The landscapes of the fantasy game Guild Wars 2 are dotted with luscious plants, many of which, like the blue flax flower, are inspired by their real-life counterparts. This crossover between video games and nature inspired Aleks Atanasovski and Hannah Young, creatives at advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy, to push the idea a step further and offer gamers an opportunity to grow their favourite game plants in reality, challenging the idea that gaming and nature rarely merge.
In theory, of course, everyone can just get a hold of seeds from plants featured in the game, and simply sow them in their garden — you could visit your local nursery for that. However, the idea behind SeedSaga's official collaboration with Guild Wars 2 is to use the popularity of the game to create a sense of a real-life seed planting quest beyond the screen.
"It's harnessing the gamer's love of getting merch from their favourite game, and having the opportunity to grow and nurture something like they would in the game, but being able to grow plants in the real world," Young tells Mashable.
In the spirit of the game, the SeedSaga packaging is branded in a way that transforms the seeds and planting instructions into a kind of treasure looted on a quest. It resembles an item you might find in your game inventory, emblazoned with an image of the plant taken from the game instead of a photo.
In its first edition, SeedSaga offers seeds from three plants from Guild Wars 2: the blooming passiflora, flax flower, and a crimson sunflower, all native to the UK, where the project is currently limited to.
"Because games are inspired by real-life plants, [there is a huge] amount of plants in the game that are exactly the same as in nature," Atanasovski tells Mashable. "We made three bags, but we could have made one thousand."
The campaign’s first run is limited not only when it comes to the variety of seeds it offers, but also in the amount of branded seed packets it will distribute. Gamers interested in planting were asked to submit an application to the SeedSaga team, explaining why they'd like to have the seeds. Atanasovski and Young are still trying to shortlist the applicants, but they found some recurring patterns in the participants’ answers. As Atanasovski explains, the responses are "sometimes based on a relationship with nature, but also how it reminds [the applicants of] something about their loved ones. A few answers were like, “This flower makes me think of my girlfriend.” Or “This flower makes me think when we met in the game."
Much in the spirit of gaming, SeedSaga launched on March 2, 2024 via an in-game "nature walk" on Twitch led by streamer Maddie Mead, a.k.a. littlebunny_x and wildlife TV presenter and activist Nadeem Perera, who is also the co-founder of Flock Together. The latter is a birdwatching community that aims to connect young people with nature, and make the outdoors accessible to all. For Perera, the separation between gaming and nature is arbitrary.
"At the moment, the gaming world and the outdoor world are almost mutually exclusive when we talk about them. And I really don't think it needs to be that way," he tells Mashable. "I'm outdoors all the time, but I also play video games. None of them stop me from doing the other. So I really want to tackle this narrative and redefine what it means to be a gamer, as well as what it means to be a ‘nature person.'"
To Young, humanity's ability to appreciate and benefit from nature is evident even in the video game space.
"In the gaming community, talking about nature is something that's really thriving at the moment," she says. "There are so many things on Reddit and Twitter where people are talking not about the games, like missions, or the quests that they're doing, but it's like spotting the landscapes that they're looking at, and appreciating them just like they do if they are on a hike in the real world."
It’s a common misconception that video games serve solely as escapism. But much like in art, nature depicted in games is more a representation of our environment than a separation from it. And as such, it makes sense that witnessing the beauty of nature in the virtual space can make us more curious about the natural world outside video games. Young, at least, seems driven by that very notion.
"The things people talk about on Reddit are so breathtaking," she says. "It's so similar to how you might be outside and take in a forest or something really amazing in nature. And I think it's not a matter of gamers having one or the other. We just wanted to remind them about the feeling and the surprise that they were getting in games, they had that with nature as well."
SeedSaga is part of W+K's inaugural project for the Agency for Nature initiative founded by Glimpse and Purpose Disruptors, and was partially created as a response to research showing that Britain ranks last for nature connectedness in Europe, while UK Citizens measured lowest for their feeling of "oneness with the natural world."
