The Alluvials

Level 4 of the game, titled Fire Walk With Me, is set in the Santa Monica Mountains, set ablaze by a seemingly interminable wildfire. Players navigate the landscape as fire, uncovering histories of privatization and speculative real estate development, the prevention of controlled burning practices through colonial legacies of land theft, and the paradoxical life-giving and life-taking agency of fire.

Inspired by queer gaming tactics that embrace failure, nonlinear narratives, and ‘difficult games’—or games that uproot conventions of human player-centric reward systems to unearth the medium’s affective capacities— The Alluvials expands on Bucknell’s ongoing research into game ecologies. Broadly, this can be taken to mean how “nature”, ecology and environmental systems are represented and experienced in game worlds, and how the game engine itself is an ecological system capable of generating new modes of being within the world.

Acknowledging Indigenous relationships to water, particularly the Tongva People of the Greater Los Angeles Basin and their understanding of the LA River as an ever-morphing entity, the project underscores that nature is an intelligent system, a technology in its own right. Through the interactive capacities of game-as-interface, The Alluvials asks its audience to consider their role in the future of water systems in Los Angeles by looking into the region’s deep past.