Cloud Gardens
The co-creator of the Kingdom series sends out new shoots towards the sky
PC
No one could accuse Thomas van den Berg of being unambitious. Looking at the delicately hued, lo-fi dioramas scattered across these pages, you might find the following hard to believe: Cloud Gardens started life as a massively-multiplayer online game. “I do often have ideas on paper, but then I already don’t want to start on them because it’s too big, it’s already some crazy plan,” van den Berg grins sheepishly.
While teaching himself Blender by modelling various plant life, he was also experimenting with Improbable’s cloud-based multiplayer game platform, SpatialOS. He ended up building a prototype for a persistentworld construction MMO, which he entitled Garbage Country: players across the world would construct towers from junk, and help each other transform them into beautiful hanging gardens. “It was way too big for one person [to make],” he admits. “But the plants were cool, so I was like, ‘Can I not save some part of this year-long experiment, and have something to show for it?’”
He certainly does – Cloud Gardens is utterly absorbing. We’re transported to a peaches-and-cream-coloured void, and shown a small urban area populated by rusty cars and oil barrels, paved in concrete, half-filled with trash. Our job is to plant wisteria, having nature reclaim this abandoned human ephemera. At first, it’s not clear how we’re supposed to ‘win’. But we’re also occasionally handed empty bottles and street signs, and, as time passes, we begin to realise the symbiosis at work. Junk emits a kind of energy that encourages any nearby plants to sprout and spread further. Success, then, depends on preserving a balance between man-made and natural elements in the scenes we’re creating.
Unlocking new kinds of shrubs helps us puzzle our way to completion; while wisteria can creep down a streetlight, vitis will spread low and wide, tangling itself around lost shopping trollies and suitcases. Thriving plants produce flowers and fruits, which when plucked provide you with more seeds. But it’s by no means a simple task: we have to think carefully about placement, lest a certain shrub doesn’t take readily, or a piece of trash doesn’t throw out a wide enough energy radius.
It’s all in good fun – until we reach a larger, multi-layered level. We spend the best part of half an hour stacking cars and traffic cones, planting monstera between them, plastering concrete with signs that inspire wisteria to trail from above and interlink with the screen below. Then we discover we’ve put our last seeds in inopportune places, and they’ve not grown enough to fill the energy meter. Sadly, the only thing left to do is start over, which van den Berg sympathises with.
Compared to fellow diorama-creation game Townscaper, then, it feels much more game-like – something van den Berg is delighted to hear. “Since a year or so I’ve been working on this, I was like, how can I make this into a real game-game so people won’t say, ‘This isn’t a game’?” he says. “Then I saw Townscaper, and I had a little moment where I thought, oh my god, I didn’t know you could get away with that. I could have made my life so much easier! But now it is what it is.”
What it is, we’d argue, is wonderfully substantial. There’s surprising emotional tension at work in Cloud Gardens. We’re planting shrubs – but also littering, creating the very eyesores we seek to transform. The game mechanics and romantic visuals tell a more nuanced, less idealistic story of the relationship between mankind and nature. “The game is not trying to say, ‘Oh, you have to erase all traces of humanity,’” van den Berg says. “I feel that part of the aesthetic that the game is based on is very much about what humans leave behind. Old factories are pretty, in a way, that we left them behind – the same way as a natural monument like the Grand Canyon can be pretty. It wasn’t designed on paper, but once I started playing with this, I was like, this is interesting: the more stuff you put down, the more you have to go over it. So you’re working towards a balance.” The MMO dream may have faded, but Cloud Gardens still has plenty to say about the connections we create with other living things.
“The aesthetic of the game is based very much on what humans leave behind”