Game B

Working Definition

Game B is the working name for a hypothetical, still-to-be-designed civilizational order intended to replace “Game A”—the prevailing arrangement of institutions, incentives, and technologies built around win-lose rivalry, bureaucratic hierarchy, and perpetual material growth. In the technical vocabulary of its architects (Jordan Hall, Jim Rutt, Daniel Schmachtenberger, and Bret Weinstein), Game A is the suite of collective-intelligence mechanisms that since the Neolithic agricultural revolution has solved three survival problems—extracting resources, outcompeting rival groups, and suppressing internal defection—by imposing complicated rule-bound machinery onto a complex living world; Game B aims to solve those same coordination problems through high-trust, omni-win networks without top-down bureaucratic coercion. In everyday internet usage, Game B designates a loose subculture of podcasts, Discord servers, and intentional-community experiments seeking “a new operating system for civilization.” Keeping the theoretical hypothesis distinct from the online social scene is essential for evaluating either.

Genesis and Global Lineage

The term originated around 2013 in an informal working group that included Jim Rutt (1953–2026), former CEO of Network Solutions and chairman of the Santa Fe Institute, and tech entrepreneur Jordan Hall (then Greenhall), co-founder of DivX, alongside evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein. As Rutt later recounted, that initial cohort fractured over a dispute between a “personal inner-transformation” wing and an “institutional-design” wing. The vocabulary revived around 2017 when Hall began publishing essays on the collapse of institutional sensemaking (the “Blue Church”) and Daniel Schmachtenberger published his thesis on the “generator functions of existential risk”: rivalrous (win-lose) games multiplied by exponential technology, and complicated socio-technical systems devouring their own complex ecological and social substrate. From 2019 onward, the primary vehicle of the concept was The Jim Rutt Show podcast, supplemented by a Facebook group, a Discord server, and a volunteer-maintained wiki. Its intellectual lineage braids together Santa Fe complexity science, Joseph Tainter’s theory of diminishing returns to complexity, Elinor Ostrom’s work on self-governing commons, and radical mid-century critics of industrial institutions such as Ivan Illich. Because Game B has no single foundational monograph—its “canon” consists of podcast transcripts and blog essays—it has been easily co-opted by New Age retreats on one side and confused with tech accelerationism on the other.

Central European Lineage

The one documented regional thread in the Game B lexicon is partial and runs through the Vienna-born philosopher and radical critic of modern institutions Ivan Illich. In a November 2019 conversation with Jim Rutt laying out the architecture of a Game B community, Jordan Hall named conviviality—the deliberate design of shared social life, rituals, and face-to-face civic fabric—as an essential pillar of Game B, explicitly crediting the concept to Illich’s 1973 book Tools for Conviviality, while Rutt added that conviviality might be “Game B’s secret weapon.” Born in Vienna in 1926, Illich attended school there until anti-Jewish laws forced his departure in 1941; he left Vienna with his mother for Italy in 1942 and returned to Austria after the war to complete his doctorate on Arnold Toynbee’s philosophy of history at the University of Salzburg in 1951, before pursuing his priestly and intellectual career in New York, Puerto Rico, and at the CIDOC center in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where Tools for Conviviality was written. The link thus documents the direct borrowing of a key pillar from a thinker of Vienna and Salzburg formation, rather than a Central European origin for Game B as a whole; although Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s Viennese general systems theory stands in the deeper background of Santa Fe complexity science, the Game B founders do not cite him directly.

Why Now

Game B entered wider circulation between 2018 and 2023 as part of the online “sensemaking” wave (Rebel Wisdom, The Stoa), propelled by three shocks. First, the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal lent credibility to Hall’s argument that digital platforms were fragmenting collective human cognition. Second, the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic prompted Rutt and Hall to frame lockdowns as a live test of supply-chain fragility and local resilience. Third, the post-2022 surge of generative AI brought Schmachtenberger’s vocabulary—multipolar traps, molochian arms races, and metacrisis—directly into mainstream AI-safety debates. Simultaneously, critiques forced a reckoning: in January 2023 media theorist Douglas Rushkoff debated Rutt on air, accusing Game B of tech-elite escapism and opaque jargon, which prompted Rutt to pivot toward a grounded “Game B 3.0” focused on worker cooperatives and local food systems, while a 2022 offshoot (“Game C”) criticized the movement’s bloodless rationalism. Rutt’s death in May 2026 closed the project’s founding chapter.

Explanatory Power

Game B’s analytical strength is that it treats civilization as a single coupled incentive system rather than a list of separate policy failures. First, it identifies a shared structural generator behind climate breakdown, nuclear and AI arms races, and media polarization: in a multipolar rivalrous game without enforceable coordination, any actor who voluntarily slows down—a lab that pauses an unsafe AI model, a state that leaves fossil fuels in the ground—is outcompeted and replaced by a less scrupulous rival. Second, Hall’s distinction between complicated systems (engineered machines governed by fixed blueprints) and complex adaptive systems (a forest or living culture) explains why layering more bureaucracy onto modern crises yields diminishing returns: complicated rulebooks create new loopholes for strategic gaming. Third, the framework demands a concrete transition architecture: Rutt’s proposal to prototype a 2,000-person, non-rivalrous township (such as Hall’s proposed site in Highland County, Virginia, or early Israeli kibbutzim) that spreads by voluntary replication rather than state conquest is an empirically falsifiable bet.

Axes of Debate

Underappreciated Angle

The most revealing blind spot of Game B is its own sociology. By Rutt’s own candid estimate, the movement was roughly three-quarters male and heavily populated by affluent veterans of software engineering, venture capital, and quantitative finance—people for whom “exiting Game A” is an attractive thought experiment precisely because they have already won Game A. That is not merely a moral irony; it is a fatal theoretical problem for a movement claiming to build commons institutions. As Elinor Ostrom demonstrated across hundreds of historical cases in Governing the Commons (1990), self-governing resource regimes endure where participants share high mutual dependence, face costly exit options, and know their grandchildren will have to farm the same valley together. Game B attempts to design high-trust commons for the demographic group with the lowest exit costs and highest geographic mobility on Earth. If the diagnosis of multipolar traps is right, the real-world laboratories of non-rivalrous survival are rarely found in podcasts or rural Virginia land purchases; they are found where people without an exit option have had to invent durable protocols of mutual aid under scarcity—from traditional irrigation commons and municipal cooperatives to the informal solidarity networks of Central and Eastern Europe’s shortage economies.