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About Us

Our Mission

We are committed to the social, economical, and environmental betterment of our global community through the creation of new virtual frontiers.

Our Vision

Our vision is a world where any human can visit virtual frontiers to educate, inspire, and take action towards the well-being of our global community.

WHAT WE DO

We are a visionary tech company creating virtual replicas of volatile environments in the world impacted by global climate change. We create virtual realities for visitors of all ages and all donation proceeds go toward leading organizations involved in climate change research, policymaking, and education.

The first virtual environment we have modeled is the M.S. DOS island in the Pacific. You may ask, why this island specifically?

Well, based on our team research, there are hundreds of published studies emphasizing the statistics of rising water levels. Islands are some of the most vulnerable land masses to be impacted. Did you know that the rising sea levels, increases in temperature, and submerging of land will destroy natural habitats for current island civilizations, endangered species, and bleach coral past the point of no return?

We hope that our virtual island can allow people a calming and therapeutic environment to become educated on important issues such as these. Though it is our first venture, we would hope to use this island as a metaphor for global climate change by the virtual connections we foster. As a corporation, we dream of creating more replicas modeled around other environments in the world being hit the hardest by the climate crisis. Not only would this experience be highlighted by a safe, peaceful, and educational space, but it would serve as a greater emotional tool to unconventionally reach others. Our goal is not to make a profit, and we are most certainly not so over our heads in thinking we can save the world through our games, but we would hope you join us in raising awareness and donating to organizations who are the real heroes trying to save our planet.

The climate crisis is one of the most imminent worries of our future and we want to help.

Sign up to visit our virtual environments where you can interact with animals, tour around the habitat, and even take a swim with the fish in the coral reef waters.

PLAYERBASE

With just a digital device and a keen interest to explore and make a change, the gaming community as well as anyone open to new immersive and interactive experiences can now instantly teleport themselves to a unique island ecosystem. We see our target users between the ages of 15-30 on average, consisting of children and young adults using the platform for entertainment and educational purposes, and generally falling into the middle class or above categories with access to internet connection and a digital device. With proper integration into school programs, demographics with less access to computers and internet may be reached as well.

VR

BEHAVIORAL DESIGN

Behavioral Design

Written by Crystal

Looking Back

Attention Restoration Theory: In 2026, Techie Tahake launched, pioneering new frontiers in the use of biomimicry for game design. By using MS-DOS island as a metaphor, we built an interactive game based on the attention restoration theory’s cognitive, psychological, and physiological benefits. 89.2% of the global population lives in large cities where no affordances have been made for mental health. Techie Tahake has created a design solution inspired by the natural world to create an ecological niche for our target market. How did we do this? In 2023, our environmental psychology team began an extensive research project to discover a variety of affordances that needed to be made so that the in-game environment would appeal to various optimal levels of affordances. This allowed us to create a game where players can renew their mental state and go back to a world where they are more likely to interact in ways that align with their values. We published this research In 2024, with the discovery that the natural environment must have four properties to provide this therapeutic effect:

-Extent (the scope to feel immersed in the environment)
-Being away (providing an escape from habitual activities)
-Soft fascination (aspects of the environment that capture attention effortlessly)
-Compatibility (individuals must want to be exposed to, and appreciate the environment)

Playing for the Planet

The video game industry is making a tidal shift towards sustainability. Along with 30 of the most globally influential Triple-A companies in the sector, we formed the Playing for the Planet Alliance with the goal of making a visible, industry-relevant impact in two specific areas: restoration of forests and reforestation and ‘nudges’ that move companies and individuals towards more planet-friendly choices. To support the video game industry in actions to help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, we summarize seven recommendations: Include a ‘green nudge’ in every game.

-Create an annual impact season.
-Pledge for the planet.
-Cut e-waste and go 100% clean. Fiscal incentives for ‘serious’ sustainability games.
-Team up, reward, and make it famous.-Help parents to engage with their children around gaming.

