As you place these objects in that landscape, they generate some energy that causes your seed to grow. You poke around it until you find a seed, and you plant the seed somewhere in that landscape, and then you’re given a bunch of objects: a wrecked car, old computer monitors, traffic cones, things that are left behind. It might be an abandoned parking lot or a broken highway entrance ramp. When you start the game, you’re presented with this post-industrial landscape, some sort of ruin, wreckage of where humans are no longer there. Ken Liu: I found Cloud Gardens both cryptic and also strangely inviting. It refuses end-of-the-world catastrophism and it raises questions about the boundaries that we always construct between the organic and the built the human and the non-human, the sublime and the dystopian. The game we’re going to be talking about is Cloud Gardens, a strangely soothing gardening game that explores environmental themes in a cryptic and quietly complex way. In this series, we take a close look at video games to examine and celebrate the work they do in envisioning the future and building rich, thought-provoking worlds. Joey Eschrich: Welcome, everyone, to CSI Skill Tree. And in that irrelevance, we achieve our potential, because we are no longer standing outside of nature, but are truly part of it. It’s about the radical acceptance of human irrelevance. The game tries to make you take the perspective that nature is just as happy with an abandoned parking lot as it is with rich soil. And we are forced to rethink what it means to have nature, what it means to be part of it, what it means to have these extracted objects being a part of the landscape. If humans were gone tomorrow from this planet, nature would not somehow be restored it would simply grow into the spaces where humans are now, and you would end up with a landscape where the human and the “natural” are mixed together. It’s ambivalent and doesn’t come out with a specific message at all. Can that really be what we mean?Ĭloud Gardens takes on all of those questions. It seems to suggest that we’re to make it so that humans are no longer there. When we see human objects in nature, we have been trained to view it as negative. We don’t really want to think that way, and yet we seem to be unable to escape that kind of discourse. And that obviously sets up an opposition between what is human and what is nature, which we all sense deep down is not quite right. Much of the discourse that we engage in seems to be about removing the human from nature. WE SPEAK SO MUCH about nature these days: cleaning it up or removing ourselves from it. In February 2022, novelist, futurist, and Orion contributor Ken Liu joined video game designer Liz Fiacco to discuss Cloud Gardens as part of the CSI Skill Tree series, hosted by Joey Eschrich at Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination.
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