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--- groworld_vegetal_culture [2013-01-24 23:41] – [References] maja
+++ groworld_vegetal_culture [2013-01-24 23:46] – [From human to vegetal scale: plant games] maja
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 ==== From human to vegetal scale: plant games ====
-After seeing the effects of "human scale interaction", groWorld collaborators were encouraged to deepen their investigations into human-computer-plant interactions (HCPI). HCPI allows people to perceive the environmental effects of their actions in real-time, using their naked senses rather than waiting for decades when it is often too late do do something about it. After a winding path through gardens and forests, the investigation led to experiments with computer games. Games in which humans could play a plant. The challenge here was to move away from instrumentalising plants to empathising with them – experiencing the sensations of “being” a plant, rather than “doing” things to plants, as gardeners or designers. As there are no definitive translation mechanisms (yet) to ask a tree or a herb what being a plant really means, the game designers relied on their own observations and imagination. Being a plant meant reaching a state of mind where stillness, slowness and beauty provided energy and incentive to playfully explore, give up control, grow and decay, create and destroy, perhaps even experience viriditas through human fingertips. Games could become a way for humans to exercise their forgotten vegetal reflexes and experience the delight of patience, growth, diffusion, ambient perception, chemical communication, and a continuous quest for light and moisture.
+After seeing the effects of human scale interaction in responsive environments, groWorld collaborators broadened their investigations into human-computer-plant interactions (HCPI). HCPI allows people to perceive the environmental effects of their actions in real-time, using their naked senses rather than waiting for decades when it is often too late do do something about it. After a winding path through gardens and forests, the investigation led to experiments with computer games. Games in which humans could play a plant. The challenge here was to move away from instrumentalising plants to empathising with them – experiencing the sensations of “being” a plant, rather than “doing” things to plants, as gardeners or designers. As there are no definitive translation mechanisms (yet) to ask a tree or a herb what being a plant really means, the game designers relied on their own observations and imagination. Being a plant meant reaching a state of mind where stillness, slowness and beauty provided energy and incentive to playfully explore, give up control, grow and decay, create and destroy, perhaps even experience viriditas through human fingertips. Games could become a way for humans to exercise their forgotten vegetal reflexes and experience the delight of patience, growth, diffusion, ambient perception, chemical communication, and a continuous quest for light and moisture.
 Making the inward-oriented plant life compelling in the context of computer games is challenging. FoAM collaborated with game designers Tale of Tales to explore what it means to play a plant on a computer screen. To investigate whether there could be consilience between game design, botany and permaculture, the team prototyped a series of mini-games. One approach involved connecting physical plants to sensors so that information about their physical environment would influence the “weather” in a digital garden. In another prototype, plant collaboration (as understood in permaculture) was used as a starting point for developing game mechanics.
-Having experimented with the “first-plant perspective” in a range of prototypes, attention shifted back to “playing with plants,” this time in the collaborative spaces of online social networks. Germination X is groWorld's attempt to introduce plants as guides in creating self-sustaining digital gardens, as a response to the industrial farming game Farmville. FoAM designed a prototype in which players are guided by autonomous “plant spirits” to design virtual permaculture guilds, where diverse plants work together to grow and propagate. Building on Germination X, FoAM created Zizim, a hybrid between a mobile app and an online game, exploring the interaction between urban foraging and symbiotic relationships between plants and fungi.
+Having experimented with the “first-plant perspective” in a collection of prototypes, attention shifted back to “playing with plants,” this time in the collaborative spaces of online social networks. Germination X is groWorld's attempt to introduce plants as guides in creating self-sustaining digital gardens, as a response to the industrial farming game Farmville. FoAM designed a prototype in which players are guided by autonomous “plant spirits” to design virtual permaculture guilds, where diverse plants work together to grow and propagate. Building on Germination X, and reconnecting it to the physical world of a city, Zizim (compass in Hildegard's Lingua Ignota) became a hybrid between a mobile app and an online game, exploring the interaction between urban foraging and symbiotic relationships between plants and fungi.
 All of the groWorld mini-games play with human interpretations of plant sentience. Until we are able to convince a plant to design a game about its own life, the number of possible viewpoints, backstories and gameplay is limited only by our imagination.