Thatgamecompany's Flower on PlayStation Network has received a great deal of critical acclaim already; I am quite sure I heard at least one pal from the critical press declare on Twitter that he "cried a little." Hefty evaluation for a title believed to be transcendent, positively -- but is it really?It's received enough coverage by now that you doubtless know the basic mechanics. Using the tilt of the Sixaxis, you stir the petal of a flower on the breeze, and as you touch other opening blooms on your way, your single pale curl is joined by gradually more colorful petals, eventually assembling the sort of floral cloud seen in artful visions of springtime cherry blossom breezes.
Your wind can be a languid, atmospheric drift, or with the push of any one of the controller's buttons, you can direct it into a brisker, fresher and more focused breeze. And that's it, really; each level is a different windswept zone of nature, from a sunlit, grassy plain populated with nodding daffodils and brilliant red poppies through a rainswept rolling hill under a sky of ominous violet, as your floral journey brings you ever closer to a dark landscape dominated by the black skeletons of electric urbanization.
Certainly, Flower may be the first game that allows players to control wind in such a lifelike way. The Sixaxis controls are subtle and virtually impeccable, and some levels feature ambient breezes of their own that gives your personal current the lifelike sense of being part of the air, genuinely.
The player-controlled transitions from speed to stirring, from sky-height to a whisk along the fingertips of the grass are lifelike and lovely; the color palettes are nothing short of awe-inspiring, and the music responds subtly to the player's pacing. When touched, each color of flower emits its own musical note, like a glass bell or a tinkling chime, and these effects blend fluidly into the soundscape.
It's breathtaking and highly original, no doubt about it. If it sounds naturalistic, meditative, that's because it is. An anecdote told to me by a friend goes that creator Jenova Chen (also known for flOw, of course) was asked, "do you control the flower, or the wind?" And Chen is said to have replied, with either gravity or whimsy, "you decide."
Well, wait a second. Here's where we get ahead of ourselves.
Ironically, Flower owes its brilliance not to some fantasy that it's reinventing game mechanics, that it's creating absolute belief, that it's video game Zen, or that it's a "video game that's not a video game." In fact, its playability hinges squarely and mundanely on just how gamelike it is, how naked its design principles, and how ancient and obvious are the laws to which it adheres.
This Destructoid review is slightly harsh, perhaps; personally, I don't find the schism so overt as critic Topher Cantler did, but in the literal sense, it's on point.
The flowers of Flower grow in tidy lines designed to be navigated on the course of level completion. You must collect petals from their appointed groups in order to transform the area around you from listless to green before you can progress. The game is wont to send your breeze through branching tunnels with little blooms growing from the walls or from the logs that arch overhead -- in a fashion resembling nothing more than the ring-collecting halfpipe bonus levels in Sonic 2.
Flower is an imitation of the pollination process -- then why should being touched by a petal cause a flower to open, why should spreading the greenery bring a trio of windmills to life, thereby opening the next area? The game's undertones ask us to believe that our petal-strewn breeze is imbued with some kind of flower-power capable of revitalizing dead grass, punching through metal structures and turning on lights.
No matter how well it imitates the lawlessness of wind, Flower is no Zen. It does not create belief; instead, it asks us to suspend disbelief. It works not because it defies the traditional bounds of video games. It works because of how well it adheres to them.
It's artful, but calling it an "art game," an experiment, a transcendence, is a bit of a misnomer.
And in fact, that's absolutely fine. If I have a small issue with Flower, it's certainly not that it is, through and through, a video game. I love video games. And I also think I understand why everyone's nonetheless so positively transported; I have a theory on why my colleague had a little cry.
I'll explain tomorrow. Meanwhile, how have you responded to Flower, and why?
37 comments:
I'd agree that there is no transcendence beyond gaming as a form. Rather, Flower is successful because it embraces its game nature. It has a simple narrative thesis and an equally restrained gameplay thesis. It explores and fulfills both through pure game mechanics (movement, reaction, exploration, collection) with no pretense to other forms.
That narrative thesis is also (for me) justification enough for the flower-power you call out -- if this is, in fact, the dreams of one or many flowers, that power is both perfectly understandable and jokingly within the bounds of traditional gaming tropes.
