ROOT

Project details match catalog

About

You are about to die… AGAIN! The year is 2194 and you, plus more than half of the population, live in a computer simulation called e+erntiy. Due to our massive carbon footprint, every day the earth looks more and more like Mars. That didn’t matter to you though, not until Earth was hit with a massive solar flare, which caused worldwide blackouts. You are one of the lucky ones. You got turned back on. But the system is unstable. If you don’t get a secure source of power to the ROOT directory, you will get shut off, this time for good. There are people willing to help. We contacted teams who have a shot at saving us all. Their mission is to retrieve a crucial part from San Antonio, TX and bring it down to our ROOT directory on Antarctica. Their mission will be difficult but not impossible. They will be without much of the technology they are used to, and communication is limited to radio. This is where you come in. We need you to help coordinate their efforts, communicate with them, and guide them through the pitfalls they will inevitably face. You will be able to speak with them on the radio, and when they reach data centers, you will be able to receive their video documents. We are all Running Out Of Time. Guide them well. Our survival depends on it.

Impact

Capitalism has failed us. With ROOT, I fictionalize current events to the extreme with a scenario where we take capitalism too far, harvest too much from this Earth, destroy the balance of nature, and as a result, we face irreversible Climate Change. Through a fictional exploration of the future, the player makes decisions that affect the narrative for better or worse. Together, we can imagine a better world! To have ideas widely adopted, they first need to be explored and accepted in the stories we tell. These stories plant the seeds for real life change. I intend to bring about real change - change through stories and a change in values. ROOT explores a world world ruined by Climate Change but also a world where we can work together and change the future. Because if we join together, we rise together. And maybe, just maybe, by working together, we can overcome our very real looming extinction event.

Team

Kristen Renee Gorlitz - Project Lead, Creator, Writer An avid filmmaker, Kristen has over 20 producer and directing credits to her name. She founded Mindweird, a media company focused on pushing the boundaries of storytelling using 3-D stereoscopic and Virtual Reality tools. ROOT, a hybrid VR/TV game and Mindweird's most ambitious project, was recently selected at the New Images Festival and accepted into the Oculus Start Program. Kristen is an Oculus Start Fellow (2021), a stereoscopic 3-D filmmaker, and a passionate genre storyteller. Matt Lubetich - Producer A multi-faceted producer, Matt has deep experience with international studio leadership (Bigfoot.com), Marcom (Microsoft, PwC, Target Stores), and developing/producing original programming. In 2009, Matt launched Evening Sea Entertainment to create stories with family, action, and strong Asian themes. Previously, Matt was the COO and Production Executive at vertically integrated Bigfoot Entertainment. Spending a decade in Hong Kong and The Philippines, Matt developed international feature films with notable directors, including Hanelle Culpepper (PICARD, The Flash). On the business front of filmmaking, he drove government and private co-production initiatives with China, Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand, co-launched the International Academy of Film and Television, and oversaw the Fashion TV franchisee for Singapore and The Philippines. Paul Sartain - Programmer, Technology Consultant A self-proclaimed technophile, Paul Sartain has worked in the Film and Television industry as a lighting technician, fixtures technician and lighting network architect for over a decade. A list of his projects includes Everything Everywhere All at Once, Eternals, Westworld, Avengers: Endgame and numerous other big budget projects and commercials. He has also dabbled in game design and 3D stereography, and is an avid collector of puzzles and a VR enthusiast.

Funding

No displayed figures preserved for this project.

Season totals as displayed on the platform's public accounting — not a statement of amounts paid out. V2 = Venus sales + Venus extras. The original page also broke each season down by fund drive and showed an Available (unclaimed) balance; that level of detail survives only on the preserved snapshots.

Leaderboard page (offline): https://artizen.fyi/projects/1670453197178x700107432743549700
Wayback: leaderboard page ↗ · Wayback: platform page ↗

Not recovered: creator, tags, links, funding, drives, submissions, snapshot. Sources: "snapshot" = verbatim Internet Archive page · "platform metadata" = archived artizen.fund page metadata · "leaderboard" = the artizen.fyi public accounting tables · "match catalog" = the platform's public fund-matching catalog (captured 2026-10-15, generated 2026-09-07) · "community catalog" = a June 2026 platform scrape preserved in a community repo.