You can play entirely solo if you want, and even turn off networking if you don’t want to see other people at all. Mostly you just see other players running around doing their own thing. There’s no competitive or mandatory co-op things that I’ve seen.
A bit somewhere gets flipped from 0 to 1, and the ridiculously complicated program that’s designed to output natural language text says something unexpected.
I know it seems really creepy, but I don’t personally believe there’s any real sentience or intention behind it. Stories about machines and computers saying stuff like this and taking over the world are probably in Gemini’s training data somewhere.