Burn Ball | Designer & Producer
Designed as a place-specific response to extreme wildfire and wildfire suppression in Lake County, Oregon, Burn Ball is a series of games, game equipment and training video produced for the PLAYA Wildfire + Water residency program. Wildfire + Water is described as, “a 10-night immersive residency Oct. 19-29, 2023 in which participants will engage in learning more about the most critical environmental topics in this part of Oregon- fire and water, with time to collaborate, create and respond to the environmental lessons acquired during the residency. The role of all forms of art to interpret, communicate and broadcast stories of change to positively impact our environment has never been more critical.”
Paisley, OR is a ranching community of about 250 people, located in a striking and unique landscape: saline lakes in the valley and forested mountain ridges 3,000 feet above. The county has been hit extremely hard by wildfires in the past 10 years, but the trauma has brought together some unlikely partnerships between conservationists, land agency folks, and ranchers to improve land use practices. Prescribed burning is used, but people have mixed opinions about how it is practiced and by whom. In general, fire in SE Oregon is more complex, more dangerous, and more controversial than it is in the Flint Hills of Kansas.
It also happens that people in Paisley had a desire to rekindle its youth’s relationship with baseball - the town's baseball field has been in disrepair for some years and the school is not big enough to have their own team anymore. Paisley School does, however, have a 100+ year history of hosting foreign exchange students who live on site in the dorms for their high school years. Sometimes, it’s been necessary to play an instructional video before intermural sports games if students aren’t familiar with the sport.
Out of this context, several new games were designed that utilize a baseball diamond and some equipment, but with game play that is about prescribed burning in Oregon. In addition to game and equipment design, a training video was produced to introduce two of the “Burn Ball” games: Fire Break! and Mitigation!
Because of my existing connection with the community of Matfield Green, Kansas, twenty volunteers got together to participate in the filming of the training video in February 2024 at the gymnasium of the School for Rural Culture & Creativity. Because Matfield Green is surrounded by grasslands in the Flint Hills, the community has much experience with prescribed fire and generally perceives it as a positive thing. Consequently, the training video also acts as a form of communication from one small town using fire to their advantage to another town in the midst of defining what their relationship to fire is and could be.
In April 2024, I returned to Paisley, OR with Burn Ball equipment and training video to play the games with students at Paisley School. We played Mitigation! with a group of 5-8th graders on the outdoor baseball diamond, and the students enthusiastically participated! In the game, players have the chance to role play as a Project Manager, making decisions about what’s more important to spend funding on in the moment: wildfire suppression vs fire mitigation. Actual figures from Oregon fire experts were used in the game design. Students worked together to problem-solve during the gameplay, and afterwards we discussed their experiences, the results of the game, and the significance of the game in their larger communities.
