Complicity

Our game, Complicity: At Whose Expense, was inspired by We Become What We Behold and the idea of AI psychosis. We wanted to make a game that seems pretty normal at first, but makes you look back and see what you really did beyond your own tunneled view. It is not meant to be replayed.

This is a city builder where you, with the help of an AI assistant, develop your own city. You can ask it to build houses, provide clean water, expand energy, and basically make the city a better place to live. As you keep giving it prompts, your city grows, and eventually you reach your ideal city. However, you have no idea if the ideal beyond your own city as the AI assistant will only feed the growth of its current objective.

We were inspired by We Become What We Behold because it shows how a simple game can say something meaningful about society without directly explaining everything to the player. We wanted to do something similar, where the player figures out the message on their own. The idea of AI psychosis also influenced us because we wanted to explore what happens when people become too comfortable relying on AI and stop questioning it. In our game, the AI keeps doing what you ask it to do, and because it seems helpful, you don't really have a reason to question it.

This connects to the idea of moral disengagement, which is how people justify or ignore the harm caused by their actions. For example, people use AI all the time without thinking about the environmental costs of running data centres just because it is out of their sight. Since the effects happen somewhere else, they can feel disconnected from our everyday lives.

That's what we wanted players to experience. You're so focused on building your city that you don't stop to think about what's happening beyond it. Everything looks good from your point of view, so you assume things are going well. It's only when the camera zooms out that you realize there's a bigger picture you weren't paying attention to. We wanted to leave players thinking about whether something can really be considered progress if making things better for ourselves means making things worse for everyone else.