Human Flower Project
Orrington, MAINE USA
Murrieta, CALIFORNIA USA
Princeton, MAINE USA
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Are You Game for ‘Flower’?
A new online game mixes environmentalism with animation with a sedentary play on petals. Is it mind expanding or sleep inducing?
Screenshot from “Flower”
Photo: thatgamecompany
Late last year we got wind of “Flower,” a new online game. This is a topic that for many reasons makes us recoil, but today we dared to look.
Animated petals swirl across a landscape. They course along gloomy stone ridges, fall into canyons, and breeze through fields with smokesacks in the distance. Suddenly, you have a hyacinth’s eye view of a hillside, or a circlet of yellow lights, like gold-dust, will twinkle into bloom around the base of a bare tree. It’s Andy Goldsworthy meets Fantasia to “follow the bouncing ball.”
Flower’s creators, an oufit of youngsters who call themselves thatgamecompany, also made “Cloud,” a game that likewise seems intent on blowing through categorizations of art, game, consciousness-raising, and self-hypnosis. Shuddering, semi-classical tone-poem-type music and surfy whooshes provide the sound track.