Our Behavioral Design Guidelines and Principles

-Designing for behaviors is about persuasion, not coercion
-The ideas and techniques in behavioral design should not be practiced like Dark Elixir! That means no dark patterns nor tactics that go against the user’s best interest.
-Customer needs and satisfaction should be the focal point of increasing engagement and retention.
-The more you can learn about behaviors, then the more you can meet your target audiences’ intrinsic needs.

Achievements & Milestones

Techie Tahake Footprint: In 2028, we offset our gaming community’s entire footprint, the carbon impact from our players charging their devices, 200% of our studio’s and gamers’ mobile energy use. Our recently released guidance documents will assist other companies in taking similar actions.

Sustainability aspects in Techie Tahake’s OperationsIn 2027, Techie Tahake developed a new sustainability program based on a two-layer approach. The first layer outlines the base for what is required for the company to conduct its business healthily and sustainably. In contrast, the second layer highlights areas that are based on the company’s values and which are essential contributing factors to the internal and external brand.
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Through clearly stated ambitions and commitments for each area that spans over time, Techie Tahake strives to further strengthen its leadership in the immersive gaming market as well as its attraction among existing and future employees. The program will be further developed during 2032 and more information on this development will be provided on the company’s website and official social media platforms during the coming year.

2031 Lens: Quality of Life

Every January, the Techie Tahake behavioral design team, led by Kendra Padrick, continuously gathers and evaluates user data centered on a specific lens. This past year has been spent focusing on our game’s impact on our player’s quality of life.

We broke down this data into seven categories:
-Improved emotional regulation
-Higher levels of focus and cognition
-Higher levels of creativity
-Improved relationships
-Decreased anxiety
-Higher levels of motivation
-Higher levels of self-efficiency

Looking ahead

Behavioral Design & Sustainability: Techie Tahake has built a reputation as a pioneering industry leader, taking the world as it is at this moment, and, with the use of design fiction, creating a bridge to the future. Techie Tahake has developed a comprehensive sustainability program that clarifies the company’s future ambition in this area further. Our recent partnership with Google Stadia will produce a new Sustainable Game Development Guide and fund research into how “green nudges” can be effectively incorporated into gameplay. We know that when it comes to improving the environment, the value-action gap is wide. Knowledge isn’t enough to change behavior and the sustainability movement is riddled with people making serious mistakes (that only happen in social and environmental change missions). This means that current efforts aren’t accomplishing what they’re setting out to do. Techie Tahake aims to change that by tapping into our most recent research discovery; the social tipping point. Lead researchers at Techie Tahake headquarters have discovered that only 25% of the group needs to change to influence and convert the rest for a group to adopt a new behavior.

2032 Lens: AI Systems

Over the past year, Techie Tahake’s behavioral design team, in collaboration with the development team, has set up an extensive AI research system to identify, map and explain the interactions between our players and the game. In the upcoming year, we will be establishing a robust evidence base that can inform our design teams and the gaming industry as a whole. For example, it will understand how various social groups perceive AI, their vulnerability to its attendant risks, and their assessment of the trade-offs between competing values embedded into AI systems. These might include questions such as:

-How should risks constrain the pursuit of higher profits by AI systems to values that may undermine user trust?
-How do (and should) AI systems shape our attitudes, beliefs, personality, and perceptions?
-What are the implications of AI systems for developing countries?

Techie Tahake’s ambition is to identify ways to embed human values into the heart and operation of our AI system, establishing methods to verify its integrity, accountability, and resilience thereby ensuring that it, and the data which feeds it, ultimately operate in the service of successful, democratic, digitally empowered human-centered communities yet. This can only be achieved through rigorous, problem-oriented research, which goes hand-in-hand with practice.

