Alice Bucknell’s The Alluvials started as a 2023 video work and grew, a year later, into a playable video game — and its central move is refusing the player a human body. In Bucknell’s speculative near-future Los Angeles, the sand that once defined the city’s beaches has swallowed downtown, turning freeways and skyscrapers into dunes. Across four levels, the player never controls a conventional human protagonist; instead, they inhabit what games usually relegate to background scenery — the non-playable characters.
The premise, laid out by designboom’s new profile: Bucknell examines both the history of the Tongva people of the Greater Los Angeles Basin and an invented near-future, including a water-desalination corporation called Qwench, a perpetually burning landscape, and a sky permanently stuck in golden hour. The word “alluvial” — relating to alluvium, the clay, silt, sand, and gravel deposited by running water — frames the whole work: this is a world made of what’s left behind once the water that used to move it is gone.
One level, Extinction Burst, makes the game’s central mechanic explicit. It opens on a bright red forest with a mountain lion moving down a fuchsia path, then gives way to a dried-out basin filled with drifting white particles that turn out, on approach, to be a form of moth. A question appears in the sky: “ARE YOU MOTH OR ARE YOU TREE?” The answer determines which non-human perspective the rest of the level unfolds through. Other levels put the player inside a forest fire, inside a wolf navigating a sand-ridden Los Angeles, or piloting an airboat across the flooded remains of the city.
Bucknell describes the approach as “queer and ecological game mechanics” — a deliberate challenge to the default assumption that a video game’s protagonist is a human agent moving through a world built for their convenience. By making the player embody what a conventional game treats as scenery or obstacle, The Alluvials asks its central question through structure rather than dialogue: is this how we want to live, and if not, what do we actually have the power to change?
This isn’t Bucknell’s only recent institutional recognition. Earlier this year, London’s Serpentine Gallery named Bucknell one of four artists in its Future Art Ecosystems R&D Fellowship, funding six months of research into how AI is reshaping environmental and cultural simulation — Bucknell’s specific project there, Medium Sized World, investigates AI systems built to simulate environments and predict outcomes, territory that sits close to The Alluvials’ own speculative-world-building, just approached from the research side rather than the game-design side.
Bucknell discusses the project’s water politics and speculative framing at the LA Public Library.
Related Reading
- In this video game, moths and wolves play out a nearby climate future — designboom
- London’s Serpentine Gallery Is Paying Four Artists to Research What AI Is Doing to Culture — our earlier coverage, including Bucknell’s fellowship
- Which VR Headset’s Eye Tracking Can You Actually Trust? — our coverage of another speculative/embodiment-focused research piece
- Getting Started: Writing an Artist Statement People Actually Read — our tutorial