mastermario said:
So you actually take it that seriously, though? Like, if you dont bloom enough flowers you get upset or stressed out or something?
Interesting...
This is going to be long, and kind of off topic, but I think it will spark a new discussion, one I've been meaning to bring up for awhile.
I think that statement really says more than you intended it to, MM. Flower is one of those rare games that really makes someone redefine what constitutes a "game." There is no real explicitly stated purpose in the game, you need never "pass" a level if you don't really want to, and as Strubes mentioned the motivation for succeeding in the game does not come from a fear or desire to not fail, but to treat yourself to the visual delight. In effect, the reason you play the game is to
see the game, to experience the visuals of the game. Aside from that its not particularly goal oriented which, I'm thinking based off that statement, is one of the main barriers you run into when trying to understand the point/purpose of playing the game at all.
If I may now digress a tad...
My roommate's g/f decided she wanted to play through OOT. She owned a Snes as a child, can run circles around me in Super Mario World, but nevertheless fell out of favor with the N64 and hasn't really had much of a taste for video games since. OOT is really her first attempt at operating in a fully 3 dimensional game environment, and her first time using shoulder buttons in conjunction with a number of face buttons, so there is a rather steep learning curve. Aside from just learning to navigate Link in this world I've noticed that one of the bigger issues she runs into playing the game is not with the controls or understanding a virtual 3d space, but figuring out
what to do next and how it
ought to be done. She is, as you are, incredibly goal oriented, and she has difficulty in discerning what puzzles are solvable the moment they come up from what puzzles are solvable after obtaining another item or ability. As a result she is met with almost constant frustration because the game constantly sets up road blocks in the player's path of achieving their goal, and she finds herself ill-equipped in understanding the game's logic to come up with possible solutions.
What became apparent to me was that when I played the game, at a much younger age when I had more time to put into games, I enjoyed the times I would get stuck in OOT. The beauty of OOT to me was that there were always 3 or 4 "riddles" to solve, and getting stumped at one meant that it was time to revisit another riddle previously thought to be a dead end and see if a new approach to solving it or a new item would aid in overcoming it. The game, for me, was more about exploration, problem solving, making mental notes, and experimentation. 90% of what I did in that game was wasted effort, incorrect assumptions, ineffective problem solving, and backwards thinking, but the effort put into that 90% made the 10% of time I spent in the game doing things right incredibly rewarding. And by the end of the game I developed my mind to accommodate the logic of Zelda games, which as I have witnessed in my roommate's g/f, is something that is not apparent and has to be learned. When she sits down to play the game she is expecting to accomplish something, and she becomes fixated on accomplishing this goal, and feels helpless if she realizes she cannot accomplish it
yet. She does not sit down expecting to
learn something, nor does she understand that getting new items to solve puzzles is only part of how the game equips the player to overcome barriers. The other part is the way in which the game teaches you to look at and understand the environment.
Ocarina of Time, like any other game such as Flower, has it's own unique language that we take for granted because we grew up with it. It builds off of previously defined conventions of the medium, and assumes a level of mental participation and patience from the player. Flower is most likely totally incomprehensible to anyone who isn't familiar at all with current video games, and demands that even game-savvy players set aside most of their assumptions about games when playing it for the first time. When trying to understand Flower the questions that arise are:
What do you do? How do you do it? What are the conditions for success? What are the conditions for failure? Based on the subject matter, how much do you care about succeeding or failing?
But that is simply one approach to playing a game, and its not always the correct one. For a game like Halo those questions can be answered quickly and easily. For a game like Flower they don't really apply at all. What Flower does is introduce a new gaming language. It's foundations are firmly rooted in games of yesteryear, but it is in many ways incomparable to the vast majority of games out there. So it is difficult to describe why you ought to play Flower, because the vocabulary for it really isn't there. It would be like trying to explain to someone the fun that can be had in Halo online multiplayer without using the words "win" or "lose." You can say Flower sounds dumb because its "about" blooming other flowers, but that's reducing the game to a bottom line that really doesn't express much about the game at all. It would be the equivalent of me saying Halo is dumb because its "about" shooting things. At some level that is what Halo is about, but saying it like that speaks nothing to the strategy, social element, skill, and so forth. Articulating what Flower is about is made all the more difficult because it is a game that really takes advantage of the visual medium, and that cannot be translated into a book or into words so easily.
Whew, that was fun. :lol
