Where Would You Be Born?
Four babies are born every second somewhere in the world. What if one of them were you?
You do not choose where you are born or into which family; real birth statistics do. Then life moves on year by year: school, work, family, illness, moving away. At the turning points, the decision is yours. Your country's real numbers stay with you at every step.
Birth Lottery
197 countries, weighted by the number of births each year. You are far more likely to land in a country with a large population.
Real Numbers
Life expectancy, schooling, income, health: World Bank data sits under every event as a footnote.
Your Decisions
Stay in school or start working? Move to the city? Every choice has a cost and a payoff.
Finding your place in the world
Birth record
NAME
What you live through will collect here. Tap a line to star it.
People born at the same moment as you, in other countries. Their lives run alongside yours, shaped by their own country's numbers.
FINAL RECORD
REMEMBERED
Decision
How do you play Where Would You Be Born?
- Press BE BORN. The game draws a country from 197, weighted by how many babies each one has per year: you are about 400 times more likely to be born in India than in Norway, simply because far more babies are born there every day.
- Read your birth record: your sex, whether you live in a city or the countryside, your family's income bracket, your parents' ages and jobs, and the life expectancy in your country. If you do not like it you can draw again; real life does not give you that option.
- Life moves forward one year at a time. Events happen with probabilities based on your country's data: starting school, getting sick, finding a job, moving away. Four meters change along the way: health, mood, learning and relationships.
- At the turning points the game stops and asks you to decide. Every option has a cost, and there is no "right" answer. The star button at the top hands your decisions over to the game.
- You can raise the speed from ×1 to ×64, and the "Skip ahead »" button runs quickly through the years until the next decision card. Everything you live through collects in the Life tab; tap a line to star it.
- When the life ends you get the final record: how many years you lived, how that compares with your country's average, and what is remembered. You can share the card, or be born again in the same country or in a brand-new draw.
Are the numbers in the game real?
Yes. The birth lottery, life expectancy, child mortality, income per person, schooling, urbanisation, internet access and similar indicators come from the World Bank's open data set (World Development Indicators), using the most recent value for each country. When a figure is missing, the median of countries in the same region and income group is used instead and marked with an asterisk in the Country tab. The events themselves are fiction: what happens to you in a given year is not set by the data but by a draw weighted with it. The game does not tell anyone their fate; it lets you feel how the odds change depending on where you are born.
How does the game handle death, illness and hard events?
They appear about as often as they do in real life. The risk of dying before age five is around 40 times higher in Chad than in Japan; the game does not hide that, but it does not dwell on details either. Losses are mentioned in a single sentence, violence is not described, and suicide and addiction are left out. Beliefs only come up in everyday scenes such as family meals and holidays, without judgement. The game is meant for players aged 13 and over.
What does the Peers tab show?
Three people born at the same moment as you, in other countries. Their lives run on the same engine with their own country's numbers, and they make their decisions automatically. While you are studying for university entrance exams, someone your age may already have been working for years. At the end you see how many of them are still alive.
Frequently asked questions
Is the game free? Do I need an account?
It is free and needs no account. An unfinished life is stored only in your own browser; close the page, come back later and press Continue your life to pick it up again.
How long does one life take?
At ×1 speed a quiet year passes in about a second and a half, and in a year with events the game waits so you have time to read. A 75-year life with all its decisions takes 10 to 15 minutes. Raise the speed or skip years with Skip ahead » and it drops to a few minutes.
What are my chances of being born in the United States or the UK?
About 134 million babies are born worldwide each year. Roughly 3.6 million of them are born in the United States, so about 1 draw in 37 lands there. The United Kingdom has around 690,000 births a year, which is about 1 in 200. With the Be born again in the same country button on the final screen you can try any country again.
How often is the data updated?
The country file is rebuilt from World Bank data once a year. The bottom of the Country tab shows which year the data was taken from.
Data: World Bank, World Development Indicators (CC BY 4.0). Reused under the World Bank's own license; the game and texts belong to Test Merkezim. The simulation is for education and entertainment and makes no prediction about any person or country.