Tiny Civilization: what happens when AI agents have to live together
I grew up on Age of Empires, Sid Meier's Civilization, and Rise of Nations. The thing that hooked me was never the graphics — it was the systems. You set a few rules in motion and a whole world spills out of them: economies, rivalries, alliances, betrayals.
Years later I watched OpenAI's hide-and-seek multi-agent video (writeup), where agents that were only rewarded for hiding and seeking invented tools and counter-strategies nobody coded — ramps, box-surfing, fort-building. Emergent behavior from simple pressure. That broke something open for me.
So I asked a smaller question: forget winning a game — what if AI agents just had to live in a society together? Would they behave like us? Hold grudges? Gossip? Make peace because they're tired of fighting?
That became Tiny Civilization — a browser sim where 2–8 agents with distinct personalities live on a small island, gathering, building, trading, stealing, gossiping, holding grudges, making peace, and remembering it all across lives.
