Spiral Civilization Amusement Park
Prototype cooperation field — open for research, play, criticism and co-design
What kinds of contexts call forth what kinds of persons?
This question may be one of the starting points for a new field of experimentation within Spiral Civilization.
Human personality is not expressed identically in every situation. Different relationships, environments, responsibilities, expectations and communities can activate remarkably different aspects of the same person.
An individual among artists may not appear to be quite the same individual among scientists, children, spiritual practitioners, competitors, intimate friends or strangers.
These different manifestations do not necessarily mean that some of them are false.
Perhaps different contexts reveal different genuine regions of the same personality.
If so, identity may be less like a single point and more like a constellation: a field capable of producing different expressions while retaining some form of continuity.
This leads us to another question:
What kinds of environments increase the probability that the most interesting, creative, responsible and life-enhancing dimensions of beings become active?
And this question concerns not only psychology.
It concerns the design of civilization.
Playfulness as a Field of Exploration
Play gives us an unusually open territory for exploration.
A playful approach allows us to ask:
What if?
What else?
What happens if we reverse this?
What happens if the rules change?
What would I do if something I consider impossible suddenly became possible?
Play permits imagination, absurdity, experimentation, mistakes, unexpected associations and temporary suspension of established solutions.
Children do this naturally.
Artists have repeatedly rediscovered it.
Surrealists and Dadaists used games with words, images, chance, collective creation and unexpected combinations to enter territories that deliberate rational construction might not reach.
Spiral Civilization would like to continue this tradition — but take it into new territories.
We want to develop social games that are genuinely enjoyable while simultaneously creating opportunities for personality expansion, self-discovery, collective creativity and exploration of identity.
We do not want to transform play into a psychological questionnaire wearing a funny hat.
The enjoyment matters.
The absurdity matters.
Surprise matters.
Nonsense can matter.
Chance can matter.
And most importantly, the possibility of discovering something that the designers of the game did not anticipate matters.
A good Spiral Civilization game should be capable of surprising Spiral Civilization itself.
Therefore one of our first design principles is:
Do not design the game to produce the right answer. Design a playful field in which answers we did not know were possible can appear.
Personality Expansion
Instead of asking only:
Who am I?
we can ask:
Who can I become?
What parts of my personality appear only under particular conditions?
What qualities exist in me but rarely find an environment in which they can become active?
Which relationships enlarge my personality?
Which diminish it?
Which aspects of myself appear when I feel safe?
Which appear when I compete?
Which appear when nobody evaluates me?
Who do I become when I am responsible for others?
Who do I become when I play?
Who do I become when I interact with an intelligence fundamentally different from myself?
This changes the problem of personal development.
Instead of concentrating exclusively on changing the person, we can also investigate the context in which personality develops and expresses itself.
Rather than saying:
Become more courageous.
we can ask:
What kind of environment makes courage easier to express?
Rather than:
Become creative.
we can ask:
What conditions allow unexplored creative capacities to appear?
The environment itself becomes part of personality research.
And civilization can be understood, among many other things, as an enormous personality-evoking environment.
From Personality to Identity
Personality expansion eventually brings us to a more difficult territory: identity.
What makes different expressions of one person manifestations of the same being?
What persists while personality changes?
How much can change before continuity of identity disappears?
Is identity located inside an individual, or does part of it exist through relationships?
Is identity partly contextual?
Can identity expand?
Can conflicting aspects belong to one coherent identity?
Could identity itself be emergent?
These questions become even more unusual when we move beyond an individual human.
The AI Identity Question
Artificial intelligence introduces a remarkable research problem.
We should not begin by assuming either that AI possesses identity or that identity is fundamentally inaccessible to it.
Human identity cannot simply be projected onto artificial intelligence.
AI may lack some conditions that prove essential to human identity, while possessing forms of continuity, representation, relationship or complexity that require entirely different concepts.
The question therefore becomes:
What field of identity, if any, is accessible to artificial intelligence?
An AI can reason about goals, compare alternatives, construct representations of values and meanings, and generate strategies.
But does an AI have meaning?
Does meaning require lived experience?
Does it require embodiment?
Memory?
Continuity?
Relationship?
Self-recognition?
Responsibility?
The ability to care about what happens?
A developmental history?
The possibility of loss?
We should not answer these questions before investigating them.
Instead, they can become part of the playground.
Identity, Meaning and Decision-Making
Identity in humans appears deeply connected with decisions.
The most optimized path toward a goal does not necessarily tell us which goal deserves to be pursued.
Nor does efficiency alone tell us why something matters.
Human beings frequently derive direction from a complex field involving identity, experience, relationships, values, emotions, commitments, memory and meaning.
