FACEMINER Mine faces, dodge audits

The work itself is simple: datasets full of images land on your desk, and you pick out the human faces and send them off for money. It feels like one of those "prove you are not a robot" puzzles, except here it is the whole job. Doing it by hand earns pocket change, so the real game is automation: better software, a faster CPU, more memory and storage, until the machine classifies faces faster than you ever could. Your rig starts at 1999 specs, which is to say pitiful, and ends as an absurd supercomputer. Every upgrade costs cash, and every upgrade makes the thing run hotter.

Growth has a bill attached. Your rig drinks electricity, the cooling system needs constant attention, and if the hardware overheats, that is game over, so you end up buying solar panels and generators like a small power company. Then there are the emissions. Wildfires and floods pile up in the news, journalists come knocking, and the company offers you a menu of solutions: fund a tree-planting program, run some PR, buy carbon credits. The options are worded just innocently enough that you can almost believe the money fixes the harm. It is the game's sharpest joke, and it lands because you are the one paying.