Building A Stranger's Life
If I asked you to build something to help society AND to stop working a 9-to-5, and all you had was ChatGPT and a spicy brain to work with, what would you build?
If you had to choose one specific problem worth solving — something real, something that matters to other people — which one would it be? And what shape would the solution take, considering you have to build it for realsies, and put it in front of people, next month?
Those were the questions I started with. The rest is what came out of them.
I started thinking about it as a business; profits were a consideration early on. They didn’t last long.
Not out of naivety — more that once you factor them in, they tend to become the whole conversation. Legal structures, monetization, market fit. The work starts bending toward what sells rather than what’s worth making. For someone who had never charged for their artistic work to begin with, that felt like the wrong door to walk through first.
When you remove profit as the primary filter, you find yourself asking different questions. Not what will people pay for, but what actually has value. It’s a slower and less legible process. It doesn’t produce a roadmap. But it tends to produce something real.
Games made sense as a vehicle. I knew them well, and they offer something other mediums don’t — you live inside the narrative rather than observe it, among other things. A reader can put a book down and stay detached. A player is already inside the consequence before they’ve thought about it. That felt useful for what I wanted to do.
The problem was scope. Games are expensive and complicated to orchestrate — programming, art, sound, narrative, none of it free, all of it slow. So I cut it down to text based content. Not as a retreat, just as a workable shape. The question then became: what’s the biggest thing I could build inside that constraint that would actually matter.
The problem I chose to work on was job fit. Not how to find a job — there are tools for that — but figuring out which direction actually suits you, which is harder and less solved than it sounds. Storytelling seemed like the right vehicle. Put someone inside a situation with real consequences and they’ll show themselves what they value faster than any questionnaire manages.
The game works simply. You’re placed in a life, given a context, and asked to make choices inside it. Close to what others in the genre already do — nothing revolutionary in the mechanism. What mattered was what went inside it.
Three lives. A boy in 1958 — motor oil, strict father, a road that splits between the army, the factory, a scholarship, and something else entirely. A girl in 1979 — single mother, a little more precarious, slightly wider options, gigs or studies or just staying local and making do. A they/them in 2012 — alone at 2am, a letter from a sister who’s leaving, cake in the fridge, warehouse job applications open in another tab.
I didn’t write a single line by hand. I gave the machine parameters and let it work. Each timeline was generated in isolation. And across all three, without being told to, it placed the same formica table. I didn’t even know they were called like that.
It had been there since the seventies. It’s still there. The options got shorter, the timespan more urgent, but the table didn’t change. Nobody prompted that. It just emerged, likely because it’s true.
In building and playing the game, I got to witness what could have been of myself. The artsy and directionless life, the factory floor, the rushed decisions and the ones deferred too long. Watching your own possible lives play out from the outside is a strange and powerful thing. The game was built for others, but it worked on me first.
The larger question stays open. If this is what comes out of one person with an AI and a specific problem to solve, what else is possible?
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If you have thoughts, or a problem worth building toward, you can reach out at contact@saberiangames.com. You can play the game for free at https://saberiangames.itch.io/a-strangers-life
