Brian Green (“often known by the pseudonym ‘Psychochild’,” according to his official biography) has written for Gamasutra yet another one of those facile pieces that explores the issue of cultural legitimacy, why we don’t have it and how we can claim it for ourselves. Consternation of the why-don’t-they-respect-us variety has always struck me as more an expression of deep-set insecurity on the part of game developers than any genuine deficiency in others’ regard for us. Nobody convened a symposium or wrote an article for an industry trade magazine about how to get rock and roll accepted as a legitimate form of artistic expression; a rock star becomes one partially because he doesn’t explicitly seek the approval of the wider mass of culture about him. And now here we are, sitting on a new medium often portrayed as dangerous and subversive, and we’re wondering how we can get away from that, like we’re afraid of the barely perceptible frown on our dentist neighbor’s face when we tell him what we do for a living.

In a certain way, Flower is an interactive experience reduced to one of its barest possible minima. The player navigates a space, “touches” things to unlock other things, and touches those in turn to unlock new areas— where the same thing takes place, and over again until it ends. The simplicity of the rules makes it seem easy and short for people who are already fluent in the language of the video game medium. Distilled to its basic pattern of interactivity, divorced from its art and music and its ambience, Flower would not be particularly fun and would only barely qualify as a game. Our enjoyment of the experience comes mostly from the content, which in turn creates the context, and feeling, of its action: the sun and the clouds, the grass in the wind, the floating and the soaring.