What is Gardening and games converge in Genius Loci?

Nobody else is doing quite what Rob Dwiar is doing. Dwiar, who works at GamesRadar as a commissioning editor, has spent much of his life as a games writer thinking about gardens. Or maybe he's spent much of his life as a gardening writer thinking about games. Eurogamer readers might be familiar with his work from his lovely articles for Eurogamer. But that's only a part of it. Now, Dwiar has written a book about the intersection of games and landscape. It's called Genius Loci, and it's currently running a campaign on Unbound. Genius Loci promises "a grand tour of video game landscapes and gardens." It's a richly illustrated thing, a lovely chunky hardback, by the looks of it, covering everything from Assassin's Creed to Dragon Age as it takes in the best of video game landscapes, making sense of the design choices, picking through the flora and fauna, and providing a wonderful sense of context. I caught up with Dwiar recently over Zoom. Amongst other things, I wanted to know what came first for him - gardens and landscapes, or games Gardens and landscapes first?" he asks himself, and then nods. "Because it seemed like we always had a project in Dad's garden, my parents' garden now. My dad's a very keen gardener, so sort of by osmosis, a lot of it made it to me. Not so much my brother, but certainly to me." Dwiar says he did some "pretty ordinary A-levels" but didn't have much of a career in mind until he started his gap year. Then it was Dad again. "He sort of said, you know, what do you want to do? How about garden design? I thought: I like that. It's a bit different. I'm going to go down that route - academically, educationally, and then professionally for a bit." Dwiar had played games since he was nine or ten, though, and it doesn't seem like putting these ideas together - games and landscape - was an enormous leap. "So I think on a very superficial side of it is just how good games can be at replicating or showing off or capturing known or familiar landscapes?" he says. (The classic Dwiar statement is issued with a lot of force, but does have a habit of turning into a question at the end. How good they are at presenting it?" He thinks. "But then, I started writing about it more, more and more, and playing more and more, and seeing it through that lens and being able to go: oh, yeah, I remember doing this bit of this landscape design work, or in my garden, my show garden, I remember doing that thing that is in this game. And you can start to see similar design processes in the landscapes and in games. And you realise that when game designers design landscapes, they must be making similar choices." Dwiar, along with noted Harvard professor Dr Robert Langdon, is very interested in symbols - in Dwiar's case symbols and meaning in landscape. "Landscape narrative, story, character history, that kind of stuff, which is a massive area of research," he says. "There's lots of it. It's been going on since forever, really. And so when I started to look at games, and you could see, actually, like, these gardens and landscapes weren't necessarily just outdoor places where you do stuff, actually. They're a designed place that ties in very closely to a game story or to a character arc or to a setting. Or it's placemaking. And there's lore behind just a house in the garden and things like that." Can he give me an example of this kind of thing? He can! "So one established method back in the past: there was a lot of 'man wanting to show domination over nature.' But show it in the form of what someone who had the money could do with their garden or grounds or landscape?