 Sitting atop a windowsill, it pondered its pitiful plight. Trapped it felt in this dreary hell, so it promptly took eager flight. Away from the mire of a drab city, into the vast expanses of nature, a dream turned into reality, as our flower caught a glimpse of its future. It was glorious, a floral pied piper whose kinetic flow enraptured all those around, creating a trail of dancing petals with musical whimsy abound. The task was clear as the morning sky, rejuvenate Gaia from within, roam through these fields, descend from up high, and cleanse it of artificial sin. However, this musical procession of spiritual uplift was rudely interrupted by the encroachment of nature's arch-enemy, banality and concrete ramparts. How does one confront this insidious foe to unveil their façade as duplicitous show? The golden mean lies not with adolescent anger, nor with vulgar exploitation that leaves nature in imminent danger. In harmony and all its dimensions, if humanity is now here to stay, bask in the possibilities of a splendid future that embodies unity. Nature is not a bottomless pit nor to be hounded in its wanderings, it is to be regaled for its spirit which brings us back to the flower's ponderings. Sitting now with this sober realization dreaming of a better tomorrow, will it be one defined by reconciliation, or one infused with sorrow? Described by its creators, that game company, as an interactive poem exploring the tension between humanity and nature. Flower tasks you with guiding a trail of petals and a path to reconciliation. You use motion controls to simulate the joy of weightless rejuvenation, and as you pick up flowers, musical layers get added to this score, creating a sense of escalation, all whilst petals dance to the beat of your momentum. Playing the game has a tangible sense of freedom, and there are no points to accumulate or time limits, it's just you and Mother Nature living a poetic parable. Playing with nature is a powerful inversion of our anthropocentrism, a shift video games are perfectly situated to express. Ecological themes in games are nowhere near as uncommon as many think, and are in many senses foundational to the spirit of play. The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time is often viewed as the quintessential hero's journey in games, and its environmental motifs are more than just incidental. Much of the game's core aesthetic comes from Shigeru Miyamoto's memories of playing with nature in his youth, and the sense of adventure, exploration and intrigue it affords. In fact, nature may be the original proving ground for play's expression, as we learn to interact with the world around us, surrounded by Gaia herself. Miyamoto attributes much of the game's atmosphere and mythology to growing up near Kyoto, Japan's old capital, and being steeped in the lore and ethos of Shintoism. Shinto is an amalgamation of various regional and local practices. The parallels between some of its foundational ethos in Zelda are interesting to behold. The three goddesses at the heart of Zelda are taken from Shinto foundational myths, and the task of purifying the lands has the practice of Shintoism expressed in gameplay. As Jack Flanagan argues in his essay on Shintoism in games, it isn't a coincidence that Miyamoto felt inspired by his childhood outside Kyoto, and drew Shintoist elements to create the Legend of Zelda, because as Shintoism has grown to advocate an increasingly environmentalist message, that countryside has disappeared. It may be Miyamoto's own longing for that lost childhood, and also innocence, which had him create a game in which a young boy runs about the land, restoring violated things. Of course, Zelda is far from the only game in the Japanese canon that expresses ecological motifs. In Final Fantasy VII, you play as a group of eco-terrorists who are adamant on stopping the Shinra Corporation from extracting the natural resources of the planet Gaia. It's an inversion of traditional moral categories, framing your insubordination as legally wanting, but morally righteous. We destroy only to save nature from ourselves. Instead of playing as nature as we do in flower, we side with nature against the encroachment of humanity's greed and recklessness, but it has a more contemporary representation of how society enacts this, through technology and industry. Characters in the story that are attuned to the patterns of nature are portrayed as virtuous, despite being marginalized by the predatory status quo. If dystopian hellscapes are too dreary for your consideration, a more mythological game that explicitly references Shintoism is Okami, an experience inspired by Zelda in more than just mechanics. You play as the goddess Amaterasu and are tasked with cleansing the land of the corruption of Orochi who curses the world, sapping its vitality. Playing as a wolf has both symbolic relevance, but also aligns you more directly with nature, animals being recognized as intrinsically a part of the web of life. You are not just an animal though, you are divine, expressing more directly the spiritual integration of ecological stewardship. Characters of this ilk are not just popular in Japan though, both Ocarina of Time and Final Fantasy 7 were major global hits, suggesting ecological awareness is more universal than appears at first glance. The rise of high fantasy in the West, of the Tolkien variety, was seeping into the global consciousness, a genre that views nature not as antagonist, but home. And environmental activism became a prominent philosophical movement, as issues like climate change continued to get worse. Modern games with ecological themes take a slightly different bent, being more systemic and abstract and less rooted in mythology. Balance of the planet aims to show how difficult stewardship is from a management perspective, asking the player to balance the many competing systems that sustain our planet. We also have depictions rooted in satire and comedy, Ratchet and Clank being a surprisingly potent deconstruction of a corporate ethic run amok. Most prominently, games like The Last of Us and Horizon Zero Dawn marry apocalyptic fiction with nature reclamation tropes to humble humanity from its dominion over our planet. In this book Respawn, Colin Milburn argues that video games can be powerful vehicles of ecological awareness, because they can represent systems, and what is the planet if not a distributed system? However, he argues games can be classified by how they depict ourselves in relationship to nature, revealing layers to our understanding of the ecology of play. The first types of games are those that portray us as fighting crimes against nature. Games can be seen in everything from Sonic the Hedgehog to Echo the Dolphin. We need to destroy some contaminating influence on the natural order of things. Super Mario Sunshine adds an element of complicity to this. Mario is sentenced to clean the island for his supposed wrongdoing. However, these games, which Milburn calls games of discipline, are ecological only superficially, as environmental corruption is seen mostly as an outside influence. Truly ecological games start to incorporate