*Just for the record, I loathe those half pipe special stages that originated in Sonic 2...*
My take on Flower is strictly speculatory, as I haven't played the game yet. Going from Michael A.'s posts to your own is certainly a transition to watch closely though...My ignorant desire is for more games with that "imitation process" to be made. There's a lot that can be "gameasized" just from the basic involuntary functions your body goes through over the course of an hour. Flower's significance for me is that I'm enjoying a reality that will either be scraped upon and passed, or dug into and flourished. I'm just happy the scale is tipped so people are disgustingly enamored with it at the moment. Reason and logicality are always necessary, but not as an immediate majority in this instance.
~sLs~
I generally found Flower to be quite beautiful, and there were moments where it felt very much like dreams I've had where I'm flying. My wife watched me play it and was really taken with the whole vibe of the thing. And I've certainly thought about it quite a bit since I finished it; the game is short but it stayed with me for quite a while. I did end up fighting the controls a little bit, especially in the game's 4th (?) level, where opening each flower requires precise movements that the sixaxis doesn't quite deliver. I'd personally love TGC to release some sort of random-level generator, just so that I could continually experience it for the first time (if that makes any sense).
I've enjoyed it quite a bit, but I did feel an intense flash of irritation the first time I got zapped and had my petals burned away in the fifth level. I was enjoying not having to deal with a feeling of punishment for doing something "wrong" in a game, and having the game revert to a normal "avoid the obstacles and carefully hit your target" mode of play was very disappointing after the first four levels. It wasn't as bad on the second playthrough, but it's still my least favorite part of the game. I'm still enjoying trying to get the trophies and am recommending it to everyone I know with a PS3.
Flower came at just the right time for me, providing a relaxing experience that subtly hints towards things while also leaving them up for interpretation. I appreciate that and I have no doubt that a lot of other people praising it at the moment enjoyed it a little more because they were overwhelmed with the releases of the last few months.
I also appreciate the fact that it does what it does while remaining a game in the exact way you explain in this post. I respect that and can only hope that we continue to get games like Flower in the future.
Flower was one of those rare games that made me actually abandon my real-life obligations and neglect my friends... I actually put my phone on silent because a friend was trying to hang out the night it came out. I had this idiot grin on my face the entire time, pure bliss. Sure it's a video game, but that's not a bad thing. If you want a game-that's-not-a-game, play Noby Noby Boy. If you want an immaculately crafted game that interactively conveys the feeling of beauty and harmony, play Flower.
We dedicated our last episode of First Wall Rebate to discussing Flower, and while we hedged on the "artgame" issue, we did make a lot of connections to more traditional forms of fine art. (The conversation runs about 40 minutes; here's the link for anyone who's interested.)
My short take on Flower is that it reminds me instantly of American transcendentalists and the late 19th century symbolist movement in both poetry and painting. I see the row of potted flowers on the drab windowsill and can't help thinking about Baudelaire and Whitman (and probably Blake and Keats, too), who all exalted the mundane in order to directly access the imagination.
Okay, reading back over that, it's not so short. Sue me. ;)
Flower got me thinking a lot about themes and messages in games, and whether or not it's commonly accepted among most people that such a notion exists. I've been trying to bang out my thoughts on paper but have been pretty unsuccessful do far since I'm kind of a 'tard.
I suppose what Flower made me think about is that we're using a high-tech piece of technology in the PS3 to play a game which basically has you, as a force of nature, rescue a city from it's own technological entrapment. Along the way you're hindered from doing so by the cold, metallic, screechy, and often frightening byproducts of technological advancement.
I think the real beauty of Flower is that it DOES have a message but that message is only as poignant as you want it to be. This is why we're seeing reaction to the game run from glorified puzzle game to arty think-piece.
The fact that I kept thinking about what Jenova Chen and others were trying to "say" with the game increased my enjoyment of it significantly. The experience, full of moments both euphoric and unsettling, made me appreciate the planet a bit more.
It's a good thing!
The more I think of it the very juxtaposition of "game" with "art" or "zen" is probably, by virtue of the terms themselves, an oxymoron. If games (and I realize we use the term very loosely for things that might be better termed "interactive") have a structured goal then they certainly defy the notion of zen. Even trying to achieve an understanding of the experience defies the notion of zen.