Can’t Stop This Thing We Started…

Techie Tahake has a reputation for improving lives. We have over-exceeded expectations consistently in research and discovery, gameplay, and employee experience. Our goals of using behavioral design to architect and initiate change processes that spark people’s optimism and help maintain motivation over time may seem unreachable. Reaching the unreachable is something we’ve always done, continue to do, and commit to doing long into the future.

MARKETING

Marketing

Written by Gen Baltazar

Who Are We Reaching?

The Techie Takahe team is driven by the conviction that we as individuals can have bigger influence than we think on altering climate change. We developed Ecolution as an immersive learning experience for digital natives between the ages of 15-to-30 who are looking for a fun experience and want to be a part of something more. This virtual reality world is designed to give players the chance to explore a real-life, mapped out preserved island and fosters community with other players, without the limitations of a four-walled room.

How Did We Do This?

By branching our intended users into two age groups, to create a more captivating experience: Group 1- Ages 15-18 and Group 2 - Ages 19-30. We developed the first release of our experience in particular, for those of ages 19-30 and aimed to connect them to an actual existing location and explore and interact with the native species in the remote island of MS-DOS.

How We'll Get There

The objective to create this immersive experience for more people is a journey that spans throughout ten years. Our strategy is to start with a strong representation of who we are as a company. This Discovery phase would be the most diverse and span into the first two years. With a good understanding of our audience, our market, and a strong branding identity in place, we can start to strategize how deliver an impactful awareness campaign and ongoing campaigns each quarter as the game goes through development to its release, for each our intended audiences. They will be centered around game features upgrades, developing public relations, and promoting user-generated content.

This effort would require the effort of a project manager, a content marketing specialist, social media manager, SEM specialist, UX designer and motion designer. As we build awareness, we envision reaching out to content collaborators and social media influencers related to our cause.
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Down the line, we would hope too collaborate with other social impact initiatives in our field such as UN Envronment Programme, Playing 4 the Planet Alliance, The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), and Games For Change, we hope to inspire collaborative action needed to shape a better world.

Measurable

In the awareness stage, we would track key performance indicators such as Likes, shares, views, mentions, and website traffic. An average rate of growth success on Instagram following would is around 12.6% per 6 months.

Achievable

Our strategy is to introduce a compelling brand image and launch campaign efforts each quarter to keep to establish a consistency. Essentially each phase would have a focus: Awareness, Reach, Engagement, Conversion.

As a new initiative, the first focus is to develop our brand and establish awareness. We plan this to be a focus for the first few years. We’d achieve this through a combination of tracking attention metrics (through unique visitors, clicks, social media likes, followers, comments) and staying consistent with our content and messaging.

Relevant

Our users are moved my experiences and seek strong values in initiatives. After the 2020 pandemic, this age group is keenly aware that there are real consequences for our actions and we provide an engaging and accessible experiences to influence them in making changes down the line.

Time Bound

Our project timeframe spans ten years from 2021 to 2031. Our marketing effort can be broken down into two phases with 9 main milestones along the way.

Subject Matter Interview: Debra J. Munson

Block Quote

I currently work for a logistics company supporting various government, corporate and private initiatives around the world. My role is focused on Operations and Business Development. My previous position was Director of Marketing for a regional IT company located in west Michigan.

EDUCATION

Education

Written by Alice Hoh

Immersive Learning

Our goal is to educate the general public who has access to VR within the decades to come, especially the younger generation; whom are more receptive to change. To do so, our VR game creates an immersive environment for players to interact in a greener world surrounded by nature. We incorporate “green nudges” to give players subtle, less invasive forms of persuasion towards adopting eco-friendly practices. Ultimately, we want people to have fun while learning and develop more environmentally conscious mindsets.

The Strategy

To begin, we gathered a group of experts who can aid us in developing an effective form of learning without hampering the gameplay. These experts include: game designers, ecologists, e-learning educators, and UX designers.

