To know why a garden looks the way it does today is to understand not only the histories of its individual parts, but also of the relationships between them, both past and present. In a garden, each individual flower becomes a character in an ongoing story, with a personal narrative arc all its own. ​ This, more than anything else, stands out to me as the key difference between exploration and gardening games. In exploration games, to spend time in a place is to deplete it, to make it less and less interesting until there’s no longer any reason to stay. In gardening games, to spend time in a place is to enrich it, to participate in stories and interactions and relationships that make it more interesting by virtue of your understanding of its inhabitants.