We’re so excited to announce the launch of Kai UnEarthed! After more work in polishing and playtesting, we’re proud to showcase Kai UnEarthed as a multisensory meditation.

Summary of the Game:

Kai UnEarthed is a meditation on unpoliced futures. You can reflect on what it means to be an ancestor to liberated young people in a world healing from climate change. You can imagine and make contact with them through a paper journal, an interactive visual novel with multiple endings, and a videogame world. As you chose how the story unfolds, you can: 

- fall in love with your crush

- go through a coming of age ritual

- explore the reclaimed ruins of an abolished youth jail

- go on a psychedelic journey imagining the volatile final decades of the Capitalist Era, as seen through the eyes of the revolution's children. 

What’s New:

• Explore Kai’s immersive world through art, sound and more
• 3 endings depending on your choices
•  Psychedelic 3D scavenger hunts
•  Reflect on the choices you make, the artifacts you leave behind, and the worlds that will grow out of them. 

Why You Should Play This Version:

• Experience more immersion with 2D and 3D gameplay
• See Tempest, Mars and other characters come to life
• Run around and explore the forest, collecting artifacts

History:

The game began as a liberated future world that M. Coopilton imagined with their former students, colleagues, and friends when they were a high school teacher organizing with their students to shut down Seattle’s toxic youth jail. They created a series of analog games imagining the future world that will replace the jail. During USC Games MFA classes, M.,Olivia, and Claire turned this world into a prototype of Kai UnEarthed. M incorporated it into their PhD dissertation research on an Afrofuturistic game jam they co-designed with Black colleagues in Dr. Brendesha Tynes’ research center at USC. They studied how young people learned in this environment, and shared insights from the study at GDC 2024 and in several academic publications. They are now working with TreaAndrea Russworm and the Radical Play lab to incorporate Kai UnEarthed into a Gaming for Climate Justice class at a local high school in South Central LA. Details can be found at mcoopilton.com and kaiunearthed.com.

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Director: Dr. Matthew Coopilton, as part of their research at the University of Southern California.

Several phases of the project co-directed with Olivia Peace.

Narrative Design:  Olivia Peace, Matthew Coopilton

Unity Programming: Claire Hu, Matthew Coopilton 

Visual Art and Worldbuilding:  Matthew Coopilton, Olivia Peace 

Game Design: Matthew Coopilton, Olivia Peace, Claire Hu 

UI / UX design: Matthew Coopilton, Olivia Peace, Claire Hu

UX research: Matthew Coopilton, Olivia Peace, Kirsten Elliott, Dr. Jaymon Ortega, Dr. Josh Schuschke, and De'Andra Johnson, with support from Dr. Brendesha Tynes and the Center for Empowered Learning and Development with Technology. 

Music: K.B., Devonte Serrano Aycox, and Z Luo

Sound Design: K.B., Z Luo, and Matthew Coopilton

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The story-world is based on participatory design and worldbuilding sessions that Matthew Coopilton did with students and educators at Southwest Youth and Family Services, the ARTifACTS collective, the No New Youth Jail movement in Seattle, and many other friends and comrades.  See https://www.kaiunearthed.com/partners for details and shout outs. 

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Thanks to the interdisciplinary USC Games program for supporting our learning as we made this game. It started as an MFA game design class project and independent study at the USC School of Cinematic Arts and continued as part of Matthew's doctoral dissertation at the USC Rossier School of Education and was polished during their Sustainability Solutions Postdoctoral Fellowship at the School of Cinematic Arts.  

Special thanks to our mentors and colleagues:  Dr. Andreas Kratky, Tracy Fullerton and the Game Innovation Lab, Dr. Brendesha Tynes and the Center for Empowered Learning and Development with Technology, Dr. TreaAndrea Russworm and the Radical Play Lab, and Dr. Gale Sinatra. And thanks to our classmates in the USC Interactive Media and Games class of ‘22, especially Michelle Ma who drew the image of Mama Li. 

Kai UnEarthed has been analyzed in several academic publications and Matthew has presented it at peer-reviewed/selective conferences and game expos. See mcoopilton.com for details. 

Thank you to the USC Arts and Climate Collective and Sustainability Solutions Postdoctoral Fellowship for financially supporting Matthew and Z's work on this project and their outreach efforts around it. 

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Thank you to people who playtested a prototype of this game during an Afrofuturist-themed Critical Game Jam: Brianna Mims, Cam Wade, Gabriel Soares, Jomih Ché, Light Bird, Magic Udeh, Nathann Latimore, and Reginald King. Thank you to Camella Coopilton, the Abolitionist Gaming Network's Abolitionist Game Night in Chicago, participants at the 2022 Games, Learning, and Society Conference, Sundeep Sood, and students at the Met School in Providence, RI for feedback as well. 

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The ideas presented in this game are those of the game's developers, in conversation with our communities and everyone mentioned here and on our website. They do not represent USC, Southwest Youth and Family Services, the No New Youth Jail coalition, the Abolitionist Gaming Network, or any other organizations.  

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We encourage players to create your own games, stories, videos, and other media set in the world of this game (its "cinematic universe"). We are supporting this by offering climate justice game design workshops for young people.  Please reach out at kaiunearthed.com for details. Please feel free to post and showcase what you’ve dreamed up and tag us. We’re eager to see what futures you imagine.

Kai UnEarthed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.  For details, go to:  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

What players choose to create and do with this game are up to you.  By engaging with Kai UnEarthed, you agree you will not hold the developers or any organizations they are affiliated with liable for your actions.  

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Attributions for 3rd-party assets used in the game can be found at: https://www.kaiunearthed.com/partners. 

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For news about a possible sequel and related games about unpoliced futures, please follow kaiunearthed.com, @kaiunearthed on Instagram, and @abolitionistgamingnetwork.