As a location, we chose MS DOS Island due to its purity from isolation and allowing players to connect to a realistic place in the world. Players would feel more emotionally attached to the existence of a place that is endangered and feel more inclined to help on a personal level. We hope to help these players by providing snippets of information and eco-friendly practices that can be used in their daily life.

Limitations

As for any project, we have to be aware of the limitations. First, we understood despite VR becoming a growing market, our target market may be limited due to factors such as: being in a low economic state, lack of interest in VR or the genre of gaming, and physical/mental issues like motion sickness or disabilities. We may also be limited by the knowledge we have in influencing the general public to translate the actions of gaming into the real world.

Additionally, since we are attempting to simulate a realistic world, we need to be further aware of avoiding the uncanny valley; which can turn players off completely. Our limitations on how far technology can go with simulating experiences of people and wildlife may not have yet reached realistic standards. We hope to continue developing the game as technology advances in the areas of photorealistic animation within VR.

Relevancy

Although we are faced with these limitations, we want to create awareness of environmental issues within an area in which anyone can become immersed in. In addition, those with access to VR are likely within an economic class that leaves more carbon footprint than those of less economic standing. Though, VR gaming centers are allowing more access to the gaming platform as well.

We believe our game is extremely relevant to issues that are happening on a global basis, especially with the exponential melting of Antarctica due to global warming.

Information Gathering

Our plan started by laying out statistics of for instance, energy and water usage. By reviewing the statistics, we find out why these numbers are the way they are and if there are ways to reduce it further. We also listed sustainable practices that individuals could adopt in their everyday life. We also looked into everyday things that lead to higher carbon footprint within the general public. With new sustainable products coming onto the market within the recent years, we have incorporated those as well.

Plan Implementation

We collaborated with ecologists, e-learning educators, and VR game designers to generate ideas on how we can incorporate important educational values within the game mechanics. UX Designers create testing metrics for users to figure out how effective the mechanics, how users feel about the game, how much they learned, and how it affected their sustainability consciousness.

Method

Extended studies were conducted where user testers play a certain amount of hours. Then, they are to collect breakdowns of their house bill 6 months prior and after the playthrough. The study concluded that energy and water usage will be reduced within players with at least 20 hours of gameplay.

Results

Data from 2024

Goals

- At least 40% reduction in house bill for usage on electricity and water
- Game rating at least 4.8 / 5 rating
- Over 100,000 unique players per month

PR STRATEGY

PR Strategy
Public Relations Strategy

Written by Viktoriya

Target Demographic Discovery

Our team believes the general public should become educated on global climate issues through the immersive environments we create. We know that creating virtual realities would encompass a smaller chunk of the global demographic we would hope to cater to, but in tackling one piece of the pie, we can tackle the other pieces as we grow. Currently, we hope to market to the younger generations of digital natives. These generations would have less of a learning curve when playing immersively and are more receptive to change. Ultimately, our dream is to be able to cater to much broader demographics on a global scale but we know there are technological, educational, and political barriers that restrict us.

Who: Young digital natives between ages 15 - 30.
Since our demographic has a large range, we split it up into 2 groups.
1st group - Ages 15 - 18
2nd group - Ages 19 - 30

We decided to focus on the 2nd group as our core target demographic because our first priority is creating an experience that is catered to a variety of users. We have plans on expanding the experience to become more child/teen friendly in the later phases of the project timeline, however, we felt that the most comprehensive opportunity is with group 2.

What do we know about our demographic?

Our target audience will be split between cities, gender, income level, interests, and other data we will collect from data analysts researching the locations we want to promote to. The media team works together on this research to leverage our public announcements, marketing collateral, and press release pitches to create a cohesive plan.

Media Team’s Past Initiatives:

Digital Marketing Campaigns - Paid social media ads targeted towards our core demographic groups. Different channels include Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube, and more.

Reaching out to Influencers - We have recruited well-known gamers in the industry to demo how different versions of the game can be played and to encourage others to become more aware of global climate issues.

