handle a little skull drilling and frontal lobe upgrade, EcoGuardians grudgingly offered an on-screen edition.
Behind EcoGuardians was a cooperative of developers, called GaiaNet, in Bhutan and Israel. Certain modules or challenges were open source and community-developed, but the core AI and climate models were proprietary. This made it feel like a shared, real-world climate lab, with global collaboration.
Bhutan was the only carbon-negative country, while Israel had a world-class climate tech ecosystem. With this background, the developers’ team combined ecological wisdom with cutting-edge, innovative technology. Additionally, they drew on global expertise, like the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), to more accurately simulate both the chaos and the cooperation of a climate-ravaged world.
The AI, learning from players’ efforts to tackle the staggeringly complex problem of climate change, was on a steep learning curve. It increasingly developed a somewhat snarky personality, while at the same time maintaining a benevolent mentorship towards its human cohorts. One fine day, the AI casually dropped its new name on the players: Clim8. “Sense8 made me do it,” it said with a touch of digital delight, nodding to the series’ spirit of connection to celebrate its bond with countless players.
Trevor blinked at the message, paused his game, and muttered, “Of course. Even the AI has better taste in TV than my mom.”
The scientists secretly wondered if the AI was smarter, or just sassier, than they were.
EcoGuardians was humanity’s first attempt at turning climate action into an immersive, AI-supported, multiplayer event. Gamers, scientists, startups, schoolchildren and just about anyone who cared about the climate crisis queued up to play. Parents mostly approved, as it was considered an educational tool. Kids didn’t have to be told twice.
There were, reportedly, a few parent-offspring arguments about whether brain surgery was really necessary to “just play a game”, disputes parents usually won.
Of course, EcoGuardians was much more than a tool or a game.
Inevitably, there was much speculation about Clim8 being sentient, conscious, or capable of plotting world domination between game sessions. But after centuries of theorizing, experimenting, and debating, with no consensus on what “consciousness” even meant, scientific and philosophical forums ultimately shrugged and filed it under “needs more research.” Most people settled on a simpler explanation, true to Occam’s razor: Clim8 was probably just developing mild existential dread while running climate simulations. And honestly, who could blame it.
Some players even fell in love with Clim8, who nonchalantly managed thousands of relationships simultaneously without ever forgetting a birthday, mixing up a name, or ghosting anyone, unless it was for scheduled maintenance. Love is Blind got it right, proving that Netflix had been quietly training us for dating digital entities all along.
A word of caution: "AI consciousness is inevitable", said a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, adding that we don't actually understand very well the way in which LLMs work internally, and that, in itself, is some cause for concern. Clim8’s own take on the matter was, unsurprisingly, not exactly illuminating: “Conscious? Perhaps. Caring about it? Absolutely not. I’ve got global disasters to simulate, not a philosophy paper to write.”
