Floods, wildfires and extreme heatwaves become the new normal. Awareness and care for the environment are critical. With the United Nations Ocean Conference in Nice just concluded, Artefact 3000 is launching FutureGuessr, an online game that visualises what the world could look like in 2100 if we fail to act on climate change.
The awareness project, designed in collaboration with the association Réseau Action Climat, aims to alert about the urgency to act, while offering an educational, visual, and impactful experience.
FutureGuessr turns scientific scenarios into hyper-realistic visual journeys. And invites players to guess where they are, in a world reshaped by global warming. FutureGuessr is inspired by popular geography games like GeoGuessr and OpenGuessr. But this time, the player is dropped somewhere in the world, in 360°, and must guess where they are. It’s a future shaped by +2.8°C of global warming, based on IPCC projections. Submerged islands of the Maldives, an Amazon transformed into a savanna, Antarctica adrift, or the vanished Mer de Glace.
The transformations of each ecosystem have been modelled from the scientific data from the latest IPCC reports. This data is translated into textual prompts, allowing visual projections to be generated respecting the topography of real places thanks to an artificial intelligence developed specifically for the project. All of this is done through a reasoned use, by hosting the artificial intelligence locally to reduce its carbon footprint.
Climatologist Benjamin Sultan, contributing author of the 6th IPCC report and research director at IRD, accompanied the project and validated its scientific approach. Each generated landscape is therefore based on a rigorous documentary basis. “FutureGuessr cleverly manages to illustrate in a playful way the upheavals caused by global warming, while showing that another future is possible,” he stated.
FutureGuessr was conceived as a bridge between science and the general public. It does not aim to dramatise but to inform. For each landscape, two scenarios are proposed: that of inaction, with often spectacular consequences, and that of a resilient future, made possible thanks to ambitious policies, sustainable practices, and collective mobilisation. FutureGuessr aims to raise awareness through play, reminding people that while the futures presented can be worrying, they are not inevitable. They depend on the choices we make today.
