In April of 2016 I joined the Forest Fire Lookout Association (FFLA) and became, at the time, their youngest member. There's a spiral staircase inside that leads all the way up to below the tower's 'cab,' which is where the observer actually looks out when on duty and where the firefinder and radio equipment are found. Most fire towers are steel, but this one in Shelburne, Massachusetts is built of stone, which is what drew my eye to it. I was, and still am, so excited to visit every lookout, but this was my very first and holds a special place in my heart. When I think back to that first lookout, and how visiting it unravelled for me, there's a sense of excitement and wonder. At that point, I thought the furthest we would ever go to see fire towers would be an hour away, so that felt like a long journey (I was very, very wrong about this and we've driven more than six hours to a single tower since then). The first fire tower I visited in real life was around 30 minutes away from where we live. I liked the way they look- perhaps my love for them was (and still is, in some way) as simple as that. There I was, suddenly enamored with fire towers at the age of 12. It's not that the experience of the game was so transcendent that I wanted to replicate it exactly, rather that before playing Firewatch I hadn't given the idea of being a fire observer or fire towers themselves any thought. I'm a sucker for good writing and slow-building plots so I immediately fell in love with the setting and characters. The story develops over a single fire season, in the summer of 1989, where you play as Henry, a Colorado native who takes a position as a fire observer at a fire tower in the Shoshone National Forest. I played story-based games, but nothing exactly like it before. Even five years later, I don't really remember what made me want to play Firewatch for the first time in early 2016.

Firewatch game