Cinder Ridge
Cinder Ridge is a game about tending to California’s forests in the near future.
Players take on the role of a new recruit working at a rewilding camp in the mountains. The player and their crew work together to manage and restore the forest; planting trees, building trails, clearing firebreaks, tearing up pavement, and more. Players can accomplish many tasks on their own, but it’s usually easier, faster, and more fun to work together with the other characters.
The game was originally imagined as a loving ‘videogame portrait’ of the Sierra Nevada foothill ecosystem where I grew up, and draws on deep research into real forest and land management practices. Inspired by the speculative fiction of Ursula K Le Guin and Kim Stanley Robinson, as well as the poetry and essays of local activist and writer Gary Snyder, the game blends light roleplaying and strategy mechanics to explore meaningful climate work in the future. The gameplay focuses on tending to both human and non-human members of a diverse fictional community, offering a gentle critique of how nature is often represented in games as either a static background for adventuring, or a source of unlimited resources to extract.
With contributions from Genie Ink, Julia Wang, Kenneth Faulkner, Aaron Gray, John Weinrich, Elsie Wang, Mickey Goese, Adeline Ducker, Joule Han, and omniboi.
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Fire Underground
Fire Underground is an animated feature-length fantasy and immersive installation set in a fictional Appalachia, and the Carboniferous swamps which lie below it. It is inspired by natural history, labor history, and Appalachian music and culture, and takes the making and mining of history as its central theme and conflict. While a labor conflict escalates into a war, the dead and dying find themselves in a prehistoric carboniferous swamp deep below ground, where strange creatures are stirring in the dark. The story is framed by scenes from a surreal “museum at the end of history'' where heroes from America's past are immortalized forever as animatronic statues and looping dioramas, alongside prehistoric creatures, war machines, and other historical artifacts.
Featuring original music by Sarah Louise Henson, as well as:
- “Rime,” performed by Sarah Louise, courtesy Thrill Jockey Records,
- “Thirty Inch Coal,” recorded by Men of the Deeps, with permission.
This project was made possible with support from the Carnegie Mellon School of Art, the Frank-Ratchye Fund for Art at the Frontier, and a Carnegie Mellon Graduate Education GuSH Research Grant.
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Vietnam Romance
Vietnam Romance is a tour of nostalgia for romantics and Deathmatch veterans pitting tourists vs. adventurers, history vs. its fantasies, and games vs. cinema. Film critic Ed Halter, described a film version of the project as exploring “a peculiarly American memory-trip, one in which the legacy of a gruesome war has become indistinguishable from pleasurable, if mythic-tragic, entertainments.”
The project takes various forms: computer game, collectable card game, live performance / puppet show/ dinner theatre, and video installation.
Vietnam Romance recreates and interrogates the fictionalized history of the Vietnam War and its culturally commodified remains through a mash-up of cultural artifacts drawn primarily from Hollywood film culture as well as war literature, comic books, popular music, collectable war memorabilia, and adventure tourist packages.
Collaboration lead by Eddo Stern, with Steven Amrhein, Jessica Hutchins, Lucas Near-Verbrugge.
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Festival Games
During my time at UCLA Game Lab I designed a bunch of whimsical games. Most of these were made for the Game Art Festival at the Hammer Museum, or other popup events around LA. Occasionally, some have traveled along with other Game Lab projects to exhibitions and events like Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and After Dark at the Exploratorium in San Francisco.
In order of appearance:
- Tap-Out-Saga — A mobile boxing game for two with a rugged plywood housing to encourage rough-housing.
- Sneaky Cactus — Stealthy succulent racing with live cacti in a rotating, motorized controller. Ouch! Adjust difficulty by replacing cacti with split stone, baby toes, and other less prickly plants.
- Horse Game: A Friend You Can Ride On — A delightfully stupid videogame performance about ridesharing apps designed for the Arcade Backpack, featuring illustrations by Adeline Ducker
- RunRunRun: Race to the Bottom — A hectic “tempest-like” arcade game for 2-4 players, designed to be played “in the round” on the Game Lab’s Cocktail Cabinet tables.
Other Work
Teaching
I’ve been lucky to get to work with a lot of incredible students at Carnegie Mellon University School of Art, UCLA Design Media Art, and USC Games.
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NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
I had a formative internship at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, assisting with UX research and prototyping exploring applications for then-emerging consumer grade virtual reality tech for telerobotics and space exploration.
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