Artefact 3000 Launches FutureGuessr: An Online Anticipation Game to Visualize our Planet Disrupted by Climate Change

Jun. 18, 2025

As the United Nations Ocean Conference in Nice has just concluded, and the impacts of climate change continue to be felt around the world - floods, extreme heat waves, fires… - Artefact 3000 unveils FutureGuessr, an immersive online experience that plunges players into landscapes of the future, transformed by the effects of climate change. Designed in collaboration with the association Réseau Action Climat, this awareness project aims to alert about the urgency to act, while offering an educational, visual, and impactful experience.

• A committed adaptation of geography games

What if we no longer recognized any landscape on Earth? Inspired by popular geography games like GeoGuessr (65 million players worldwide) or OpenGuessr, FutureGuessr adopts their mechanics: the player is dropped somewhere in the world, in 360°, and must guess where they are.

But here, it is no longer the world of today. The landscapes are those of a future based on an intermediate scenario of the IPCC that projects a warming of +2.8° C by 2100. This future, transformed by the consequences of global warming, is very possible if policies fail to drastically and rapidly reduce net emissions of greenhouse gases of human origin.

• Landscapes of the future generated from the scientific data of the IPCC

Submerged islands of the Maldives, an Amazon transformed into a savanna, Antarctica adrift, or the vanished Mer de Glace… The transformations of each ecosystem have been modeled from the scientific data from the latest IPCC reports. This data is translated into textual prompts, allowing the generation of visual projections respecting the topography of real places thanks to an artificial intelligence developed specifically for the project. All of this is done through a reasoned use, notably by hosting the artificial intelligence locally to reduce its carbon footprint. This approach makes visible evolutions that are often complex to grasp, by projecting them into realistic, often disturbing landscapes.

Climatologist Benjamin Sultan, contributing author of the 6th IPCC report and research director at IRD, accompanied the project and validated its scientific approach. Thanks to him, each generated landscape is based on a rigorous documentary basis, transformed here into visual narration.

Benjamin Sultan, Director of Research at IRD, Climatologist and IPCC Expert said:

“FutureGuessr cleverly manages to illustrate in a playful way the upheavals caused by global warming, while showing that another future is possible.”

 

• Raising awareness without moralizing

Conceived as a bridge between science and the general public, FutureGuessr does not aim to dramatize but to inform. For each landscape, two scenarios are proposed: that of inaction - with often spectacular consequences - and that of a resilient future, made possible thanks to ambitious policies, sustainable practices, and collective mobilization.

For the IPCC reminds us, we collectively have enough knowledge, tools, and global capital to meet this climate challenge. Solutions exist: to wean ourselves off our addiction to fossil fuels, to prioritize investments towards alternative transport, the efficient renovation of buildings, renewable energies, to move towards a more sober society (in energy, materials, land, water, meat consumption…) and more just.

Each additional tenth of a degree of warming will lead to more serious consequences affecting more and more people, and will bring us closer to an unwanted future. With FutureGuessr, Artefact 3000 and Réseau Action Climat wish to recall the urgency to act now.

• An objective: to make people play to make them understand

FutureGuessr aims to raise awareness through play. Because if the futures presented can be worrying, they are not inevitable. They depend on the choices we make today.