Through the medium of video games, Seeder offers an empowering, participatory response to Medialab’s LAB 5 The Mechanics of Truth theme. Moving beyond critical reflection and the prevailing despair around Al and future politics discourse, the game chooses instead to center an active and collective creation that foregrounds agentic decisionmaking through the accessible medium of gameplay and simple walking and typing mechanics. 

Seeder pairs a custom video game controller with an asynchronous, multiplayer video game. Set in a dark, overgrown forest, the game’s central mechanic is a walking simulator where players discover abandoned sites of infrastructure and personal objects. These sites and objects instigate hallucinatory encounters and conversations, asking increasingly bizarre or intimate questions to players who can respond through custom controllers in real-time. 

In the background, players' individual responses are added to a growing dataset, gradually training an AI language model from scratch. From this, a collective, asynchronous psyche grows throughout the game's existence, nurturing a shared myth about the past, present, and future of the gameworld and individual perspectives. 

Seeder directly engages with the technologies that are shaping much of contemporary generative culture, but chooses to reframe the discourse away from unproductive doom spirals. It draws upon the agency and collaboration of collective gameplay to imagine a new kind of technological ritual where the social, cultural, ecological and affective vectors of emerging tech can operate in more imaginative, social and equitable ways. 

Team 

This prototype is developed by a team formed by the author of the original proposal Freddie Sanders freddiesanders.studio / @f_sanders_  together with: 

Angela Rodríguez @angela.rraw 

Nicole Malick pipacrea.com / @pipa_crea 

Joanna Wayra orcid.org/0000-0002-2540-8999 

Grayson Earle graysonearle.com / @prismspecs