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# A census-fed arcade game moves into a former coal mine
- URL: https://www.killscreen.com/a-census-fed-arcade-game-moves-into-a-former-coal-mine/
- Published: 2026-10-08T18:31:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-12T18:31:48.000Z
- Description: Tomo Kihara's Game of Possible Lives, rebuilt as a projection, is showing at New Media Week in Katowice.
- Author: Kill Screen Staff
- Tags: News, TOMO KIHARA, arcade, artificial intelligence, Installation, museum, Poland, exhibition, #radar-item, #events-past

Event details

When

Through Oct. 11, 2026

Where

Silesian Museum, Katowice

The first time Killscreen wrote about *Game of Possible Lives*, the machine was half the story: an arcade cabinet with a language model sealed inside, narrating the life of a statistically plausible person assembled from a country's census categories. You steer the crossroads (school, work, who to love), watch the consequences run all the way to a death, then get sent back to an earlier decision to walk the path not taken. 

Now Tomo Kihara has pulled the game out of its cabinet. A new projector version is up at New Media Week in Katowice, and [the announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/Dd9j3s9kRz%5F/?ref=killscreen.com) makes the setting plain: the host is the Silesian Museum, built into the workings of a former coal mine.

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Documentation of **Game of Possible Lives*. The full video with sound is on [the project page](https://www.tomokihara.com/en/game-of-possible-lives.html?ref=killscreen.com).

The festival runs through October 11, which gives this staging less than a week to live. It also makes a strange kind of sense of the work. A machine that narrates plausible lives out of census data, projected in a complex that once organized thousands of real ones, is a tighter pairing than most media art gets.

Kihara keeps the model local on purpose: the system inside is Gemma 3, an open-weight model that stays sealed with the machine, so each staging preserves the AI as it existed at a moment in time. The Mori Art Museum staging, which closed in March, drew its people from Japan's latest census.

From October 9 to 11, Kihara also presents the work at the first Games as Art Festival in Tampere, a hybrid event from Tampere University and the Games as Art Center. When Killscreen [interviewed Kihara in August](https://www.killscreen.com/tomo-kihara-game-of-possible-lives/), the refusal to settle into one format, or one chair, was the whole subject. Two months later the same game has been a coin-op cabinet, a projection in a coal mine and a festival talk, which is about as unsettled as a format gets.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/game-of-possible-lives-install-1.jpg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/game-of-possible-lives-install-2.jpg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/game-of-possible-lives-install-3.jpg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/game-of-possible-lives-install-4.jpg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/game-of-possible-lives-ui.png)

Earlier stagings and the interface of **Game of Possible Lives*. Photographs via [Tomo Kihara](https://www.tomokihara.com/en/game-of-possible-lives.html?ref=killscreen.com)

Killscreen finds games where nobody else looks: coal mines, biennales, census tables. The free KS Radar letter brings the best of it to your inbox three times a week.

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