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# A whole triennial is named for a platformer's grace period
- URL: https://www.killscreen.com/alice-bucknell-coyote-time/
- Published: 2026-08-17T18:37:48.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-17T18:37:48.000Z
- Description: Alice Bucknell's Coyote Time—an eco sci-fi text adventure premiering at St. Louis's City Museum this fall—gave Counterpublic 2026 its title.
- Author: Kill Screen Staff
- Tags: ALICE BUCKNELL, Coyote Time, Counterpublic, ecology, text adventure, public art, SFMOMA, Interactive Fiction

Coyote time is game design's mercy rule: the few frames after your character runs off a ledge in which a jump still counts. Alice Bucknell has stretched that grace period over an entire city. *Coyote Time*, Bucknell's eco sci-fi text adventure, premieres this fall at Counterpublic, the St. Louis public art triennial running September 10 through December 13—and the exhibition [took its name from the game](https://counterpublic.org/journal/announcing-counterpublic-2026-coyote-time/?ref=killscreen.com), gathering 50 artists under the figure of a character "suspended in midair, unsure of what comes next." Name another major American art exhibition organized around a platforming mechanic. I'll wait.

The game invites players into an "infinite night" of text, sound and speculative storytelling. Bucknell developed it in residency at La Becque on Lake Geneva, where [an early build and its soundtrack surfaced](https://www.instagram.com/p/DbBOnA4jF6G/?ref=killscreen.com) at July's Summer Open Studios: game development by Joseph Pleass and Ben West, pixel art by Khaled Makhshoush and Omar Khouri, and a score by Nina Keith. In St. Louis, [per St. Louis Magazine](https://www.stlmag.com/culture/counterpublic-prepares-to-transform-st-louis-with-coyote-time/?ref=killscreen.com), it will be playable at the City Museum—the found-object funhouse that is itself the city's great monument to play—with Nora N. Khan curating the commission.

![Industrial riverfront buildings at Gateway South in St. Louis under a wide sky](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/counterpublic-gateway-south.jpg)

Gateway South in St. Louis, one of Counterpublic 2026's sites. Photo: Izaiah Johnson, courtesy of Counterpublic

Bucknell has spent years treating games as interfaces for ecological systems—we talked with them about [pollination simulators and quantum love stories](https://www.killscreen.com/alice-bucknell-multiplayer-games-interspecies-cooperation/), and last year SFMOMA acquired *The Alluvials*, Bucknell's game of drought and water politics, as the first video game in the museum's permanent collection. What makes the new title land is its double edge: a grace period is also borrowed time. The ground is already gone; the jump might still register. That's the wager a triennial is asking half a million visitors to inhabit, and it's the most precise use of a game-design term as ecological metaphor I've seen all year.