I'd Rather Let The Flowers Keep Doing What They Do Best

Stendhal syndrome, Stendhal's syndrome, Hyperkulturemia, or Florence syndrome is a psychosomatic illness that causes rapid heartbeat, dizziness, confusion and even hallucinations when an individual is exposed to art, usually when the art is particularly 'beautiful' or a large amount of art is in a single place. The term can also be used to describe a similar reaction to a surfeit of choice in other circumstances, e.g. when confronted with immense beauty in the natural world.
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As a writer on games, I've often expressed frustration at the way we often receive new material in a compartmentalized fashion, rather than discussing, reviewing, enjoying games as individual holistic experiences. I've long believed that, even if a game produces a laundry list of elements done outright wrong, that shouldn't preclude us from appreciating, even "championing" it for one very special element done absolutely right.

From my excess of patience with Persona 4's exposition or Hideo Kojima's self-indulgence to my outright frustration with audiences and reviewers who chose to focus on Silent Hill 5's combat when the critically-acclaimed series has never had good combat, it's perhaps a fair criticism that my eagerness for the "big picture" has sometimes meant I've missed it.

So why, then, am I plucking Flower's petals one by one?

Because inherent in every defense of a game's under-appreciated bits is a criticism of the culture that has failed to appreciate it. And inherent in this dissection of Flower -- which let me remind, I like -- is a criticism of a culture that has vastly exaggerated it.

We are a demanding audience because we want more from games. And when we find one we love, we reward it mightily, we ring its knell to the high hills, until GTA IV is Citizen Kane and we've all binged on the not-a-lie cake until we puke Portal. With BioShock, most of us had never read Ayn Rand before, but it was suddenly in vogue to pretend we had.

As if, by swelling with love, by being terribly sincere, we could somehow transmute the skeptics who think we're wasting time fiddling with controllers. As if by lionizing titles with the subtlest signs of promise, we could combat the mainstream's failure to appreciate the dignity of games. Perhaps we're addressing our own private, lingering doubts, sacrilege to confess. We must be the champions, after all.

We hold up Flower -- "look," we cry, "this game makes me want to have what is art discussions."

We play Flower and find that it is beautiful -- "oh," we sigh, "here's the one, here is our latest ambassador to legitimacy."

We find a cheeky business angle -- the $10 game that sold a $400 console! -- as if that were at all a normative example. We make it about the platform war, because this is deeply personal to us, the hardware market.

We are waiting, always waiting, for a game that can send us running to the blogosphere to discuss -- "here, here's one," we gasp, prizing Flower closely, thumbing through the indices of academia to find quotes about art, cracking our thesauruses for synonyms of narrative, homophones for wind.

Poor Flower, unpermitted to simply be a good, thoughtful video game. We did this to Braid, too.

And, fair play, Flower and Braid were done to us right back. Was it the creators of these games who began these vaunted discussions long before the games released, this authoritarian-author talk that let us know to plan ahead, look out, an Important Game is about to be born in a manger?

I don't know. But Flower has got people all twitterpated, as if one beautiful landscape has decimated the ability to reason. Your experience with a game is your own -- seeing what you want to see, getting out of it what you would like to get out of it, is your right. In fact, I'm the one who's always saying "engagement is a choice". Make that choice. All well.

But you will not create reality simply by the language you use to describe it. All your love will not imbue Flower with traits it doesn't possess. You're free to imagine that it is whatever kind of experience you want it to be -- but don't then try to rationalize it by hyperbole. Don't fake Stendhal's when what you've really got is Stockholm's.

Loving something based on what you need it to be to serve these fervent wishes for the advancement of the medium, this desire to elevate the discussion, gets in the way of the demand for genuine advancement, for real quality.

There's nothing wrong with a good, thoughtful, pretty video game. There's nothing wrong with a Pixar flick (credit to N'Gai for that one) -- but if we insist that all games must strive for more, we'll never achieve it if we act like we've just seen a Shakespeare, a Shepherd.

Not only that, but refusing to believe that Flower is not as "deep" as we need it to be devalues what Flower is.

It's a good, thoughtful, pretty video game.

It succeeds. I like it. I wouldn't bother devoting this much time to it if I didn't think it was important. It has contributed to the medium -- it's impossible that we won't continue to discuss it in the years to come, which is why I'm opposed to varnishing it with hype. I have expressed my admiration for the game in each post I've made about the it thus far, and so unwilling are some to smudge the new Da Vinci that I feel that no one's heard me.

By highlighting what Flower is not, I have not been trying to crush the flowers, to pull their petals. I only hoped to tilt this floaty breeze back down to earth. It's nice in the grass.


[Post headline is a quote from the poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa, as a little nod to a dear friend.]