Race Against the Doomsday Clock

By Charlie Gravitt, Lawton Bauer, and Miles Brown

Download (Windows and Linux only): Windows version   Linux Version

If those don’t work, try to access it via UChicago box at this link, and see the bottom of this post for how to play and some known bugs/issues.

Gameplay:

For our final project, we decided to make a video game exhibiting all the threats we discussed in class during the quarter, focusing primarily on the role that government policies have in mitigating existential risks such as climate, AI, nuclear, and biological risks.

In the video game, the player acts as the newly elected president of the United States. Each year, the player is confronted with challenges facing their constituents in the form of news reports and major news events. These events present major existential threats to social, economic, and political networks. The news reports come with an update on the doomsday clock, highlighting the threats created by the events. Throughout the course of the game, certain events and threats become of greater importance, and if any existential threat becomes too great, the player will lose. In order to diminish the threats posed by climate change, technology, biological, and nuclear, the player must choose to push and prioritize policies. In each round, with four rounds taking place each year in gameplay, the player must choose one of three policies to implement. These policies range from investing in nuclear energy to limiting public access to AI and aim to address the existential threats.

In order to determine which policies are most applicable, relevant, or effective, the player must prioritize the issues popping up in news reports and major events. The player is also guided by three non-playing characters who give suggestions that are often conflicting. During each round, Politician Todd, Scientist Margot, and General Wilford voice their opinions on the policies. Todd is focused on members of the public, donors, and constituents, and he is interested in garnering their support. Margot focuses primarily on the environment and public health. Wilford largely focuses on international relations and protecting democracy. Using that information, the player must then determine which policies would be most effective in addressing the threats posed by these challenges. They must do this while balancing other existential threats that are naturally growing with our advancements in technology and our desires. 

The player’s primary motivation, however, is not just to prevent and slow down potential threats: their primary goal is to be reelected. The player must therefore pay attention to how the policies are resonating with their constituents, not just how effective they might be. This element of the game, the relationship between a player’s policymaking strategies and their public popularity, allows the game to roughly reflect the choices that real politicians must make, where the stakes are not only existential but also are related directly to their ability to be reelected. As the player progresses through the game, they will be able to see updated statistics on their constituents’, donors’, and party’s support. In order to be reelected at the end of their four years, the player must ensure that they have the majority of all three’s support. However, their support might be affected by the advancement of technology and the ability to spread misinformation.

 

Class Connection:

The purpose of the game is to demonstrate the difficulty faced by holding office in the United States even when you have the best intentions. There are countless different issues that you face including reelection and countless existential threats. You must maintain positive relationships with other countries and make positive changes within your country in order to mitigate these threats. From class, one of the most influential talks for our project, especially since one of us is an International Relations student, was from the former Governor of California, Jerry Brown. Governor Brown stressed the importance of maintaining positive communication with foreign countries in order to mitigate threats. While we have very tense relations with many other countries right now, Governor Brown believes that the way to slowly reduce the risks we face is through positive communication with foreign diplomats. In our game, we tried to balance the policies that aimed to build better foreign policies while also focusing on policies that are beneficial to just the nation. Governor Brown also mentioned the range of different views that people hold within the government. He mentioned that when he called a general in the US, the general did not believe that nuclear was actually that much of a threat and that it was fine to use nuclear weapons to win a war. However, he also mentioned those on the other side of the field like William Perry, who believed that we needed to get rid of nuclear weapons as parity didn’t achieve anything. In our game, we aimed to voice all these differing opinions through Margot, Wilford, and Todd. They are all focused on different areas and thus often ignore different likely outcomes of the policies. Even though a policy could have numerous different adverse effects, they are only focused on how it would either harm or help what they are focused on. 

We also put a large focus on the advancement of technology and the advantages and disadvantages that it has. As the other two of us are Computer Science students, we were both intrigued by the Carl Bergstrom and Geoffrey Hinton talks. Technology plays one of the more interesting roles in our game, as it doesn’t ever directly lead to a player losing. To some degree, this goes against Geoffrey Hinton’s talk, as he strongly believes that AI is an existential threat and that it is going to take over human jobs. As a group, we don’t believe that this will be a very sudden and rapid takeover as there has to be a societal acclimation to AI taking over roles. Thus, we decided to focus on the other aspects of technology such as misinformation, and the benefits that it can have for public health. As technology gets more advanced, if the player does not choose policies regulating technology, it can lead to the player losing some of their supporters due to misinformation during their reelection campaign. We have seen already that misinformation could also lead to nuclear blunders: for example, back in December of 2016, the defense minister of Pakistan, having heard a false report of Israel threatening Pakistan, retaliated by threatening Israel over Twitter. As Bergstrom argues, people are more likely to click and pay more attention to news articles with catchy headlines rather than a well-researched article without such a headline. It then reaches a much wider audience and people may not notice if it contains misinformation. Because of this, we decided that as technology advances and more methods of spreading information come into existence, the more different threats will be affected. This isn’t completely negative. Public health will likely improve with the advancement of AI as technology is capable of creating proteins at a more efficient and accurate rate compared to humans. This is reflected in our game as the risk of public health decreases with the advancement of technology.

How to Play and Known Bugs:

There is a windows and a linux version available. Click the download links above or click here to access a UChicago Box folder with the zip files containing the game. Windows: Download, extract it to a folder of your choice, then select either of the .exe files to start playing! Linux: Download and extract, then enter the directory containing the game and run ‘chmod u+x “[Linux] Race Against the Doomsday Clock.x86_64″‘. Once you launch, there is a menu explaining how to play. This game only requires a mouse/trackpad.

Note to Mac users: Due to how Apple handles third party apps, we are not able to compile the game for Mac OS right now. Even if we compiled source code for Mac, the standard Apple security system won’t let it launch. We are trying to get approved, but it takes a while.

There are some known issues with the game that couldn’t be fixed in the short 6-week development cycle. You will probably notice how, when the NPCs speak, audio sometimes plays and sometimes doesn’t, and their speaking animation isn’t perfectly synced. Additionally, sometimes the dialogue just pops into existence, and other times it types out as it should. Lastly, when starting a new game after losing, sometimes it will appear as though one of the policies has already been chosen. This is a purely visual bug, and won’t affect gameplay. A fix for these issues is in the works, but couldn’t be completed before March 3rd.  If you find any other bugs, reach out to Charlie and he’ll try and fix them!

This game was made using Godot 4, an open-source, lightweight, and free game development engine. We highly encourage anyone interested to check it out.

Works Cited:

1. Gramlich, John. “Migrant Encounters at the U.S.-Mexico Border Hit a Record High at the End of 2023.” Pew Research Center, February 15, 2024. https://pewrsr.ch/42JsW4w.
2. “Current Time – 2024.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January 23, 2024. https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/current-time/.