Madrid Developer And NASA Launch Social Experiment Mars Survival Game

Players are being invited to “live” on Mars in a brutal new survival game designed as a giant social experiment — with a NASA-linked research team and a developer behind The Witcher tracking how people behave when food, power and oxygen start running out.

Behind the project is Alfredo Munoz, 45, a Madrid born and raised architect based in the US and head of architecture firm Abiboo, who made headlines during the COVID-19 pandemic with Nüwa — a striking concept for the “first sustainable city” on the Red Planet.

Now his team is turning that vision into a playable world called Futuverse, built for VR, PC and mobile, where gamers face the same brutal choices a real Mars settlement would cause, from rationing essentials to stopping society from fracturing when systems fail.

Munoz says the twist is that every decision is designed to generate research-grade data, with blockchain used to log how goods, power and relationships move through the settlement, allowing scientists to analyse behaviour without needing to know who any individual player is.

And while Mars is the flagship simulation, the game will also expand into other extreme futures – from moon bases to floating sea-level cities and post-apocalyptic Earth scenarios – to study what happens to human civilisation when normal life collapses.

Speaking from Miami, Florida, the architect said the game would be a way “to leverage science as a way to bring gamification and an understanding of how societies will have to survive in very extreme environments, either because of climate change or because of the opportunities afforded by reaching and settling in space, or because of civil unrest due to potential wars, like a nuclear war or something.”

Munoz, who is also the Chair for Memberships of the Technical Committee of Space Architecture at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, pointed out that they now have top experts from around the world on their development team, including people from NASA.

These experts include Dr Alfonso Davila, a Research Scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center; Dr Amanda Kavner, whose research focuses on developing and applying cognitive computational models in educational assessment and curricular development using machine learning algorithms to analyse neurocognitive measurements recorded in educational environments; and Kenny Vassigh, who has worked at Silicon Valley companies like Google, as well as at NASA, where he has worked on designing spaceflight missions, the Space Shuttle, and the International Space Station, among others.

The team also includes sociologists keen to study how relationships between players evolve in the virtual Mars settlement and on floating or post-apocalyptic Earth cities, including Dr Felix Tropf, a sociologist researching social demography, genetics, and artificial intelligence, among others.

He is an Assistant Professor in Social Science Genetics at CREST/ENSAE, an Associate Member of Nuffield College in Oxford, a Visiting Scientist at the Queensland Institute for Medical Research in Australia, and at the Centre for Fertility and Health in Oslo, in Norway.

The game is being designed by Rafal Nowocien, a seasoned game developer who co-created “The Witcher”, a popular game franchise that has since been turned into a Netflix series. He also worked on Cyberpunk 2077 when he was a member of renowned game creators CD Projekt.

Munoz told Newsflash: “We already had really big brains, but now we have some members from NASA and a top-quality, multidisciplinary team.”

He explained his interest in the project, saying: “There is no space analogue for analysing how a large community will be able to make it in these extreme conditions.

“Once we start envisioning how a large community of thousands of people are going to be forced to interact with each other when the conditions around us are almost going to kill us… That is very different than when you have a trained group of astronauts who have been psychologically trained and who have already been through the process of how to survive in those conditions.”

He said that he and his team see “an opportunity with big data analysis” and “gamification” to “understand how social conflict happens”.

He said that Futuverse has “two directions”, the first one being simulating an extensive human presence on Mars and on the moon, the second being simulating a floating city on Earth after a rise in the sea level and a post-apocalyptic settlement after a devastating nuclear war or a “Dune-like” environment where humans struggle to find water.

He sees all of these settlements as interconnected and relevant to his quest to develop solutions that can be used on Earth to tackle current and future problems.

Munoz said that there was plenty that we could learn about in space in order to “make Earth a better place”.

This all began half a decade ago with the creation of Nüwa, a simulation of a future capital city on Mars.

Munoz said: “Nüwa started as an exercise of working with top leaders in space, in engineering, astrobiology, planetary geology, to create a simulation of how a future capital on Mars could be.”

He explained that there would be an in-game currency based on the amount of energy required to sustain human life on Mars, saying that settlements on Earth would feature items that would be a lot cheaper.

He used the example of a cheeseburger costing 100 credits on Mars while an insect burger would simply cost one credit.

He said that the reason for this is that it takes 10 times more resources to produce meat compared to vegetables or algae, and that our ability as a species to send resources to the Red Planet will be extremely limited as the orbits of Mars and Earth only allow for travel between the two approximately once every two years.

This means, in effect, that the Mars settlement will have to be nearly completely self-sufficient.

He said: “We need to be able to create an entire life support scenario on Mars with the resources we have on Mars.”

He envisions humans being able to stay on the Red Planet for the long run and even perhaps having children there.

Munoz said that players will be able to earn credits by working together and competing with each other in teams to solve problems, with those who figure out how to make money in the Mars simulation, the first they are developing, would later be able to ‘travel’ to simulations on Earth, where their credits will have more purchasing power.

The Mars settlers will be split into three classes, Munoz said, explaining that there will be ‘tourists’, people who are simply visiting the Mars settlement, ‘explorers’, geared towards discovery and advancing human civilisation on the Red Planet, and ‘citizens’, who can participate in the city’s political life and influence the course of history in the simulation.

Munoz is also keen to see if players come up with “alternative political systems” on the Red Planet, especially ones that he and his team have not necessarily anticipated. He explained that he plans to use blockchain technology to ensure that all player actions are “traceable” for the scientists studying them.

Munoz said: “The advantage of blockchain is that, although it is private and you don’t know who is behind an interaction, everything is traceable.

“So, for big data analysis and to understand things from a social sciences point of view what happens in the trades or in the relationships between the citizens, it helps a lot to have very relevant information regarding the transmission of power and the transmission of goods and services, and to create an entire ecosystem that could potentially be very, very different to how we live in today’s society.”

Munoz sees Futuverse as an opportunity to “learn by doing”, as educational technology that can teach players and scientists about the Red Planet while having fun.

The ‘Futuverse’ game is currently available in Beta version in Early Access and is set to be released as an Alpha build (an early version of the full game) in the near future before being fully released.