Groworld was concerned with exploring people's relationship with plants. Computer games are a powerful mechanism for suspending one's belief in other, imaginary worlds. The focus of the groworld game was to explore the use of computer games to allow players to become closer to the plant world.

We were also working on this project with two other groups, Tale of Tales and SixToStart. Both of whom have experience working on projects which use games technology to explore specific experiences and situations.

And as a game project, we were sometimes explicitly, at other times implicitly tackling these issues:

• What is the depiction of plants and growth within existing games?
• Should this be a scientific simulation, if not how do we avoid this?
• What is an art game? Are we making one?

The aim was to explore a number of different areas:

• The player taking on the role of a plant, and therefore in some sense becoming one
• Using plants as inspiration as an organisation model, (e.g. through the use of decentralised technologies such as peer to peer networking)
• Using games as a method of story telling
• Describing the complexities of permaculture through a game
• Using multiplayer cooperation in a similar way as plants growing together for mutual benefit in permaculture guilds
• Using plant guilds as a framework for a game world's structure
• Developing and using human-plant interfaces as way to directly couple the game with living plants
• Find ways of augmenting living plants with information from the game
• Use the groworld drawings as inspiration and incorporate them into the game in some way
• Incorporate the game with a groworld gardeners website to share a database of information

The problems we had to solve were involved with the design of the game, what most suited the aims we had in mind. On a course level, decisions had to be made based on questions like:

• 2D or 3D, both or neither?
• Conceptual, metaphorical, schematic?
• Immersive, descriptive, detailed, fully animated?
• Online, in browser or downloadable app?

Given these derisions, we also needed to decide what technology would be the most appropriate to use. From there we could go on to develop some game mechanics and work on an overall design.

The expected outcome was a downloadable multiplayer game which would be associated with an installation involving living plants. Plants in the game world would mingle with the real plants by means of projection, and sensors which would read signals from the plants and their environment.