There’s a Skull in My Garden

How can you get players to care about the things your generative system makes?

In this short Roguelike Celebration talk, Younès Rabii talks about player interpretation and meaningful stories, by way of his roguelike Tea Garden.

Tea Garden is influenced by Max Kreminski’s idea of gardening games, which posits a style of games that treat generative things as non-disposable, in contrast to the common “we’ll just generate another one” style exemplified by the extractive gameplay in things like Minecraft.

In Tea Garden you explore gardens in your dreams, and bring back dream flowers. Which means it has a flower generator. Problem: many of the flowers just looked like random jumbles of pixels. However, by adding interaction configurations of pixels that didn’t seem to have meaning created new avenues for those random flowers to be put in a new context and be perceived as meaningful.

Tea Garden has a very neat flower generator (though Younès does point out that it has some risks, hence the eponymous and entirely unexpected skull). But the larger point of creating context through interactivity is related to a lot of ideas I’ve been thinking about.

Generating something with context means that it exists as part of a larger system. Objects in the real-world have their history embedded in every scratch and smudge, so Dwarf Fortress’s history-tracking emulates some of that effect. A generator’s framing brings in pre-established context, borrowing from the rest of the world. Sharing content imports the context associations that other people have established into your own experience. And, in Tea Garden, the interactions create the affordances that let you impart your own context to the generated flowers.