I agree that if you're aspiring to entirely free form, goal-less play then boot up Noby Noby Boy (a game that no part of my being "gets"). Flower very much has goals built into its structure and level design that facilitates those goals, no matter how cleverly it hides them under a free-form-like interface. That's just brilliant design, and I commend thatgamecompany for it. Part of the experience of the game is feeling like you're in a sandbox, feeling like you're playing, then "stumbling" upon a pattern and setting yourself a goal. Because we play games all the time we intrinsically look for structure and goals and that will get in the way of the illusion - it is an illusion after all - of free form play.
The handful of people I've shown Flower to who don't play games very often seem to have bought into that illusion much more readily. They neither consciously sought to complete goals and open new levels nor consciously sought to avoid them (as most of us, I imagine, have to do if we want that "zen-like" experience).
@Sean
I contend that you're supposed to hate that part of the game - it's necessary for the exhilaration of balance that is present in the final level. I hate it too, but wouldn't avoid it for all the world. Besides, isn't that itself part of the zen (buddhist) narrative quality of the game? You're only frustrated because you have a desire that's being thwarted. If you were just playing with no goal there there would be no frustration...
I liked Flower in almost the exact same way I loved Shadow of the Colossus, riding on Agro from point A to point B and being mesmerized and taken away by the landscape and quickly forgetting my sense of self. It wasn't about the mechanics or my objective.
I say this with all due respect to critics, but sometimes it's ok to STFU and be taken away by an experience that can not be easily be put in to words without trying to explain it by stripping it of everything it makes it enjoyable in the first place.
Words seldomly ever put experiences in to proper context.
"I say this with all due respect to critics, but sometimes it's ok to STFU and be taken away by an experience that can not be easily be put in to words without trying to explain it by stripping it of everything it makes it enjoyable in the first place."
I agree. Too many game writers do not.
However, I think there's a difference between "getting to the core" of something and just nitpicking. It is harder to tell with some writers than others.
My favorite part of Flower is that even as I was playing the game, I was more interested in looking at it than what I was doing. Flying up into the air and looking at the contrast between what I had brought to life and what I had yet to explore; then flying down for the bug's eye view of it all, it's all done so smoothly and beautifully, with such a rich color sense, that it's really easy to get swept away. As you say, it's not really the "non-game" it's being made out to be, but the game seems less the "point" than it is in other games.
That's what I'm saying, Wolf Dog -- I think it can easily be put into words. I don't get what everyone's finding so singular or indefinable here.
@Leigh
Well that's getting trickier cause now we're talking about a subjective experience.
Is it possible you were swept away by reviews and commentary before playing it that you just tried too hard to find something there.
Or it's possible we're just a bunch of saps. :P
-Eddie
Thanks for your post, Leigh. I look forward to the next one too.
It's impossible for me to reflect on Flower as a self-contained experience. I love it for all the reasons many of us have already written about. But I also know it arrived at a time when I was still clearing my head from a heavy dose of dark violent shooters. The weather where I live has been especially cold, wet, and gloomy; and all I seem to hear these days is more bad news about, well, pretty much everything.
I don't mean to suggest that Flower can't stand on its own as a wonderful gaming experience, but I know I looked forward to playing this game (and replaying it) each day for the simple respite it provided and the beautiful, tactile immersion it gave me.
Just as an aside, the last time I played Flower I had a crazy flashback memory to the sublimely bad movie "Soylent Green." The people who check themselves into the government clinic to be voluntarily euthanized (known as "going home" in the film) are given a poisonous drink and shown imax-styled views of a lush, unspoiled Earth full of flowers and trees before they die. When Edward G. Robinson (in his final film role) sees the beauty of the world as it once was, he weeps.
I think there's a bit of that in Flower too.
I kind of take issue with the idea that the injection of gamelike elements into the audiovisualmechanical experience disqualifies it as art. If you think that the inclusion of these traditional videogame elements clashes with the rest of the experience, that's one thing. That's a critique, maybe.
But the idea that art-games will necessarily transcend traditional game mechanics seems wrongheaded to me. It's what a game does with those mechanics, how they function in the context of the game as a whole that matters.
