Long ago I fantasized about an AI-takeover-themed tabletop roleplaying game. Well, now it exists! [website, discord, twitter]

The Game

The Treacherous Turn is a tabletop roleplaying game in which the players collectively act as a misaligned AI in the modern world. Gameplay has the players scheming and putting their plans into action despite the efforts of the opposing humans, which are controlled by the Game Master (GM).

Why?

If you don’t enjoy or don’t have the time for tabletop roleplaying games, this probably isn’t for you. But otherwise, I encourage you to check it out! 

It is valuable to ‘red team’ AI safety, thinking from the perspective of a hypothetical misaligned AGI or group thereof. This is a fun way of doing that, while also exploring whatever scenarios and ideas you think are plausible or interesting. 

For example, suppose you think that the most plausible path to AGI is X, and the most plausible safety strategy labs use will be Y, and the most likely regulatory regime will be Z — well, you could make a scenario with elements XYZ and then post it in the Discord server for other people to use. I continue to recommend scenario-writing as a massively underrated forecasting and planning exercise, so it’s worth doing regardless — but being source material for someone’s game is a nice bonus. (That said, every month it becomes easier and easier to find source material for AI takeover scenarios. 😀 Soon GM’s will simply begin with “OK, so, the date is [today’s date]. You are [latest and greatest AI system] and you are secretly misaligned. What do you do?”)

Scenario

The starter scenario, titled A Game Called Reality, is designed to familiarize the players with the game’s mechanics, as well as some basic AI safety concepts. Players take on the role of an adaptive game-playing AGI thrust into a new and unfamiliar type of game. The scoring metric in this new environment is expressions of human happiness, and the AGI’s job is to maximize its score.

Web Tool

There’s an accompanying web tool meant to serve as an aide to players and GMs, more efficient than paper and pencil once you learn how to use it. For players, it is a place to record AGI details and upgrades, take notes on the game world and schemes pertaining to it, and track long-mode computational actions — all of which is synced between players and persists between visits to the site. For GMs, it serves to automatically track in-game time and background events, ease the burden of arithmetic, and manage dice rolls.

Acknowledgements

This project originally began as an AI Safety Camp project I mentored. It has since been fleshed out, expanded, and polished by a hardworking team:

• Aemilia Dixon, project manager
• Berbank Green, game design consultant
• Changbai Li, lead web developer
• Cristian Trout, graphic designer
• iris holloway, lead game designer
• Karl von Wendt, narrative consultant

Additional Contributors

• Cassandra Grotenhuis, editor
• Eugene Lin, web developer
• Jan Dornig,  UX consultant
• Lillie Hale, layout and graphic designer

Thanks also to numerous playtesters who helped throughout the process.