Alice Bucknell
The Alluvials Level 2: Extinction Burst, 2024
Interactive video game
Copyright, The Artist
The Alluvials Level 2: Extinction Burst In the second level of The Alluvials video game, the first-person shooter game type is reimagined as first-person pollinator. Follow a trail of incandescent...
The Alluvials Level 2: Extinction Burst
In the second level of The Alluvials video game, the first-person shooter game type is reimagined as first-person pollinator. Follow a trail of incandescent moths through the gutted ruins of the Great American Water Engineering project known as the Hoover Dam. Once you hit a fork in the road, choose your lover: play as Tree or Moth.
Play as either a Joshua Tree or Yucca Moth and indulge in the twin phenomena of drunken post-pollination flight paths or body swapping in burst root rhizomes. This infinite level makes use of procedural generation for its trees, moth swarms, and pollination protocols; no two playthroughs are the same. It takes a page from game writer Bo Ruberg's concept of 'permalife': a queer game mechanic where losing is impossible because the hardest thing is to carry on living.
Set against the precarious and extreme symbiosis of its playable characters, extinction burst is also named after the brutal, paradoxical process of when chronic sickness leaves the body—it rises to a head, coming out with a fury. The level contemplates ecosexual pleasure in the face of an anthropogenic domino effect of death. Yet the level is unbeatable and unlosable—pollination is a disintegration of the self, a refusal of extinction's refused futures, and an exercise in living through deeper time.
???? ༘⋆༄.°⋆
In the second level of The Alluvials video game, the first-person shooter game type is reimagined as first-person pollinator. Follow a trail of incandescent moths through the gutted ruins of the Great American Water Engineering project known as the Hoover Dam. Once you hit a fork in the road, choose your lover: play as Tree or Moth.
Play as either a Joshua Tree or Yucca Moth and indulge in the twin phenomena of drunken post-pollination flight paths or body swapping in burst root rhizomes. This infinite level makes use of procedural generation for its trees, moth swarms, and pollination protocols; no two playthroughs are the same. It takes a page from game writer Bo Ruberg's concept of 'permalife': a queer game mechanic where losing is impossible because the hardest thing is to carry on living.
Set against the precarious and extreme symbiosis of its playable characters, extinction burst is also named after the brutal, paradoxical process of when chronic sickness leaves the body—it rises to a head, coming out with a fury. The level contemplates ecosexual pleasure in the face of an anthropogenic domino effect of death. Yet the level is unbeatable and unlosable—pollination is a disintegration of the self, a refusal of extinction's refused futures, and an exercise in living through deeper time.
???? ༘⋆༄.°⋆
