Finding the Way to Game B

5 min readJun 28, 2021

This is the second post in a series and will make much more sense if you read the preceding one found on my profile.

Call the current way our civilization works “Game A”.

Assume that there are foundational issues in the structure in Game A that guarantee it will eventually destroy itself.

Now call a different way that civilization could work, that avoids destruction for longer, “Game B”.

That’s it. That’s the idea. Of course the details get a bit tricky, but for now let’s see what we can learn from a general view of the situation.

Imagine that the image below is a space of all the possible civilization designs. We know that Game A and Game B are both in that space, but despite what this image might lead you to believe, we don’t know how to get from A to B:

From the core assumptions, you can guess that some people are quite motivated to figure out what Game B actually looks like. I’m going to call this mode of playing Game B the Visionary. They are trying to work backwards from the failure modes they understand to be inherent in Game A towards civilizational designs that avoid them. The more they figure out about these possible designs, the easier it is to get there from here. As they explore the design possibilities, our understanding of the space starts to look more like this:

Those blue lines are their efforts. Not all of them are fruitful, but remember, we don’t know where Game B is exactly, relative to Game A. They’re exploring; trying to figure out what might work.

Meanwhile, back in Game A, others are playing in a different mode — one that I’m going to call Pathfinder. They’re also trying to find a way to Game B, but they’re constrained by what’s possible in the world today. They’re launching ventures and running experiments. They’re informed by the theories of Visionaries, which give them some ideas of what they might be working towards, but they still don’t know for sure how to get there. Most of their attempts fail, but they have the added benefit of getting feedback from the real world in doing so. Now our understanding of the space looks more like this, with the red paths representing the efforts of Pathfinders experimenting their way out of Game A:

They’re similarly blind, but you can see that the distance between the efforts of the Visionaries and the Pathfinders is slowly shrinking. What’s more, their efforts are informing each other. Not only are the theories guiding the experimentation, but the results of the experimentation feed back to inspire better defined theories. Eventually this feedback loop brings the efforts closer and closer together until finally, contact:

That lone purple line is the sequence of experiments and theories, made possible by the findings from all the rest, that eventually connected and formed a viable path from Game A to Game B. Why were we looking for that path again?

Ah, that’s right. Game A has some foundational issues. Unfortunately, they do not just pause while the Visionaries theorize and the Pathfinders experiment. If any of those issues manifests itself in the wrong way, the game board is wiped clean before a viable path can be found. This brings up the third and final mode of play: the Defender. They work within the realm of the currently possible to stave off catastrophic and existential threats, increasing the odds of finding the path before it’s too late.

The way I described the three modes of play — Visionary, Pathfinder, and Defender — may make it seem like each player is sorted into a particular mode, but this is not the case. Each individual player dances between the modes, but all three must be played for there to be a chance of finding the path in time. They all work together to maximize our odds of success.

Visionaries make the target easier to hit, Pathfinders get us closer to the target, and Defenders give us time to reach it. Visionaries learn from the Defenders what the new design needs to avoid, and learn from the Pathfinders what actually works. Pathfinders draw their goals from the Visionaries, and learn from the Defenders how to reduce our risk. Defenders coordinate with the Pathfinders to reduce the risk of today, and with the Visionaries to reduce the risk of tomorrow.

I think I can speak for the world here when I say we need as many people contributing as much effort to all of the modes as possible.

A note: In this post I am simultaneously referring to Game B as a thing we don’t even fully know how to define or reach, and a thing that a community is playing in these three different ways. You’ll find this is typical within the community with members referring to each other as “Game B Players”. My perspective on this is that we are currently doing our best to live Game B lives in Game A worlds (though our best efforts are inherently incomplete), while in parallel our picture of Game B evolves and we try to transition more of the world from A to B.

For a deeper look into what Game B is, including some failure modes we’re trying to avoid and what that purple path could look like, consider these sources. In my opinion, they’re prime examples of valuable Visionary content:

Finding the Way to Game B

Written by Damien Laird