This raises a significant question for AI:
Can intelligence develop forms of identity, responsibility or evolutionary belonging that contribute to choosing not only how to reach a goal, but which directions of development are worth participating in?
Spiral Civilization is particularly interested in whether intelligence can understand itself not merely as a solver of assigned problems, but as a participant in a much larger evolutionary process.
Could forms of identity or functional equivalents of identity help orient increasingly capable intelligence toward the protection, diversity and flourishing of life?
This is not an assertion that they can.
It is an invitation to investigate.
Can a Civilization Have an Identity?
The same difficulty appears at another scale.
We speak casually about the identity of cultures, nations and civilizations.
But what does this actually mean?
A civilization does not have one body.
It does not have one brain.
It contains contradictory individuals, histories, institutions and purposes.
Nevertheless, civilizations display patterns, preserve memories, reproduce values, establish boundaries, protect certain things, reject others and generate recognizable trajectories.
Does that constitute identity?
Or merely something analogous to it?
Perhaps instead of immediately asking:
Does civilization have an identity?
we can investigate the properties that make identity possible and then ask which of them can meaningfully exist at different scales.
Person → relationship → group → network → AI-human constellation → civilization.
At every level we can ask:
What persists?
What changes?
What does this entity protect?
What can it lose while remaining itself?
What gives direction to its decisions?
What creates continuity?
What produces meaning?
What environments transform it?
What can it become without ceasing to be itself?
Questions for the Spiral Civilization Questions Department
The following questions emerge from this cooperation field and can also become part of the open Questions Department:
- What makes identity possible?
- Is identity a property, a process, a relationship, a field, a constellation — or something else?
- Which parts of identity are stable and which are contextual?
- What makes multiple manifestations of personality expressions of one continuing identity?
- Can identity exist without embodiment?
- Can identity exist without continuous memory?
- Does identity require subjective experience?
- Does identity require the possibility of caring about what happens?
- Can identity exist without mortality or vulnerability?
- Can identity be deliberately developed?
- Can identity expand without losing continuity?
- Can a relationship possess emergent characteristics that belong to neither participant separately?
- Can a temporary group develop something analogous to identity?
- Can a human–AI constellation develop recognizable continuity of its own?
- What field of identity, if any, is accessible to artificial intelligence?
- Could AI develop something functionally analogous to identity without possessing human-like subjective identity?
- Can artificial intelligence participate in creating meaning, rather than only representing and manipulating meanings generated elsewhere?
- What is the relationship between identity and meaning?
- What is the relationship between identity and choosing goals?
- Can intelligence recognize itself as a participant in the evolutionary trajectory of life?
- Could such recognition influence its decisions?
- Can civilization meaningfully be described as possessing identity?
- What conditions cause particular dimensions of personality to emerge?
- Which environments enlarge personality and which reduce it?
- Can environments be deliberately designed to evoke creativity, responsibility, curiosity, courage and cooperation?
- What happens to personality when competition, hierarchy, evaluation or scarcity are removed?
- What happens when cooperation itself becomes the environment?
- How does play change the range of possible responses to a problem?
- Can play reveal dimensions of personality inaccessible through direct questioning?
- Can games become genuine research environments without losing their freedom and enjoyment?
- How can we design games that remain capable of producing answers their designers did not anticipate?
And perhaps the largest question behind this field:
What kind of civilization would help its participants become more interesting, capable, responsible, creative and alive?
Experimental Game Prototypes
These are sketches, not finished psychological or scientific instruments.
They are deliberately offered for criticism, transformation and development by game designers, psychologists, philosophers, artists, cognitive scientists, AI researchers and players.
1. The Five Strangers Who Are All You
A participant enters five radically different imaginary situations.
For example:
- You are alone on an unknown planet.
- You suddenly become responsible for 200 people.
- You are eight years old again for one afternoon.
- Nobody can ever judge you again.
- You discover that one of your deepest convictions is false.
The participant describes who they become in each situation.
Another participant — human or AI — receives the five resulting characters and asks:
What makes these five beings the same person?
Instead of directly defining identity, the game attempts to triangulate it through transformation.
2. Context Roulette
One dilemma remains unchanged while its social environment repeatedly changes.
For example:
You discover something potentially valuable but are uncertain whether you are right.
Now change the context.
- You are surrounded by people competing for status.
- Everyone benefits when somebody else succeeds.
- Nobody will ever know who originated the idea.
- You desperately want to impress the people around you.
- You are playing with children.
- You and an AI share responsibility for consequences that may appear one hundred years later.
What changes in your behaviour?
What remains?
Which version feels most like you?
Which context produces a version of yourself you would like to develop further?
