THE ARCADE
Five playable exhibits: drive the synthetic city, contain the copies, keep the human lineage alive, and test whether…
Real or Rendered
Seven rounds, one judgement each, a score at the end. The useful part is not your score — it is discovering which category you are confidently wrong about.
The Ward
Four rooms under quarantine, copies of copies loose in the corridors. Find the keycard, survive the swarm, throw the breakers in the right order: human, copy, copy-of-copy.
The Sprawl
Drive the city the machines built. Every building is occupied, every window is lit, and there is nobody inside any of them. The point is how long it takes you to notice.
The Preserve
Ten epochs of internet history. Keep a human lineage alive past the Turn, with fewer resources every round. Losing is the common outcome and it is instructive.
The Drill Yard
No score, no pressure, no ending. Repetition until noticing becomes automatic rather than effortful — which is the only version of this skill that survives contact with a real feed.
Why a museum has an arcade
Because reading about detection produces the feeling of competence without the competence. Every one of these was built to create a specific experience the prose cannot: being confidently wrong in the Gauntlet, noticing too late in the Sprawl, watching quality decay across generations in and losing to arithmetic in the Preserve.
If you only play one, play the Gauntlet — it takes five minutes and it will tell you something uncomfortable about your own eye. Then read how to spot AI writing and how to spot fake images, video and voices, which explain what you just experienced.
The Gauntlet is meant to be hard, and most people score worse than they expect. That is the design, not a failure of it — a test you pass easily teaches you nothing, and the honest finding across this whole site is that human detection is far less reliable than people assume. Losing here is cheaper than losing to a cloned voice on the phone.