Tune

Organization:

Kaliens Kollective

Dev Category:

Business or Non-Profit Organization

Release Year:

2025

Tune is a research-based game that shifts the perspective of war beyond human-centered narratives. While wars are often documented through human suffering, their devastating and lasting impact on animals, forests, rivers, and entire ecosystems is largely invisible, rarely archived, and often lost in fragmented data.

In Tune, players explore these overlooked consequences of conflict through sensory mechanics—tuning radios to uncover faint animal voices, scanning landscapes to detect hidden dangers, and using light to reveal traces of displacement. These interactions transform scattered and damaged data into embodied experiences, allowing players to confront the suffering of non-human lives caught in war.

Rather than framing war solely as a human tragedy, Tune reframes it as an ecological crisis, inviting players to see and hear what is usually ignored. By placing animals and ecosystems into the narrative, the game challenges us to expand our understanding of war’s true cost and to empathize with voices beyond our own species.

Game Overview

Tune helps players recognize and reflect on the often-overlooked effects of war on animals and the natural environment. It encourages them to develop empathy, think critically about the ecological consequences of conflict, and understand how human and non-human lives are deeply interconnected.

Through interactive mechanics like radio tuning, scanning, and light sharing, players practice keen observation, pattern recognition, and piecing together fragments of information, much like researchers assembling stories from incomplete data. By the end, the game emphasizes that war is not only a human tragedy but also an ecological crisis that demands broader ethical awareness.

In Tune, the core challenge is the completion of the journey from ignorance to awareness. The player begins by exploring the dark and silent ruins of war, relying on a single beam of light. Their primary goal is to use tuning to hear forgotten testimonies buried beneath. Simultaneously, they must search for ‘fuel’ to maintain their light and navigate the vast map, while the journal entries they acquire present the additional task of piecing together scattered fragments of narrative.

Ultimately, the player’s achievement is to illuminate the entire map’s darkness with the trail of their own exploration. This signifies more than just having explored a map; it represents the symbolic completion of an act of shining a light on a neglected truth and listening to voices that had gone unheard. Therefore, the true goal in Tune is not to earn points or defeat an enemy, but to fully comprehend a fragmented narrative, understand the multi-layered tragedy of war, and, in doing so, empathize with the suffering of others. The player’s ‘process of knowing’ is, in itself, the most significant achievement in the game.

Tune is primarily intended for players ages 12 and above who are interested in social issues, ethics, and the hidden consequences of war. The game is designed for both general audiences who may encounter it in exhibitions and classrooms, as well as gamers and students exploring narrative-driven or research-based games. Its blend of journalism, interactivity, and ethical reflection makes it especially relevant for learners in fields such as media studies, peace studies, environmental science, and human-animal relations.

In Tune, performance is assessed through discovery rather than points. The more carefully players explore, the more journal entries they unlock, the more of the map they illuminate, and the more complete their understanding becomes.

Tune

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