Alyssa Rodriguez & Ami Cai
2024 HEAR US Awardees
Graduate Game Design Class of 2024
Alyssa "AJ" Rodriguez is a Latine Indigenous 2D artist and narrative designer. Through collaborations with the American Museum of Natural History and Anima Interactive, she has designed games and interactive installations that connect natural sciences with cultural experiences.
Ami Cai is a Southern Chinese American visual narrator. She creates art, branding, games, and stories that strive for advocacy, using her extensive background from working in various companies like Amplify, Code Coven, Anima Interactive, Waking Oni Games, and Sweet Baby Inc.
Project
Farming Towards Our Future is an NYU MFA Thesis about community building through urban and sustainable farming in a futuristic Solarpunk setting that critiques the solarpunk genre as we see it portrayed in popular media to better serve marginalized voices, cultural experiences and what farming looks like for people from different backgrounds and lifestyles.
The game highlights and focuses on the future that communities around the world are already actively working towards today. Solarpunk is a fairly new and unexplored genre that is still broad but currently heading in a very coorporate and clean idea of eco-futurism with sparkling white buildings integrated with greenery and solarpanels. Just like farming simulators, it ignores the context of the land this version of the future is built on and the of farming elements in this genre of games along with the aesthetics of solarpunk are detached from the process of growing and its community impact.
By using black and white for an eco-futuristic setting, we are emphasizing the “punk” of solarpunk, which are historically alternative and anti-capitailst movements while straying away from “greenwashing” as a crutch associated with more corporate eco-futurist representations. Through urban farming, we seek to show that farming is accessible to anyone anywhere with practices informed by real small farmers who have consulted on the project and successfully and accessibly live sustainable lifestyles.
By consulting with a variety of experts across several fields of Intersectional Environmentalism, game design, local farming initiatives and community managers, we seek to show that this ideal future is not only attainable but actively being worked towards. It is unfortunately easier in today's world for people to imagine and explore dystopian narrative worlds in games and much more difficult to imagine that they can nurture, grow, and build towards their ideal future not just for themselves but for all who come after.
The player experiences the push “against succeeding alone" and explores alternative versions of engaging with a community through their small agricultural business. It is a click and point simulation and narrative digital game, the gameplay of which draws inspiration from classic farming simulators as well as 2000s flash games that used simple point, click, and drag interactions that made the gameplay experience reach a wider target audience of all ages who had acces to a computer and mouse. With an entirely BIPOC and queer team of creatives, and interviews with consultants, FORWARD is a game of optimism that shows this future is achievable, being worked towards today, and we’re all part of that narrative.
