EXPERIMENTAL BOTANY AND ELDEN RING
Never has eating your greens been so appealing, or had such potential
Developers Zoe Vartanian and Badru, of Ice Water Games, are fascinated by the mystic properties of plants. They’ve spent years studying and, at times, consuming various herbal remedies, taking inspiration from Sylvia Federici’s feminist social study Caliban And The
Witch, which looks at how botany was once branded witchcraft by fearful patriarchs.
In the course of research for several games, including the now-cancelled Wildflower,
Vartanian and Badru have played with the idea that plants have specific meanings or symbolism, like “hopeful” in the case of a dandelion seed. As with potion-brewing in many fantasy RPGs, their experiments consist of mixing these attributes together to see what happens.
Vartanian calls this “wildcard cooking”, and it certainly sounds wild. “You’re combining things that you know have [desired] attributes, but there aren’t necessarily specific recipes,” she says. The resulting concoctions vary greatly. On the one hand, the developers have made spruce tip jelly and nettle tea. On the other, they’ve managed to brew elderberry poison (“not on purpose”, Vartanian insists).
Botany is a kind of time magic, as Vartanian and Badru have learned from periods spent living near woodlands during early spring. “We were walking through the woods every day and seeing little sprouts in the soil, and watching salmonberries come in,” Vartanian recalls. Monitoring these tiny changes “slows time down”, she says, “because you have all these points of reference - this plant right here is now totally different. And that’s kind of cool, because otherwise time goes so fast, and seasons can die in the blink of an eye. To be able to slow down, and know all the different times that this plant has looked different is kind of nice.”
GROWING WILD
Videogame magic isn’t usually this poetic, Badru observes. “In games, magic is just power. And it’s very predictable, like a gun or a sword.” He’s more interested in approaches that lean on a “broad suspension of disbelief” than games in which magic is quite so systematised and predictable. As such, he enjoys the stranger breeds of sorcery you find in Elden Ring which are as unpredictable as amateur herbology, and reliant on a “broad suspension of disbelief”. While the game has its fair share of bog-standard fireballs, it also has spells that are less straightforward, like conjuring horns from the caster’s shoulder, turning your weapons invisible, or driving foes mad from the inside out with the The Flame Of Frenzy (a whole school of forbidden magic that has a special ending attached). You’re never quite sure what to expect. “I think Elden Ring has this sense of ‘anything can happen’. It feels like it all makes sense, but also, it’s so open.”
“IN GAMES, MAGIC IS JUST POWER. AND IT’S VERY PREDICTABLE, LIKE A GUN.”