Gaia

A new myth

Gaia is a unique form of story. Instead of passively watching a narrative about Earth unfold, you live it. This is not a movie, or a book, or a podcast, or theater. It’s not even a game, because there are no points and there’s no competition.

It’s a participatory story where you play god — you are Gaia, the life force — and the narrative progresses as you create a habitable world and sustain all of the organisms that live in it.

Most people care tragically little about climate change. It’s a problem too abstract to feel personal, and too big to seem fixable. Humanity never cared very much, but we care even less now that a pandemic is sweeping the globe and the truth about our racist social systems is becoming more poignant than ever.

But we’re still heating our climate. We’re still logging our only lifelines faster than ever. We’re still burning fossil fuels. And when we fix our societies and find a cure for COVID, our real existential battle will truly begin.

We invent new forms of stories because the old ways haven’t saved us yet.

This is the right time for a story like Gaia. Our hypothesis is that by being the earth, all human “players” will gain a deep empathy for the ways in which our actions could nurture, but are instead destroying, our only home.

Other stories like Inconvenient Truth and Day After Tomorrow have let us glimpse our own demise, but they’ve failed to permanently shake us fully awake.

VR is a medium defined by personal agency and deep empathy so it is uniquely suited for this narrative in which the whole beautiful world is painstakingly built and then simply, casually, lost.