I'll never look at a flower in the same way again...

So Valentine's Day arrived. Whoop-de-do. It's never been one of my favourite days - it always struck me as a way to waste money on crap for each other if you've got someone special, and an excuse to get blind drunk if you haven't. Over-commercialised bull. Having said that, I have a rather dim view of most other [something] days. The only day of the year I can think of that doesn't really nark me is May Day, as there's not really any way for people to make a profit from it. Other than the pubs. And anyway, I'm now on the far side of the planet, where May Day, if it existed here, would be at the beginning of winter and not really worth celebrating... guess I'll have to go with one of the kiwi days now.

Anyway, I'm going off on a tangent there - time to get back on topic. So this year I didn't get the better half flowers. I didn't even get her a flower. No, this year I got her Flower, a new addition to the PSN store and the latest case study in the "are computer games art?" debate. And I think she liked it. Granted I'm not about to find myself wrestling the controller from her hands the next time I want to run through the Killzone 2 demo, but she actually played it for more than twenty seconds.

In Flower you play as a petal in the dream of a depressed flower on a dull city apartment windowsill. Seriously. You float around on the wind bumping into other flowers in wide open fields, gathering more and more petals that float along with you, bringing colour to previously dull landscapes. It's such a remarkably odd concept that it is even more delightful to discover that it works.

A word that I have seen a few times used to describe the feeling it instills is "zen" and I couldn't put it better. It's a bit misleading to even call it a game - there are no time limits, no score, no enemies (not counting a few environmental hazards later on that hardly warrant mention here) - it an experience. In a world where computer games are closest to television, films - even books - in their format, Flower comes across more like a piece of music or a fine painting. You don't go in at the start with a view to getting to the end (well, maybe you do, but that will soon change) like the storyline or raising difficulty of most other games dictate. You go in to please your senses, in the same way a picture hanging on the wall does for your eyes or a piece of classical music does for your ears.

And that all leads me round to the games-as-art debate. Most art in this world stimulates one of the senses, but Flower stimulates more than one. It has not just pushed games closer to being art, but has single-handedly surpassed all other forms of classical art. Many games have made me smile or feel good inside over the years, but Flower manages this without giving me an obvious reason as to why it made me smile and feel good. The more I write about it the more I think it's pointless for me to do so - there is simply nothing out there that it can be compared to or referenced against. Simply put, if you own a PlayStation 3 go and buy it. It's the only way to really understand anything I've written here.

Games will never replace paintings, sculpture, music or any other form of art - like radio never replaced print and television never replaced radio - but I believe that thanks to Flower they will increasingly be able to stand next to them as an art form demanding of equal respect. The ball now lands at the feet of other developers to see if they can match or even surpass the new standards that have been set. I look forward to the future...