Rooted (AlphaSpark)

Functionally, Rooted is a simple “tree simulator.” The player cannot move from the small hill they find themselves on and are often restricted to observing, waiting, and sunbathing as primary modes of action.

The player might first be drawn in by the desire to understand what exactly they are, but when the fact of their arboreal existence becomes increasingly obvious -- through the minimality of the mechanics and descriptions or through the tongue-in-cheek options that prompt the player to do things they cannot, like “stand up,” “fluff” a squirrel's tail, or “go on a road trip” --  they might find themselves instead relaxing as they sunbathe or thinking through how best to proceed in the interactions with the other characters. Ultimately, whatever choices the player makes, and however they choose to engage with the game, it should soon be clear that the options available to them on each slide do not always have the consequences that might be expected -- dropping a pine cone, for instance -- might encourage one character to engage further with you (the tree) and might cause another character to run away from you.

The purpose of this is not to frustrate the player with a “random” or overly elaborate reward system. The purpose instead, is to prompt the player to find comfort, or at least resolve, in the uncomfortability of not knowing what the future holds.

We do not expect that Rooted will excite the player with difficult gameplay and give them the satisfaction of winning, collecting, upgrading, or purchasing -- although a player could certainly play the game with the intention of collecting the most photons or avoiding death (both of which are possibilities). The purpose of Rooted generally is not to “win” or to “figure it out” or even to “avoid death” but to accept a number of qualities about the reality of life as a tree that find their counterparts in life as a human in society today, and every aspect of the game was created with this in mind.

We hope that the game prompts the player to consider impermanence: the characters that present themselves in Rooted might be interesting, and we hope that the player invests emotionally in the narrative, but when these characters are gone, there is no way to bring them back, and, for the most part, they are gone for the remainder of the game. We hope also that Rooted frustrates the tendencies and thought processes that are incentivized by many clicker games: the desire to do something constantly (e.g. clicking), the desire to collect things, upgrade things, buy things, and so on. None of these actions are possible in the game, and we deliberately included lighthearted prompts that subvert these inclinations: you can try to “demand payment” from the squirrel or “buy a car.” Not all of the lighthearted prompts serve this end -- some are merely there to lighten the mood of the game and ensure that the experience of playing Rooted is thought-provoking but also entertaining -- but the ones that do make this message rather explicit.

It is true that in Rooted, the player can still accumulate points, or photons, by sunbathing, and they are still able to “spend” those photons when they exert energy in interactions with characters that present themselves (by dropping pine cones or pine needles), but these “points” function much differently in Rooted than might be expected based on a player’s experience with other idle or clicker games. In this tree simulator, the mechanic of accumulation is not clicking or purchasing but waiting, and although the player might still collect a large number of photons, this number is not saved, can only be seen when the player is sunbathing, and is ultimately irrelevant to the actual gameplay -- there will always be more photons than necessary to complete an interaction. There are some other aspects of the game that comment on broader questions of humans’ impact on the earth and use of things in the natural world, but, at the least, we hope that Rooted gives its players pause and allows them to spend some time enjoying a sort of peace and relaxation that are afforded by the act of simply waiting. This game, we hope, gives standstill a purpose, and makes it engaging, but still maintains the qualities that make standing still, for a moment, a worthwhile endeavor.