Poems About Flowers Are Usually Terrible.

Flower has received a great deal of press and been subject to a great deal of discusssion among critics and fans alike. So now that the issue is thoroughly stale, I will offer a perfunctory and unnecessary takedown.

The question is not whether Flower succeeds in its attempt to make a game that plays like a poem, as it is silly to debate whether something intended as art actually is art. Let's just assume it is. I think the questions we should ask are not whether it is a poem, but rather what kind of poem it is and whether it is any good. The answer to the first question is that Flower is the kind of poem a fourteen year old thinks is really deep; describing a simpleminded and excessively manichean conflict between nature and technology. So, in answer to the the second question, its a bad poem. I was a fairly melancholy high school student, so I know bad poetry.

In other words, Flower is Emerson gone retarded. And Emerson -- along with every other transcendentalist (lets be honest, Whitman was the first great American poet, everything before him is just a good effort) -- is terrible; his eyeball may be transparent, but it's also firmly lodged six inches up his ass. Clearly a strategic error. If you are to do a cut rate knockoff of any nature-revering poet, it should be Longfellow, or Blake.

I am not averse to poetic games by any means. However, I think Flower, by starting with the desire tomake a game that is like a poem and working backwards from this goal represents the wrong way to try and make games art. Just as an adolescent attempts to play at maturity, the designers of Flower tried to play at art by selecting a suitably poetic topic and going from there. The result is something pleasant, but uninspiring.

A poem's greatness has nothing to do with its subject matter. After all Wallace Stevens wrote one of his best about a jar. A poem's greatness comes from form of the poet's expression, which compresses a great deal of existence into a handful of words. And the form of Flower's expression contains little of the aesthetic force I expect from good poetry. So what is required for games to be art is not for someone to decide that they want to make an art game, but for someone to have something they need to say, which they then say through a game in an artful fashion. What is an artful fashion? Who knows! It, like almost everything else I'm too lazy to think through, is like pornography; the distinction is difficult to articulate, but you know it when you see it.

So Flower is a failure. It may be a noble failure, however, as I'm sure even the best artists have some maudlin scraps that are probably best forgotten (but which will of course be auctioned upon their deaths). Provided of course that Flower is a stepping stone, rather than a wall.