Posters and Billboards - We plastered tangible designs across populated cities where large crowds can see the advertising and be nudged to check-out the game later.

Student Scholarship Challenges - We have created sustainability competitions for students to propose creative and unique solutions for future virtual ventures. We give back to the students who have interest in green technology and global sustainability.

The Media Team is compromised of marketing, public relations, digital designers, and more. We use a mixture of digital and physical strategies when building up our presence, but as the head of public relations, my team and I mainly focus on maintaining those efforts. We have been fortunate enough to not experience any media crisis, however, we have a list of working steps in case we do.

Crisis Control Strategy

The Media Team understands that crisis control management is a case by case basis. There is no one-fit-all strategy that will solve all of the issues that arise with a scandal, however there are a few actionable steps we can take to give us more time to re-evaluate and how to move forward.

Pause on all marketing initiatives.
We do not want to come off as tone-deaf with any campaigns in case there is a pop culture moment that becomes viral overnight, a stakeholder scandal, or social movements that require sensitivity.

Reevaluate all future launching campaigns.
Do we have to modify the content depending on current or future events? If so, we need to work with the designers and marketers to ensure the content of all our campaigns make sense in moving forward.

Create a public release statement.
This is case by case, however a well-crafted statement about the current events will go a long way whether it is a formal and genuine apology, a letter from the executives, future outlined steps, or a social movement statement.

Highlight charitable good.
Our company is focused on giving back to organizations that are working towards creating a better planet for humanity, however, we can outline more transparent steps on how this change occurs. We can always bring light to the public about the way we give back and increase our transparency.

Smart Objectives

When our team first started to investigate the M.S. Dos Island, we were actually moved by the neighboring island civilizations. In researching the different ways current island civilizations exist, we realized we had to find ways to preserve what was on the island already and to help other global communities struggling to face global climate change. We gathered a group of experts and creatives who aided us in developing virtual immersive environments.

Early on in our development, we were convinced to try to solve a small chunk of a larger pie when it came to the global crisis. As a small team working with a technology corporation, we wanted to utilize tools of the future that would act as emotional gateways to unconventionally reach our audience.

Specific

Public relations and the marketing team will work closely together in sharpening our media presence. The marketing team focuses on promoting our virtual reality games, including market research and advertising. While the public relations team focuses on maintaining a favorable public image for the organization. Since the media team is interconnected and dependent on the timeline of a product launch, we work together to build the necessary buzz prior to the introduction of a product in the market. As the head of the PR team, some of the ways my coworkers and I have built up the company’s public presence is by:

Writing press releases about upcoming product launches or new company initiatives
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Creating stories and positive pitches to the media about upcoming company announcements
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Securing speaking opportunities for stakeholders and executives at industry gaming events/conventions
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Building relationships with the media and gaming influencers in the industry
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Managing and updating company messaging
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Creating talking points and speaking to the press about a company crisis

The media team is the backbone of any corporation. It is the largest influence on how users will see the mission of the company and how strong the customer relationship will be. Even for corporations that are non-profit, it is important to establish very early on how the company wishes to be perceived by the public and to micro-manage everything that is published and popularized with media. Part of my team’s efforts is to make sure we finely comb the cultural nuances behind our marketing collateral to make sure we do not create backlash controversy. We try to brainstorm creative ways in which we can catch people’s eyes but once we have their attention, we want to make sure we retain it and build upon it. PR can take years to build amongst a strong, loyal customer base, and seconds to lose in a scandal. We like to think of our team as the mascots of the organization; we focus on positive public image, and we uplift all of the hard work that goes into our organization’s virtual realities.

Caption: We were very proud to celebrate having our first big press release with The New Yorker when we officially launched our virtual-reality game into the public. This introduction helped catalyze our successful entry into the gaming industry, and since then, we’ve grown our audiences to recruit more researchers, game developers, designers, and digital analysts to make more immersive virtual realities tackling global climate change.