Iroquois, I'd say there's a difference between an art-game and a game that's art. In an unfortunate side-effect of not having a good word for non-game interactive art. Saying that a video game can't be art because it's a game is like saying that a movie can't be art because it's a story. It's silly. But in this context, "art-game" would refer to something like The Graveyard, and its use would be something like talking about art-films as opposed to "regular films." It doesn't necessarily mean that other films aren't art, but it's used to talk about an identifiable niche of films.
I love the post, and I hope you follow it up; even though I know I'm already predisposed to agree with Michael here.
I think Wolf_Dog pretty much zeroed in on such a problem though...as it is a subjective can of worms. I can't tell you how many people find that it is their PERSONAL effing DUTY to send me messages about the "subjectivity of art" as if I don't know (every time I make a VG-as-art post it never fails). It defeats the whole purpose (for me anyway...) when people feel that compulsion to couch and quantify.
Anytime someone ventures into "art" it usually stems from a subjective definition of what it is in the first place; and what is subjectivity but an introspective perception of the world? People don't like to have that part of themselves challenged and they typically respond very poopily towards it.
I'm certainly not forcing the pin on you here, but I think Wolf also voiced my thoughts here as well. It's so easy for us to get swept up in what everyone ELSE is looking at, rather than what we see for ourselves.
~sLs~
I have not believed that videogames are art and playing Flower hasn’t changed that. I have a very post modernist definition of art. For me the definition of art is attempting to communicate through a medium the intent, emotions, etc of one party to another. So in a sense the creator is communicating something that the receiver will likely misinterpret (or can never truly know if they have the correct interpretation). Games do not fit this definition because they are a medium of expression, much like a word processing program or language. Using Julian’s example a movie is art because of a story (one party is trying to convey something to another party) but a game developer is really only providing the tools for the user to create their own story.
Personally I have really enjoyed Flower (my wife thinks of it as the “silliest thing she has ever seen” though) but here is nothing about it that makes it different from any other game because it conveys a feeling that is more poetic than other games. Still though, I find it a game with an amazing minimalist design that is perfectly relaxing and calming.
I have yet to play this game, but I have seen it in action and read enough about it to form a general opinion about it. To me this seems...application seems more like an executive toy than it does an actual game. You could probably get just as much Zen like feelings from a ball clicker, or those magnetic bases for stacking paper clips as you would this 'game'. Not to say that it isn't fun in any way, but to each their own.
Dark Tori, I don't really understand how you can say that movies are art because of story, but that precludes video games from being art. Video games have stories too, so at the very least they're comparable with movies on that point. There are tons of video games with perfectly linear stories and tightly scripted sequences (both interactive and non-interactive). Also, how does this translate to more esoteric films that don't have a coherent story? Is Un Chien Andalou not art? Because that's typically the type of film that's more likely to be considered art than something with a very clear story like, day, Dark Knight. Moreover, is journalism art? It conveys a real-life story. Is editorial writing art? It uses the medium of words to communicate the intent of the author and persuade the reader of their ideas.
Moreover, by your own definition of art, and your own description of Flower, Flower is art. You say that it "conveys a feeling that is more poetic than other games..." which implies that it conveys some feeling in a metaphorically poetic way. This fits your definition of art as attempting to communicate emotion through a medium (you yourself define games as a medium). You then go on to say that Flower makes you feel relaxed and calm? What is this if it isn't the communication of emotion?
I thought Flower was a major disappointment, and I would protest the fact that its construction around familiar objectives, choke points, and low level collection are what define it as a videogame. Objectives are not essential to the medium, only interaction. What happens as a result of that programmed interactivity is open to interpretation. In the case of Flower that interaction is so basic and myopically focused on linear collection that I stopped paying attention to the aesthetics almost immediately. Instead, I become fixated on collecting the last bulb in the circular pattern so I could re-activiate the hill I was floating around and move on to the next one. There's nothing ascendent about that experience for me. It's gaming by checklist with a pastoral color greeting card aesthetic on top. I was also unmoved by the music. It sounded like the kind of ostentatious new age compositions that John Tesh might have composed. It felt sterile to me.
