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 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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