When your body is the whole Earth

It was a strange, loving idea:  if global problems like climate change feel too big to fix, why not just make you... bigger?

Researchers are successfully tricking people into feeling more empathy for those who are different from them by placing them into VR worlds where they have a different body. Putting abusive men in homes where they're in a woman's body, or putting white people in black bodies are two examples that have shown striking, promising effects on implicit measures of bias. More than just walking in another's shoes, these experiences let you grab with another's hands and stare at a different face in the mirror. 

So what if your body wasn't human? What if you were the whole Earth, and your character was Gaia, steward of life? What would it feel like to spark the first amino acids to turn into single-celled organisms? To watch evolution happen on you, on you, because of you? To see that all spiral off the rails after you give fire to apes and in a few short millennia humanity brings it all crashing down? 

We've been building this minimum viable product for half a year. It is sketchy and basic, with an emphasis on "minimum." But we've learned a ton from these broken interactions and blocky animations. Like: this piece must be interactive, not a 3D movie. The player needs agency. Yet it must be linear-- we're not trying to branch into alternate realities if the player decides to withhold fire from the apes. Characters are vital, but what should the moon's personality be? And what character should the player be? Will it be too painful to be the Earth? 

We still don't know how it should end.  The Giving Tree is a wonderful reference for the target emotional state we want to leave each player with: grief, guilt, and gratitude.  But will it be too brutal if you are the tree when the inevitable happens, and humans destroy themselves and you as well?

We want this piece to wiggle its way into your gut and nudge you to do more to be a sustainable steward of life, whatever that means for you, and to treasure this tiny blue spaceship we call home. 

Now we scrap it and rebuild from the ground up. Onwards.