My Five-Year-Old Plays Flower and I Maybe Grow Up a Little

“Why is it so sparkly everywhere, Daddy?” my five-year-old daughter says. “Maybe to lead my way? I mean, I am a flower. I should follow the sparkles.”

She’s playing Flower, and she soars along the wavy, green ocean of grass below, her singular petal in search of more flowers to add more petals to her airy, bouquet-like serpent. Despite her original intent to follow the sparkles, she floats up and away, up into the hills, to fly higher, to see more. “I want to explore,” she says, and, at first, I have to keep myself quiet. Stay focused, I think at her. Stop wandering. Get the flowers—the flowers! Don’t you see the flowers?

Thankfully, I say nothing. I let her explore. Honestly, exploring is what I’d do, were the controller in my hands. I often take a daydreamy pace when given the opportunity in a video game. I mosey, I meander. If there’s a shiny coin right in front of me, but a distant horizon over that next ridge, I’ll opt for the horizon every time. I often wish I wouldn’t. My hyper-exploratory tendencies have done little more than build a library of only half-finished games. So, here I am. Watching my daughter unknowingly follow in my own gaming footsteps. And I hate it.

How does that expression go? “We hate most in others what we dislike in ourselves.” But this is my daughter we’re talking about, so I keep it bottled up inside. No need to vent right now. I’ll save my Worst Parent of the Year award for her teens.

I let her spin in circles and half-circles, swooping around in figure eights and algorithmic roller coasters of up-and-down wavelengths. I watch her five-year-old hands twist the controller every which way, the three-axis gyroscope inside of the controller feeling her every twist and turn. Too far left. Okay, now too far right. She overcorrects by pointing it too high, then too low. This movement-sensing controller will take a moment for her to get used to. She’d been relegated to nothing but thumbsticks before this. Me, too.

The light on the front of the PlayStation 4 controller is pink, a color I’ve never seen before on the controller. She finally stops grinding into the ground, and she’s high up into the wind currents now, twisting among the tall, white, towering windmills with their slow, deceptively powerful and power-generating spins.

She continues soaring high, taking in her gradually green-growing surroundings. Then she swoops back down at the speed of blustering winds to pounce upon some more flowers that need opening. Her moves are almost carnivorous, predatory.

She’s quietly attracted to blue petals. She’s noisily hungry for pink ones. “I have so many petals, I can’t see where I’m going,” she says in the middle of her horizontal tornado. Then she pulls a banked dive like some kind of pastel F-14 Tomcat, onto another hapless cropping of goldenrod blooms.

She steers into the headwinds, defying the game to turn her around, sometimes wanting to push the boundaries of where the storm-colored sky and blue-green grasses will let her go.

At first, she stood in front of the TV, spinning herself around completely to steer—rather than tip the controller properly like a plane’s wings. It was almost like she was putting on a ballet, except kid-stumbly awkward. So, I sat her on my lap, I held her elbows in, and placed my hands over her hands on the controller. She complied. But when I’d remove my hands, her natural tendency to aim the controller in every direction took over again.

Her lips press together as she sweeps along a water log-style ride down a dusty canyon. I feel the chambers of my heart catch when there’s an operatic “Ah!” as she sweeps through a clutch of red, or yellow, or turquoise flowers.

She awakens ever-growing stands of windmills, bursting down sparkling rows of flowers. Plinking, plunking instruments—glockenspiels, maybe—tinkle through the air.

“The sun is setting,” she says. She has been silent for a while. “And the city is getting good. Look, Daddy. It’s nighttime in the city,” she says about the main menu screen. “But it’s better now. I think I’m the leader and I’m the flashlight. Wait. I think we’re all flashlights now. I think I’m the leader flashlight. I’m a flashlight-flower leader.”

I see the landscape shift from empty fields, to stonehenges, to wind farms, to long runs of power poles, to short runs of ranch fences hemming in bales of hay. She turns a slow circle around the bales of hay until they light up like enormous robins’ eggs.

“You can make breakfast, Daddy. I want some cereal. Today.”

Oh. Breakfast. I’d forgotten. She unconsciously sticks her tongue out, still staring at the TV screen, and sweeps around at full speed among the light poles. I see her feet unconsciously interacting with her movements, too. She flexes and curls her toes when she suddenly discovers a bopping maneuver. Quickly up, quickly down. Like a pouncing tiger. “Bop,” she says.

As I get her a cereal bowl, I hear her say from the other room, “What are the flowers even doing? I need to fix that wagon stuck in the ground. I fell off the wagon.” I peek at her game from around the corner and see a half-buried horse cart in the ground. She’s too young to know what “falling off the wagon” means, so I let it go.

I set the bowl, the box of cereal, and the carton of milk on the dining table. “Isn’t it pretty out here, Daddy? The sparkles, and the flowers opening, and also that the city is all pretty.” She’s only seen the city in the game’s main menu. But, even after an hour of soaring through the countryside, she’s never lost sight of what’s become her goal. “The city needs light,” she says. And even though Flower never explicitly says that’s the goal, she’s not far off.

She tackles her breakfast cereal in a hail of clinking bowls and spoons. She’s still chewing her last mouthful when she hops back into the game chair. I take a pee break and hear her yell from the living room. “If the game has more for me to do, then it needs to give me more to do!” she says. Which is a simple, if not misdirected, game-design logic. She apparently had a hard time finding a few missing flowers that needed saving before unlocking the next stage.

I come back from the bathroom to see my daughter saying, “Shhhh,” to me. She puts a finger to her lips for emphasis. “Listen. Listen,” she says. And then I hear it. Frogs. “There are frogs,” she says, before moving along the darkening landscape, the frogs lost to the sound of the wind.

I’m not much of a cereal guy, so I make myself some sausage, eggs, and sourdough toast for breakfast. But I’m interrupted by my five-year-old’s crying. Something’s gone wrong in Flower. I look into the living room from the kitchen. .Power lines crumble and crack and shatter the once-flowing landscape. The ground is broken and bruised. Thunder rumbles overhead, and rampant electrical currents shock and awe the ground below.

She jumps with every electrical snap and electrocuting buzz from the ruined power lines. Her petals smoke, turn black, die. My daughter is ugly crying now. Mouth turned into a clown-like frown, tears splashing from her eyes. She can’t even see the TV screen through her tears right now.

“I will help you,” I say.

She steps aside, hands me the controller, then crawls into my lap again. We press on, literally hand in hand, with the controller.

“This isn’t easy,” she says, still crying. “This isn’t easy peasy.”

“Not everything is,” I tell her. “In fact, many things aren’t.” I guide her hands through the battered landscape, and, without telling her, I eventually remove my hands and let her take over again. I try talking her back into the simple attraction she had to Flower in the first place. “You’re a flower,” I say. “Follow the sparkles.” And she finds herself again. And her tears go away. And soon she’s back into it, a little wiser, perhaps, but with no damper on her joy. And I let her explore.