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Flower: May Create Happiness

• By Sid Shuman
• February 13, 2009 08:05 AM PST
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Designer Jenova Chen explains why it's time to make players feel instead of react.

READ: GamePro's Flower review.

"I am 27, and I find less and less games interesting to me." That's Jenova Chen speaking. Chen is the designer of Flower, a downloadable PlayStation 3 game that's winning rave reviews for its unusually powerful emotional themes and simple gameplay style. I spoke with Chen about his remarkable new game, and why he's set on dragging the video game medium into a richer world of feelings and emotions -- kicking and screaming, if he has to.

"I am a loyal fan of the Final Fantasy franchise," Chen says. "So when Final Fantasy XII came out, I spent 40 hours grinding [to level up my character]." One day, Chen had a revelation. "I'm wasting my life here. I just want to know the ending of the story!" It was a profound revelation for the young designer. "Grinding doesn't help my life at all. For adults, entertainment needs to be relevant to their life." Chen points to the stagnant US comic book industry as an example of irrelevance. "I don't want to see video games become like American superhero comics," he admits. "American comics live and die based on a very niche audience. In Japan, comics are a national art form."

Flower is a rich emotional journey and utterly unlike anything that's been seen before.

Chen, designer of the emotionally charged PSN game Flower, isn't kidding around. Before Flower, Chen won raves for co-developing a pair of unusual, web-distributed games, one of which, Cloud, was partly inspired by his experiences as a bored, hospital-ridden asthmatic youth. Another game, Fl0W, was most notable for adjusting its difficulty to match the player's progress. By focusing on the relative immaturity of video game design practices, Chen is posing tough questions about the state of a young medium; questions that could be an early harbinger of serious, lasting change in video game design. Chen, himself a USC film student, points to similarities between the earliest days of the film medium and the still-evolving video game medium. And he believes that technology advances -- faster processors, high-definition video, more lifelike graphics -- are losing their traditional stature of importance in video games.

"For any medium -- film, music, video games -- it all starts with technology innovations," Chen explains. "Technology rises quickly, but when it reaches a certain threshold, it slows down. That's when the content innovation starts to catch up." Chen points to early moviemaking practices: Filmmakers began to record higher frame rates, added colors, and used better cameras and handheld cameras. "That's when people started to really make more films, when the film experience expanded."

Chen thinks these days are fast approaching for video games. "I think video games maybe already passed that threshold. Look at the difference between the PS2 and the PS3, there's a big technological leap. But if you look at the content, how many new game types come out ever year?"

Well, I can think of one. Have you played Flower?

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