Game B

Note: This page, just like its primary subject, is a work-in-perpetual-progress. Perhaps there is a detectable structure, but don't treat it or any ideas as set in stone. There is no one definition of Game B, but here's an attempt to summarize Game B by James Allen.

Game~B is a memetic tag that aggregates a myriad of visions, projects, and experiments that model potential future civilizational forms. The flag on the hill for Game~B is an anti-fragile, scalable, increasingly omni-win-win civilization. This is distinct from our current rivalrous Game A civilization that is replete with destructive externalities and power asymmetries that produce existential risk. However, Game~B is not a prescriptive ideology (or an ideology at all): while the eyes of Game~B players may be fixed on the same flag, the hills are multitudes. The flag sits atop each, and no player individually is equipped to map a route in advance.

Rather, Game~B players gather together to feel their way up each hill with their toes, sensing for the loamy untrodden ground beneath them, slowly inching forward, listening for signals from one another, adjusting at each step to orient themselves toward the flag that is barely visible. Like an actual game, Game~B describes a modus operandi as much as it does a goal, although for now, the former can be brought into sharper focus.

Game~B players are already everywhere, and Game~B is already emerging. #gameb is merely a means to make the organism self-aware, to show its players that they are already in a community.

The Evolutionary Background of Game B

How basic properties of the ecosystem earth are at odds with core assumptions in Game A, necessitating Game B. Evolutionary Background of Game B

Enter Game A

Game A is almost everything that humans have been doing to design their world, especially in the last 10,000 years, to coordinate beyond the Dunbar number.

Enter Game B

What is Game B?

""Game B is notoriously difficult to think and talk about for the very good reason that if you were using the conceptual structures that came out of Game A to do so, you may very well be poisoning the well.""

"- Jordan Hall"

Defining Game B precisely would suffer from the reductionist Game A tendencies. Looking at the constituents of Game B from multiple angles might help to elucidate the concept. Here are some different constructions that point to Game B:

1. Game B is the flag on the hill for an omni-win civilization that maximizes human flourishing.
2. Game B is the environment that maximizes collective intelligence, collaboration, and increasing omni-consideration.
3. Game B is building or developing the capacity to navigate complexity without resorting to complicated systems.
4. Game B is establishing coherence within complex systems.
5. Game B is a meta-protocol for hyper-collaboration.
6. Game B is the infinite game where the purpose is to continue playing. Game A is the finite game where the purpose is to win.
7. Game B is the theoretically optimal condition for creative collaboration and, thus, for maximal innovation.
8. Game B must orient its primary innovation capacity towards cultivating individual and collective sovereignty. It must foster awareness of how choices show up and are decided, more than it augments individual and collective power.
9. Game B is a new mode of societal, economic, and political organization that leverages people's authentic, long-term interests towards a healthier, more cooperative society and improved well-being. A Game B system is any cooperative, mutually-beneficial system that can outcompete exploitative, adversarial systems through manifest appeal and willful, voluntary participation.

It may also be helpful to define Game B in terms of what it is not. Following Ariadnae:

• It is not an ideology nor a political stance; much different than Right and Left, which both strive to find ways for a fairer, more productive and sustainable Game A. Game B is an attempt at freeing oneself from any ideology and dispel biases, attempting to see the world for what it is
• It is not an apocalyptic view of the world; actually, the world in all its manifestations of cultures and extremes is remarkably plastic, resilient and adaptable.
• It is not an esoteric, psychedelic, cult-like movement trying to blow-up the classical success-based hierarchies of the Western world; instead, it is an earnest attempt at analyzing human spirituality, psychology, and sociology in order to understand what drives us as individuals and collectives. It is an attempt at leveraging old traditions and discoveries to build everlasting ever longer bridges across people with a myriad of backgrounds, cultures, languages, and religions and take the best of each in order to make sense of humanity as such.
• It is not a utopia in the making, nor a movement aimed at replacing markets and money with some obscure technology-driven new social order; instead, it is an attempt at understanding how money, technology, and political systems shape the world order as it is. It attempts to discover ways to advance societies via more creative, cooperative, and sustainable low-resolution forms of collaboration, to support healthy markets and societies.
• It is not a secret brotherhood of people armed with "bullshit baffles brains" jargon talking in such complicated words that laymen would find hard to understand. It is every one of us who is trying to make sense of the world using precise and accurate speech, evidence-based facts and scientific inquiry methods; we strive to make complex theories simple enough for the individual understanding, but without simplifying things to a point, where they would lose their essence and value of truth.
• It is not a counter-reaction to the great thinkers of yesterday and today; it is an attempt at distilling and integrating the truth in all that the classical and contemporary thinkers have to say, in order to create a round and comprehensible story of who we are and where we are heading as individuals and collectives.

Game B players are already everywhere, and Game B is already emerging. #gameb is merely a means to make the organism self-aware and show its players that they are already in a community.

How can you move forward?

There are a many principles and ways that help individuals to prepare themselves for entering Game B. Jordan Hall has provided a number of strategies.