us, the player, in both the creation and perpetuation of corruption itself. He states, Games depict environmental risk as the result of illicit behavior, a deviancy of the system. We are virtuous though. The system is virtuous. By conjuring eco-crime as irredeemably other and beyond legality, these games must suspend the very laws that they themselves posit. Essentially, corruption of nature is viewed as an aberration, when in fact it is often a feature of the system itself. We can't just view the ruin of nature as an outside force. We often are the cause of it. The next layer of this is what Milburn calls games of environmental control, where we are incorporated into the management of ecological networks. In Powerhouse, we play as the thermostat, and embody the idea of algorithmic regulation of temperature as we try to regulate fluctuations in emergent dynamics. This brings us to a bevy of games called eco-games, like energy balance and energy will, all of which try to represent systemically the cybernetics of ecology. Games can be extended to games that represent ecological systems and the feedback loops that mediate the global environment. Here though, we take decisions abstracted from the system itself, as if some divine being playing with nature as a toy. In Fate of the World, we get to examine how certain actions lead to devastating consequences for both ourselves and our planet with regards to global warming. Games can be powerful vehicles for eco-awareness, because we can play with nature itself. In our book Playing Nature, Alenda Chang expands this argument and claims games not only allow us to represent nature mechanically and aesthetically, but also afford us many of the benefits of nature as well. Significantly, many of the advantages of natural experience can be found in computer and video games, free unstructured play without adult supervision, a chance to learn about natural processes, or how people, animals, plants, and inorganic matter are connected. This connects games and systems with nature itself, weaving us organically into an ecology of play. To make this argument, Chang claims games create mesocosms, which ecologists understand as simulated or controlled environments that allow us to test and play with ecological phenomena. Most games are what she calls anthromes as opposed to biomes, which means they are fundamentally instrumental for people. However, games that are ecological break free of this framing, allowing us to reconstitute our conception of nature itself. Different games do this in unique ways. Global Cave Adventure invites us to use our imagination to reconstruct the haunting imagery of a perilous cave system, just as much as Walden tries to systemize Henry David Theroux's Sojourn into nature and how it enlivens our creative spirit. Spore exhibits scaling, both across space and time, and how evolutionary progression might happen, despite its inaccuracies. Mountain embodies nature in a non-human way, showing nature existing off its own accord, divorced from our agency. Games even illustrate things in their failure to depict phenomena as well, like how farming games like Farmville don't account for waste or entropy or degradation or pollution. She says, in depicting a kind of agricultural utopia void of workers but replete with labor saving technology, farm games thus inadvertently reprise the capitalist drama of modern agricultural history and economics. However, her most compelling argument is how games can intrinsically model ecological collapse because games are the art of failure. Permadeath, failstates, individual survival, gamers are attuned to collapse at a foundational level. This concept is played with though, the suggestion being what if gamers aren't just concerned with their life, with the life of the planet itself. How do we do this though? How do we reconcile both the mechanics and aesthetics of games to ecological needs? Pure abstraction may allow us to simulate phenomena but often disassociates us from the consequences of our actions and pure aesthetics can enrapture us but is often insufficiently specific to compel action. This leads us to Colin Milburn's final category, games of environmental responsibility. He argues we need to leverage emotions, empathy and storytelling, the aesthetics of ecological awareness in conjunction with the mechanics of complicity to engender a sense of ownership and responsibility for our actions. One way is through humor in the way that Katamari Damasi satirizes consumption as a practice, revealing the absurdity of its want and indulgence as our aggressive impulse to accumulate folds the entire planet into one. However, in a game like Shadow of the Colossus, we see a subtle but more sincere depiction of ecological awareness, not rooted in condemnation or judgment but the beauty of tragedy and catharsis. We hunt and slay Colossi to fuel our own selfish desire to save the woman we love. The creature's slain seem a part of the environment, bound to the land as any animal is to its habitat, but we go out of our way to disturb this. As Milburn states, it is an opening of ecological awareness and responsibility to act responsibly, not merely through techniques of discipline or control but to move us, touch us, empathy. When we see how the Alaskan Inupia tribe lives in the game never alone, integrated deeply with nature itself, it's an invitation to see the world differently as one where all life is bound in a circle and we are intrinsically a part of it. The anxieties of our era are subsumed by the beauty of an integrated spiritual practice. We need to couple our ever expanding understanding of the dynamics of our planet with an aesthetic appreciation of nature itself, of how it sustains, protects, and inspires. In Final Fantasy VII, the Shinra Corporation is an overtly diabolical threat. They don't mind killing their own people and sapping the planet dry for their own enrichment. However, us, as well as the protagonists of the story are also complicit in the perpetuation of these systems. We need to take responsibility for the role we inevitably play in the malice that preys on nature itself. Part of the fiction of the game requires the self-awareness, but suffice to say the rhetoric is clear. Only when we realize what it is we are, an integral part of a system, of a series of algorithms, of the global network that is our ecosystem, can we start to have discussions of how to shepherd a new future. Unbound to the preservation of nature, as much as it is to ourselves. When you make your way up to the top of the final tower, you return once more to where you begin. What started as a dream now bleeds into reality, as the massive tree blossoms where a cacophony of industrial parts once stood. The tree symbolizes stability, order, motherhood, and grace, but it is also a navel into the divine. There is a reason messianic figures sit under trees of enlightenment, and the tree of life is a universal mythological motif. It is a reconnection to our lost heritage, a way for us to unite with our true ancestors. This dream doesn't have to remain just a dream, though. It is a reality we are all inevitably a part of.