Want to find your happy place? Try 'Flower'

Winda Benedetti Citizen Gamer • E-mail

Anyone who’s ever played video games knows the feeling. Maybe you’ve got bullets whizzing past your head, maybe a clock is counting down. Either way, you’ve got a controller gripped so tightly in your hands that your knuckles have gone white from the loss of blood flow. Teetering on the edge of your couch, you lean toward your television like it’s some kind of industrial-grade magnet. Your shoulders sit tied up in knots around your neck.

Our video game experiences may be virtual, but our physical reactions to them are as real as they get.

This we know: Video games can really get the blood pumping. And sometimes it’s cathartic, this explosion of action, competition and stress. But sometimes it’s just, well, stressful. (Remember that time you pitched your controller across the room in a fit of frustration?)

But while so much of gaming is rooted in these intense emotions — the fear of death, the fight for survival, the desire to dominate — more and more these days it seems games are offering the exact opposite kind of experience.

Some games just want to help us chill out and relax. They want to help us find our happy place. They come offering us our moment of Zen.

Game Factory recently launched the first in its “Zenses” series of games – games that promise the kind of “active relaxation” that “allows the player to transcend the stresses of everyday life” in the form of nature-themed puzzles. Meanwhile, “Zen Bound” — forthcoming for the iPhone — promises a “calm and meditative” game of wrapping rope around wooden statues. And all kinds of casual games now offer “Zen mode,” modes that allow us to play without the standard stresses of a timer or the threat of losing if we don’t make the right move.

But can a game truly help us chillax?

Jenova Chen thinks so. He’s the creator of "Flower,” the game most likely to chill you out … when it’s not busy blowing your mind.

Relaxation without the cheese
“This is a video game version of a poem dealing with the contrast and the harmony between the urban and the nature,” Chen says. He calls “Flower” — a game that just launched on the PlayStation Network — “interactive therapy.”

Chen, co-founder of ThatGameCompany, also knows exactly what you’re thinking right now. “It is very lame to describe this game with words because it sounds cheesy,” he says.

Yes. Games that offer mellower pursuits tend to come off like some new age guru hawking the latest self-help fad. Just check out this “Zenses” advertisement. Aimed squarely at women, it sounds like the cheesiest tampon commercial ever invented.

But I’ve played “Flower,” and I promise: It isn’t cheesy.

Yes, as the name suggests, it is a game about flowers, and more importantly it’s a game about the dreams flowers have when they’re trapped in the gray confines of an urban apartment.

A game that you download directly to your PlayStation 3, “Flower” begins with a single petal. Riding on a breeze, you sail across grassy meadows, collecting petals from other flowers until you’ve become a swirling trail of petals with the power to affect the environment around you. Sometimes you bring light to the landscape, sometimes you bring color. But no matter what you’re doing, you soar through the air with an unparalleled feeling of grace and lightness.

OK, sure, it still sounds cheesy. But truly, “Flower” — the follow-up to ThatGameCompany’s award-winning underwater game “Flow” — is as artful and artfully implemented a game as I’ve ever seen. Its dazzling graphics drop you into the middle of a magical-yet-familiar place that comes alive with music as you swoop through it. And the controls are as intuitive as they come. Tilt the PS3’s motion-sensitive controller to steer your petals where you want them to go. Push any button you like to propel them forward on the breeze. It’s that simple.

Meanwhile, there is no ticking clock or ever-shrinking health bar to threaten you … and with none of these pressures you’re soon delightfully absorbed in sailing through the grass, hunting for flowers and leaving your mark on the world around you.

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