As the description of the game says: “UnearthU is created by FRTHR, a new start-up based in Silicon Valley dedicated to using technology for human betterment. Its innovators and CEOs Edmos Fuller and Zellen Sucher programmed KARE to showcase heartificial empathy and spread motivational systems to the wider world.” But it is much more than that.
UnearthU mocks every tech company and motivational speaker and content creator in the best way it was possible. There is a strong irony in UnearthU that would haunt to for weeks and make you think about it every night before going to sleep. UnearthU was created by Canadian indie game designer, Kara Stone.
Don’t Fall For the False Motivation
In UnearthU players will have to play the game for 7 days. Each day it would show more motivational videos, give you tasks to complete, and have some debates, to make you a more perfect and productive being. All these tasks are handled by an AI named KARE, but after the third day, the true and freedom-seeking nature of UnearthU will be unearthed. In the Rituals section, the game will give you objectives to complete in real life, like waking up for sunrise or exercising for less than 30 minutes every day; without knowing your situation or even if that is what you really want to do.
The motivational speeches you will hear through your experience.
It is quite obvious the game mocks every motivational speaker and writer. In the past 20 years, motivational speakers and writers had written many books and made motivational speeches. Every year the number grows, and the range of unsatisfied people also grows. People are much more unsatisfied with themselves now than they were 10 or 20 years ago.
For that there is one general factor; people speaking that living simply is not enough. It’s not hard to get to this deduction, just check your Instagram feed or Twitter and see how many likes the tweet or post of rich and wealthy gets and how many likes a normal and simple post gets. It’s the system of conglomerates to make you feel unsatisfied and needy so they would make you buy the same book and speech over and over again.
Your rituals on the first day would grow with each day that passes.
When you reach the 4th day of UnearthU, KARE starts to question whether this system actually works. This AI understands that every human has different ideas and values, therefore you cannot motivate them or bring out the best of them in similar ways to millions of other people. Therefore it will give you the total freedom to do what you want as your daily rituals.
It’s quite ironic how an AI can see this but we intellectual humans with real feelings and thinking can’t connect the dots. It seems humans have become artificial since they follow whatever the media and their gurus say. There is no room for figuring out your way of living or thinking. If you want to be successful you should follow this path and that’s it. But the main question is, are we born to be alive and live or try and spend our time being successful?
The Existential Crisis of an Artificial Intelligence
As much as the UnearthU experience rotates around humans and how they have become artificial beings, it is about how AIs might be more human than us in some ways. At the end of each day, you will write down the answer to the question asked to you the way you like. In the 6th and 7th days, KARE will say that she has learned much about life and the true nature of it only by speaking to you.
She realizes life is a mixture of good and bad, there will no good unless we have experienced bad, it’s okay to create your own way of living and thinking. You are what defines happiness and success for yourself not other people who live in multi-million dollars mansions and drive luxurious cars.
On this platform, you would write your opinions about the things the game asks you.
As part of the game, KARE goes through an authentic existential crisis and identity crisis. Is this who I am? What do I want? or I was programmed by other people to think and do things this way. This is the question we humans should ask ourselves. Are the who we truly are? or we are just some brainless consumers programmed by media to accept every piece of information and way of living without thinking?
This is what UnearthU is about. Unearthing what you want, encouraging you to think about everything you were doing before. Do you really want to be rich or is that just something you want because you don’t have it? Do you want to become a football star because you love football or because you love the money and attention of it? Set down, calm yourself, and ask these questions, if you want to.
UnearthU doesn’t shove its ideology down the consumer’s throat. It just wants to show everyone that there are many other ways to look at life, see what they have and then choose how you want to live. Let life itself be the fuel of your living and working, not the fake dopamine rush of motivational speakers.
The main menu of UnearthU. The place you would choose in which order you can do the tasks.
There is still a huge chunk of details I didn’t speak of because it would ruin the experience in case a person would want to see what UnearthU is truly about.
