Love letters to the future was part part puzzle, part story, part activism. It had a few distinct elements. The main thing was the Love Letters website (done by HiRes). There, we collected messages people wanted to send to the year 21o9. Some of them some were heart felt, some were heart wrenching, some where funny, some were hopeful, some were apologetic, some were just cool.
People could also vote for each other’s messages. The top ones were encoded onto state of the art microfeche, and put in a time capsule, which we sealed at the Copenhagen climate summit.
Once you submitted a message, you got a clue that there was something strange going on. Searching on the site for “maya 2109″ revealed a hidden section that we called “the portal”. There, people discovered that our messages did reach the future, and inspired someone named Maya to reply.
Her replies were scrambled in transmission though. Players had to solve puzzles, including some with locative game play, in order to decode them.
When they did, they found that Maya’s world is a wreck. Civilization has been basically destroyed by runaway climate change. She always assumed we didn’t do anything about this because we didn’t care. Then she found our time capsule, and realized that a lot of people did care. This gives her hope that we can change the future. That there’s still a choice.
It’s one of the most fun projects I’ve ever worked on, and I’m well pleased to see it up for an award. Xenophile were the main creative visionaries behind it. Hopefully, we’ll find a way to continue it with them this year. Let me know if you’d be interested in participating or partnering.
