A census-fed arcade game moves into a former coal mine

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 makes the setting plain: the host is the Silesian Museum, built into the workings of a former coal mine.

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, 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.