“Like a Flower” is a game about creativity and creation, control and letting go. In it, you control this character, that has to collect these “sparks” (which are essences of ideas) in order to put together a piece of writing. The game involves a lot of close reading and attention to text as they are what the tasks and puzzles rest upon. The whole game could be thought of as taking place within our minds. The character is us, trying to come up with ideas, piecing together what we’ve seen and read before into something new. It begins in this abstract space before eventually you’re transported into this place deeper within you, carried over by the ferryman of souls into the realm of the mythopoetic. These two worlds operate in parallel — the first world is still active and necessary, but in order to progress, you must relay over what you’ve found in the second world from creatures who exist beyond yourself. The texts in the game, gotten through places like inscriptions on stones and in conversation with flowers in the sky — they revolve around a few key topics: of release, madness and faith, of being a vessel, of self-acceptance, of love and presence, of spontaneity, of just being. The central through line of these is that of letting go. Of giving ourselves more and more to those powers unknown — the muses, the gods, the daemons, the genius which, by the way, were originally these disembodied creative spirits, divine attendants that came to humans for reasons beyond our understanding. We humans weren’t geniuses, we would “have” a genius. I had a realisation once that, when I peered at the edge of inspiration’s spark, everything that i thought was from me, wasn’t. They were always from the void, or as a remix of some prior material that I saw. And on top of that, there was no willful act that created the ideas, they always just came, whether that’s on a walk or whether that’s amidst many hours of agonizing over research. The latin word “inventio” means both to create, but also to discover. It is at once an act of creation and one of recollection, this almost necessary drawing from the past, a coming upon, a finding of what already came before in order to construct something of the present. Embedded into the structure of the game is this letting go, the mechanics mirroring its content. You start off by controlling the character through the WASD key, but when you enter into the second world, you can only move by point and click. Some tasks embed this too — one puzzle involves drawing the spontaneous zen circle the enso - too careful and slow of a stroke will require a redraw. You get past a guard not through fighting it, but by gifting it a bagel made from a lime grown through presence, and from a heart of love, received through listening. At the end, you no longer move yourself towards your goal, but follow a cactus. The final, main act in world 2 is not of doing anything, but one of its complete opposite — a complete release, a disintegration and death that leads into a new rebirth. This game is really quite crude, very on the nose, but I wanted to explore this combination of my two previous interests, storytelling via motion, and interaction via the web and programming. What draws me to video games as mediums is how they work with this embodied enactment. Rather than just a passive viewing, the player has to actually do these actions. In “Like a Flower”, they actually have to wait, they actually have to let go of control. I’m not saying that my game makes any kind of impact that it sets out to do, but in the process of its creation, I’ve begun to think more about design, in any medium, as one of world-building. What worlds am I creating for people to inhabit in, whether that’s months, as in a website interface like a social media, hours as in a film, or mere seconds, as in a billboard advertisement. All of these use different tools to shift our perception, to change, just a little, how our minds and bodies churn. The making of this game has lead me to consider the idea of worlds more carefully. What worlds do I create for others, and, more importantly, what worlds can I co-create, together?

If you’d like to see more of my work on games, see my 3D projects. Otherwise, return home here.