The first level of The Alluvials video game is a sneaky undercurrent, a liquefied trojan horse, something that looks the most like a game to get you on board the rest of the levels. Both a video game about water futures in LA and a game about gaming, the Alluvials addresses the politics of Southern Californian water scarcity across scales, temporalities, and geographies. First up: a take on a racing game set inside the swampy underbelly of a pre-channelized LA River. The weird mechanic? Here, you’re playing to lose. Steer one of synthetic water company Aquarius’ designer airboats across the marshy channels of an ancient river basin. 

Once you hit the fork in the road heralded by the ghost of LA’s legendary mountain lion, P-22, the clock starts: you have five minutes to escape the swampy matrix of LA’s weirded climate past (or future?) Those incandescent columns are data visualizations of the LA River’s current pollution index, lovingly assembled by Friends of the LA River (FoLAR); hitting them is Bad, so is running out of time, in the sense that you, the player, may lose. But who wins in your place? This level messes with conventional tropes of player v environment (PvE) or player v player (PvP) gaming.

Galvanizing queer and ecological theory in gaming, it dislodges player from character: presenting a system where the player may choose to self-sabotage to secure the future of an ecosystem, or else be subsumed by it. Playing to Lose is a mechanic introduced by queer game scholar Bo Ruberg in their essay of the same name; for The Alluvials, it’s a portal or spell into the world of the work, priming players on the open-ended systems of levels to come.