Not to brag but I have a pear tree at the moment that is really something. It must be twenty feet tall, for one thing, and the pears are these fat golden gems that hang from its spongy boughs. The pear, I remember reading in The Observer about fifteen years ago, is a fruit whose time has come. Fifteen years means it’s probably come and gone by now, but still: that pear tree of mine. Sometimes it’s nice to get off the motorbike I use when gardening, put down my magic trowel and just take it in. I grew that!
Grow a Garden is everywhere on Roblox at the moment, melting servers and sending player counts through the roof. I have been intrigued by this, but not quite intrigued enough to get a Roblox account. But there’s a clone of it on Fortnite now. Of course there is. These games trade modes and ideas back and forth endlessly. So yesterday I dropped into Go Garden to see what the game’s about.
You start with a few flower beds in an arena that’s shared with a few other players. It’s like you’ve all dropped in to the Fortnite Allotments together. You plant seeds that grow at a variety of speeds depending on what they are. You harvest the seeds and sell them and you then use the money to buy more seeds that you sell for more money and on it goes. Oh, and because it’s Fortnite, you can do most of this while bombing around on a motorbike.
There are wrinkles, which are still announcing themselves. Some plants are one and done: you plant a tulip, you get one tulip and you pick it and sell it and then get on with your life. Others, like strawberries, leave you with plants that produce more and more of the things. Different weather conditions lead to different mutations in plants, which I assume makes them more valuable. You can buy sprinklers and whatnot to speed everything along, and there’s a Piranha Plant knock-off who you can go and chat to now and then. They’ll dispatch you to grow very specific plants in order to get a little bonus gift.
It took me a few minutes of this – planting seeds, harvesting, selling, repeating – to realise that I was in familiar territory. And this is not because I’ve played the original, and it’s not because I’ve ever taken any real interest in actual gardening. It’s because – oh cripes! – Go Garden is a clicker. A clicker. I may be in real trouble here.
Clickers are some of the strangest and most compulsive games out there. You start by selling or growing something that’s worth almost nothing, but then the feedback loop kicks in and you’re selling stuff or mining it or however the fiction works and bringing in a little bit more than you’re spending. Then you invest in things that allow you to grow or mine a bit more effectively so you have more money to invest. Then you start to automate processes.
This may sound fairly tame in principle, but it’s a bit like that thought experiment where you have a penny that doubles every day. It doesn’t take long for you to be absolutely minted. And so Clickers start small and then follow a kind of Katamari Damacy power curve onwards and upwards. I fear these types of games because I can’t stop playing. But I can’t stop playing because in their relentless flow of greater and greater numbers, they put me out somewhere deep in space, rushing at greater and greater speeds towards the outwards edge of the universe where I’m informed that light and time and space start to curve away.
In other words, they make numbers first compelling, then slippery, then terrifying, and then cosmic. Cor, that’s a lot to put on a game about growing strawberries, but it was quite a lot to put on a game about clicking on a cookie, which is where my journey with Clickers began.
So the question is: do I think Go Garden is a good clicker? Yes and no.
Yes because it’s delivered with wonderful art. The plants are simply rendered but they’re glossy and colourful things, and the mutations add a little excitement as they take shape. All of the timings – the rhythms that make these games work – seem to be nicely worked out, so I can gather strawberries all the live-long day while I wait for my pears and corn to grow. I even like dashing back and forth to the store, largely because underneath everything it’s still Fortnite and there’s that bike to carry me. (There are portals, I should add, to take you back and forth between places a little more quickly, but I’m not that much of a lost soul yet.)
The problem is that I’m not sure I’m going to stick around for whatever comes next. I gather there’s going to be some new layer that cranks everything up massively in terms of numbers, so I’m going from making millions with each harvest to making billions. Maybe I need to swap out my crops and move away from those strawberries? Maybe I need to go massively deep on sprinklers and other gadgets? Maybe I need a new, more arcane source of seeds? Can I expand?
These are all good questions – or very bad questions if you’re trying to put a Clicker aside and get on with doing the dishes or whatever. But this Clicker is now competing with all the other Clickers I’ve ever played, on a mechanical invention basis, sure, but also in how I felt afterwards having given tens of hours to clicking on a cookie that isn’t even real, when I still haven’t finished reading Don Quixote. So I think for now I’m checking out. My garden will wither. That giant pear tree of mine may get even more giant and I won’t be here to see it. I won’t climb on the motorbike and roar over to the seed shop and I will go and read a bit more of Don Quixote.
Until I get bored of that, of course. At which point I’ll just drop back in to see how the pears are doing…