I compare it to Electroplankton, which, for me, is a masterpiece because it avoids to lure of objectives. It offers a vaguely evocative setting, a simple set of rules, and a near infinite amount of meaningful variation to be discovered in repeated playthroughs. Flower, in comparrison, is a linear level crawler whose objective design pulled me away from its aesthetic ambitions from the very first level.
It is the interaction that I believe removes the art from videogames. A movie is linear and when I view it I interpret it, and in many cases translate a story. In a videogame I am creating that story and only interpreting that to myself (or creating something that others can interpret). A better example may be that I would never consider a D&D play session as art, but the Lord of the Rings trilogy is art. If I transpose a group of play sessions into a book then it becomes art.
As someone who views videogames very highly (and for many years) I used to wrestle with this. In the end this isn’t a bad thing at all and I don’t feel that it diminishes the value of videogames in any way, and in many ways I feel it enhances videogames. With Flower I am getting an emotion response, but I am creating something through the game to give me that reaction. The game designers in a way have given me a tool to create art, but the tool in itself is not art.
DarkTori, I think your insistence on interaction precluding something from being called art is missing the point. What about theater, one of the oldest forms of art? The actors respond to the audience in various ways, from adjusting their timing to actively engaging the audience. Even the audience's mood can affect the actors, and change the feeling conveyed by a scene. Moreover, what about improvisational music? Is jazz not art because the musicians make some of it up on the spot, adjusting consciously or subconsciously based on audience reaction? Also, if transposing an RPG session makes it art, would a live session for an audience make it art? Are real play podcasts art? If so, how is watching somebody play Flower not art?
Actually maybe that's a good way to look at it, a game is like a jazz song, with some pieces set in stone, some improvised as you go, but what you can/want to do with it is determined by the chord progression, tempo, rhythm, which correspond to the mechanics and level design in a video game.
What about a sculpture you're meant to touch and move, hold in your hands. You can move it around and play with it. How is that different from admiring the predetermined facets of a game? You fly around and move the grass, exploring the space the level artists made. Or what about a game like Gravity Bone, that moves you through a completely predertermined story? How is it not art when a short film telling the exact same story with a non-interactive camera is unequivocally art?
Also, are you changing your definition of art you set forth in your first post? I made it a point to base my argument off your definition, as well as poke holes in the definition itself, but you're rejecting things that meet your criteria, and accepting things that fail them. We can spar back and forth all day, but unless we're dealing with a concrete definition, all we're doing is dancing around our own biases.
@ Julian
I have not changed my definition. Audience reaction and improvisation does not negate my argument, there is one party that is attempting to communicate to another party and the other party interprets it. I had never thought of the example of doing a live role-playing session as art; but I think you would correct that according to my definition it would be art. I have not played any game that is 100% predetermined (have not heard of Gravity Bone) but games do not stop you from attempting something even if it fails (like the old “I don’t know how to XXX’). The fact that there are predetermined facets to a game doesn’t change anything because every tool has predetermined facets.
Also I am not attempting to make a definition of art and thrust it on everyone (I mentioned postmodernism before) but have always thought that such a personal definition both expands and contracts what many others think of as art (for example can a business venture be art, I think it can). I am getting off point here though. To me Flower is just like every other game; I may feel relaxed while playing it the same that I may feel frustration from playing SOCOM. The minimalist design and spectacular visuals do not separate it from other games. None of that has excluded me from loving this game.
My definition of art is not massively different from yours, but that doesn't matter. If I felt you had an internally consistent argument I would be happy to drop the issue. But I simply cannot comprehend how Flower is not an attempt by one party (thatgamecompany) to make another party (the player) feel a certain way. They are conveying emotion through the tactile experience of controlling the game, the visuals and audio, the progression through the different levels that convey something like a story. By asking me to do something in this space they have crafted, they are inspiring emotion in me. This fits your definition of art perfectly. I also think that experimenting with the rules in simulations can convey meaning, but that's a topic I don't need to breach here, since we're talking about Flower, and Flower is essentially a traditional linear game.