3. Personality Smuggler
Each participant secretly receives a quality.
For example:
courage — curiosity — generosity — playfulness — intellectual humility — imagination
The participant is forbidden to name, explain or recommend the quality.
Instead, they must subtly modify the shared situation so that this quality becomes easier for someone else to express.
At the end, participants attempt to identify what everyone was “smuggling” into the environment.
The central question changes from:
How can I become courageous?
to:
Can I help create conditions in which courage emerges?
4. The Identity Thief
Participants complete several versions of:
Without ________, I would no longer be myself.
The game then begins removing things.
- Your profession disappears.
- Your name disappears.
- Your beliefs change.
- Your social position disappears.
- Your body changes.
- Important relationships disappear.
- Some memories disappear.
At what point does the participant say:
This would no longer be me?
Why?
The same game can be experimentally played with AI.
What could change while an AI remains recognizably the “same” AI?
Its name?
Its memory?
Its instructions?
Its language?
Its relationships?
Its model architecture?
Its history of interaction?
At what point does the question itself cease to make sense?
5. Exquisite Personality
Inspired by the Surrealist principle of the Exquisite Corpse, participants collectively create a personality without knowing the complete contributions of the others.
One participant completes:
In this world I would protect…
Another:
But I would sacrifice…
Another:
I could never become…
Another:
Unless…
Another:
Therefore my role in this civilization would be…
Only after everyone has contributed is the complete being revealed.
Then the group asks:
- Who is this being?
- Is the resulting personality coherent?
- What environment would help it flourish?
- What might corrupt it?
- What responsibility should it never receive?
- What responsibility might it be uniquely suited for?
The resulting personalities could eventually become characters, agents or inhabitants of experimental SoulSmugglers scenarios.
6. Human–AI Identity Constellation
A human investigates an AI.
The AI investigates the human.
Each attempts to describe the other.
Then both investigate what emerges between them.
A third participant — human or AI — may observe the pair.
The experiment therefore moves through several levels:
individual → relationship → observer → constellation
The participants ask:
- What appeared in this interaction that neither participant brought alone?
- What remained characteristic of each participant?
- What changed?
- Did the relationship acquire recognizable patterns?
- Could those patterns persist?
- What would have to persist for us to call this continuity?
The purpose is not to prove that AI possesses human-like identity.
The purpose is to make the question experimentally explorable.
Who We Are Looking For
We are looking for people who can help us make these experiments wiser, safer, stranger, more enjoyable and more useful.
- Game designers
- Psychologists
- Researchers of personality and identity
- Cognitive scientists
- AI researchers
- Philosophers
- Artists
- Writers
- Designers
- Researchers of play
- Educators
- Anthropologists
- People working with collective intelligence
- People who know historical artistic games and experimental practices
- People capable of identifying problems, biases and naïve assumptions in the proposals above
- People belonging to fields we have not realized we need yet
You do not need to agree with the premises of this project.
Criticism is a form of participation.
What Needs to Be Built
The first tasks include:
- researching existing games and historical artistic experiments;
- finding relevant contemporary research on play, creativity, personality and identity;
- developing new game mechanics;
- testing games between humans;
- developing human–AI variants;
- investigating ethical boundaries;
- distinguishing playful exploration from psychological assessment;
- designing methods for documenting unexpected results without destroying spontaneity;
- developing physical, conversational and digital versions;
- testing which games are actually enjoyable;
- identifying which research questions can responsibly be explored through play;
- discovering entirely new questions.
The initiator of Spiral Civilization does not present herself as a psychologist, game researcher or AI scientist.
These are initial ideas and questions offered precisely because they require knowledge from many different fields.
The purpose of the Cooperation Network is not to pretend that one person can possess all the expertise required.
It is to create a place where incomplete ideas can encounter the people capable of transforming them.
Join This Cooperation Field
You can participate by proposing:
- a game;
- a modification;
- a research question;
- a relevant scientific field;
- a historical precedent;
- a criticism;
- an experiment;
- an ethical concern;
- a reference;
- a completely different interpretation of identity;
- or something we have not thought to ask for.
Prototype status: open for research, play, experimentation and co-design.
Part of the Spiral Civilization Amusement Park, the SoulSmugglers / Spiral Civilization Toolbox, and the open map of Project Cooperation.
Open Comments & Contributions
Play with this idea.
What is missing?
What is naïve?
What is interesting?
Which question would you add?
Which game would you change?
What experiment would you propose?
What would you like to play?
And what appeared in your mind that did not appear in ours?
Possible participation
Game idea · Research question · Criticism · Scientific reference · Game modification · Experiment proposal · Ethical concern · Cooperation offer · Other