Flower Power Blooms in First Climate-Change Game

Spoiler alert: There are many, many very big spoilers for the videogame Flower in this column. Don't read it if you haven't played it all the way through. Or unless you — y'know — want to have it spoiled for you! Your life; your call.

What the hell is Flower about?

People have been arguing about this gorgeous little tone poem since it was released two weeks ago. As many reviewers have noted, the game is very abstract. You control a flower petal, guiding it with a gust of wind through blighted, brown landscapes. As you touch different flowers, you gradually bring the landscape back to life — and trees and grass burst into color.

Later, though, the world that you bring "life" to becomes specifically industrial. For example, when you finish a level, it generates winds that power windmills, creating electricity. Then you're plunged into a dark, murky landscape, where hissing power lines sear your fragile little petals, and corroded-metal electrical towers attack you like diving sharks. When you succeed, you clean up these dark, satanic mills.

At which point I decided, OK, OK, I get it.

Flower is about climate change.

What's more, it may be the first — and only — truly good game about climate change.

When I say that Flower is the first game about climate change, I don't mean that it's the first game to refer to climate change. Plenty of post-apocalyptic games have been set in a near-future world ravaged by global warming — like last year's Fracture, where two warring tribes scrap amongst the ruins of the depleted planet, or the upcoming game Fuel, where Mad Max–style drivers race across a United States complete with global-warming–created tornadoes and floodplains.

But in these games, climate change is merely part of the background. You're not supposed to do anything about it; the damage has already been done. (Indeed, Fuel appears to regard the damage as totally awesome, because it has created such badass racing environments! Woo-hoo!)

What makes Flower different is that it is "about" changing or improving the situation — and making you feel wonderful over how you've renewed life that was destroyed by industrialization.

And what's most remarkable is that Flower manages to do this without being cloying and preachy. Indeed, the game is amazingly subtle.

At first, it doesn't seem that way. On the contrary, Flower pretty much clobbers you over the head with its metaphors. Flowers, flowering grass and wind blowing through renewable-energy windmills = good. Gray urban blight; angry, weird weather; nasty electricity; and corroded old power line towers = bad. Got it?

These allegorical algorithms are about as old as civilization itself. Our literature is full of them: In the Bible, spiritual salvation is regularly characterized as water flowing and trees blooming over dried-up land. T.S. Eliot's masterpiece The Waste Land — with its vision of a corroded, parched world desperate for life — reads practically like a design document for Flower. (Particularly "What the Thunder Said"!) If you've ever read any fairy tales or belonged to any world religion, you've had these dark materials flash-burned into your soul — which is precisely why Flower packs such a kick.

Given how old and venerable these metaphors are, you could argue that the game isn't about climate change at all. It could be merely about the age-old eternal struggle between man and nature, right? Don't litter, kids! And sure, I agree: Flower is a work of art, and works of art have many meanings, including some the creators never intended.

But at the same time, it's pretty hard to jingle these particular cultural tokens around in your mind — violent weather? wind turbines? power generation? — without finding yourself at least thinking about global warming. Climate change is the emotional operating system for modern environmental metaphors; you cannot really get around it. While I found Flower genuinely thrilling, at points the implicit politics felt somewhat like watching the tear drip down the Indian's face in those "ZOMG what are we doing to the environment?" public service announcements from the '70s.

Yet here's the ultimately cool thing: Flower does not, in the end, demonize human civilization. When you begin the game, you start with a bleak, gray-scale vision of a city, where cars stream through the dark streets. At the conclusion of the game, if you succeed in bringing the various blighted fields and areas to color and life, what's your reward? To hang around and glory in those lovely fields of gold?

Nope. In the final scenes you return to the city where you began. Cars still zoom around town, and plenty of overpasses remain — but this time, trees and flowers are abloom amidst the concrete. In Flower, the "saved" world is one where humanity has figured out how to balance its industrial life with the natural world. We get to keep our automobiles and our greenery — our PlayStation 3s and our roses.

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Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to Wired and New York magazines. Look for more of Clive's observations on his blog, collision detection.