The Research Behind Salmon Run and Return of the C'waam

A fish game with an address

I made two small iOS games about fish, and both of them have an address. Salmon Run follows the salmon through its life and its run up the Klamath River. Return of the C'waam is about the c'waam and the koptu, the two sucker fish the Klamath Tribes have relied on since time immemorial. I could have built a generic fish game, the kind where a bright cartoon swims through hoops and the water could be anywhere. I built for one basin instead, about animals a real people have known by name for longer than the written record goes. Both games sit alongside the books on my apps page.

The choice to be specific is where most of the research lives. A generic fish is easy. You draw something blue, give it fins, and let it eat smaller things. A c'waam is harder, because a c'waam is a particular animal with a particular life in a particular water, and if I get it wrong, someone who grew up on Klamath Lake will know at a glance. That reader is the one I build for. Getting the fish right is a way of respecting the people who already carry it.

What the watershed asks

Salmon Run started with the life cycle, because that is the spine of the real thing. A salmon hatches in fresh water, travels to the sea, grows, and comes back to spawn in the water it came from. The run is that return, and it is hard, and most fish never finish it. I built the game around that arc because the arc is true and because it already holds the shape of a game. There are stages. There are predators and rapids and the long odds of getting home. I did not have to invent stakes. The river supplies them.

A life cycle drawn in the abstract is still a diagram. The place is what turns that diagram into the Klamath. Where I could, I kept the game honest about the water these fish actually move through, and about the pressures that meet a salmon on a river people have dammed and diverted and fought over for a century. I stayed careful here. I did not want to overclaim, and I did not want to load a small game with figures I could not stand behind. So I held to what is well established and let the play carry the difficulty instead of a wall of statistics.

The c'waam and the koptu

Return of the C'waam asked more of me, because these fish are less famous and more endangered, and because they sit at the center of a people's history. The c'waam is the Lost River sucker. The koptu is the shortnose sucker. Both are listed as endangered. For the Klamath Tribes, these are first foods, fish that fed families through the year and anchored a way of life around the lakes and rivers of the upper basin. The return of the c'waam in spring was an event, a marker of the year, bound up with ceremony and with survival at once.

That history is the reason the game exists, and it is also the reason I could not treat the fish as set dressing. A sucker is a humble animal to most eyes. It lives near the bottom and it will never sell a poster. But the c'waam carried a nation through hard winters, and its decline now lands on living people as a real loss. When I built the game, I wanted a player to come out the other side knowing the fish by its right name and knowing why that loss matters to someone.

Why the learning half matters

Each game has a playing half and a learning half, and the second one is the reason I made them at all. Play can teach a shape, the arc of a run or the pressure on a species, in a way a page of text struggles to reach. But a game can also leave a player with a warm feeling and no real knowledge, and I wanted to avoid that. So the learning material ties the play back to the actual fish and the actual stakes. If a child finishes Salmon Run understanding that a salmon returns to its own water and that the return is fragile, the game did its work. If a player closes Return of the C'waam knowing that the c'waam and the koptu are real, endangered, and central to the Klamath people, the game did its work.

I have written elsewhere about researching this history from the inside, about gathering my people's origin stories into one cycle, and about the novel I built around the Modoc War. These games carry the same obligation in a different medium. The rule holds across all of it. Get the real thing right, name it correctly, and refuse to dress a serious loss in easy comfort. A fish game can be small and still be true. Making it true means grounding it in one watershed and one people's long relationship with these animals, and keeping the conservation stakes visible under the play. That is the research, and it is most of the work.