This Blog Devoted to Digital Plant Life Will Give You A New Perspective On Game Worlds

Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

When you're playing a video game do you rush through every level, or do you ever stop to smell the virtual roses? A new blog has popped up recently devoted to the art and appreciation of digital plant life, and although Video Game Foliage might seem just about as "nichey" as you can get, I suspect this screenshot-laden site will appeal to just about anyone who appreciates the work behind the beauty of virtual creation.

But why not avatars or cities or scenery as a whole? What is it that makes plants so special? Well...

In Video Game Foliage's very first post, its writer makes a solid case for the appreciation of digital plant life by posing a slightly technical question:

Making spaces for games is a strange and interesting art. Not being bound by physical limitations makes it possible to create impossible structures, but being bound by the technical limitations of modern computer graphics makes it difficult to create accurate simulacra of even simple objects. So video games cheat, using approximations to create the desired aesthetic result.

Plant approximations are especially hard, since organic structures tend to be difficult to describe in terms that graphics cards understand. This creates an interesting design constraint.

How do you create representations of plants given the limitations of realtime rendering?

Plants may seem like an afterthought to fill out an environment or scene, but making those plants anything but an eyesore rarely comes cheap in terms of design or processing resources. Though I wouldn't say that you can judge the quality of a game's world design by the quality of its trees, that point's not too far removed from the truth.

VGF doesn't focus solely on the most realistic plants in gaming, though. There are blocky plants, flat plants, plants using the dreaded poster-board cutout method many Second Life users will be incredibly familiar with, and there are even screenshots from more surreal games like Proteus and Darwinia. Sometimes it's even more important to recreate the feel of plants in an environment than it is to imitate their physical appearance, and there are a lot of different ways to achieve that.

For more beautiful, bizarre, and even slightly broken examples of natural worlds within virtual ones, follow Video Game Foliage on Tumblr.

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Iris Ophelia (@bleatingheart, Janine Hawkins IRL) has been featured in the New York Timesand has spoken about SL-based design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan andwith pop culture/fashion maven Johanna Blakley.

Comments

[followmeimthe piedpiper]

Plenty of screenshots from Sir,You are being Hunted
on there but not one of the windblown trees and grass in Betrayer which is one of the best representations of RL foliage I think I've seen in any PC game. If only SL could emulate that. (sighs)