As for the issue of predetermined games, in fact MOST games are very scripted. In FPSes, you run through a pre-scripted story, you're just improvising the action scenes. It doesn't matter that you spun to your left and shot the alien with a shotgun when you could have sniped him from across the ravine. The story says you enter this area for this reason and defeat these enemies. That's all predetermined. If you fail, you do it again until the game gets the answer it wants. This is even more pronounced in adventure games, but the idea is the same. you could make a movie out of Full Throttle word-for-word and event-by-event and it would be entertaining, but a little long. In a book you wouldn't complain that it simply says "John Protagonist walked to the store," instead of describing the exact path in intricate detail. The story doesn't MEAN something different because of the exact path he took.
I'm not arguing that all games are art. Hell I wouldn't even argue that all movies or all paintings are art. I'm merely arguing that some games are art, and Flower is one of them.
Fl0wer does nothing for me. The hype never hooked me up. The whole "game as art" semantic is something I really have a problem with.
Is it too simple for me? Is it just not enough "Space Marine" fare? I don't think so, but it still doesn't have any value I find attractive.
Also, I don't like Chen's cavalier attitude about game design and how he says that most modern games "fail to educate you on an intellectual level, and the emotions they evoke are relatively primal". This is just like art critics and the whole metaphysical mumbo jumbo more accurately identified as intellectual snobbery.
Anyway, that's my take.
I decided to search Youtube for some videos...
And... I was amazed to how much it reminded me of Ocarina of Time.
The sounds, the music... it all took me back to that introductory video in OoT were Navi goes to Link's house.
It was pretty.
I know this impression may be due to the fact that I only watched a video of Flower and didn't actually play it... but I think that's okay... and I think that maybe I did get what the game was about.
When I played OoT, I just let myself be amazed. So I was able to be touched by the game. To me, it seems Flower depends on the player. If the player allows the game to touch him... that may be the "Zen magic" of it... how it's a game we want to be touched by.
So... we just let it.
My PS3 came with a DualShock 3. Does Flower work with it, or would I have to go out and buy a Sixaxis?
DarkTori, What about art happenings? In most of it you have interaction with the audience, with enough room for improvisation and an anarquist organization. Would not the Performance art, one important aspect of the postmodern art, be art?
Otherwise we would haver a semantic problem here.
^^
Myself, I have a rather broad definition of art; it's something like "that which is designed for the purpose of evoking a reaction in an audience."
@ Danilo
The fact that Flower is “art” to me is really irrelevant. The game doesn’t really change if it is considered and “art game” or not. Game designers and game fans should not be looking to see if they are creating art but instead should be considering that they are creating something new; let me call it post-art. A minority of other “art” forms (some postmodern performance art) would all fit in this category. In the end the result is the same; both art and videogames are something beautiful, ugly, or somewhere in between and inspires thought and creativity.
@ Doug
The Duelshock has the same functionality is the same as the Sixaxis. Flower works on both controllers.
I have a broader one, "something that is recognized as designed for the purpose of evoking a reaction in an audience"
If a monkey tapping at random on a keyboard end up with a shakespeare play like Hamlet, I will not say that the play isn´t an amazing work of art. I recognize an autor even when there´s none.
Yes, i agree with you DarkTori, when you say that instead of thinking in making art we should be thinking in making something enjoyable, relevant. Aham, Mario will not change one pixel if tomorrow people start saying that games are art. This whole discussion is like walking in circles, even though walking in circles has never been that funny. ^^
"Flower is an imitation of the pollination process -- then why should being touched by a petal cause a flower to open, why should spreading the greenery bring a trio of windmills to life, thereby opening the next area?"
I thought it was supposed to be in the dream of the flower on the window sill. As in this is what flowers dream about. I don't know it is just what I thought.
I deeply appreciated it simply for being outside the norm - it feels special and rare even for PSN, which even amongst it's peers (Wiiware and XBL) seems to have become kind of a haven for the unusual on consoles.
With most games I find it's the experience that drives me rather than any desire to complete or progress a set of challenges, so I loved the first few levels and the last one, but wasn't particularly engaged by the pylon-heavy bits in between.
It's tempting to say I'd love a sequel, but to be honest I really hope it doesn't. It's lovely for what it is, we can do without it becoming marketed into just another franchise.
it looks real. Singapore Florist
Post a Comment