ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the significance of “grass” assets, bringing critical plant studies and the Anglo-American lawn’s cultural historiography to textual analysis of ludic backdrops. While Alenda Chang critiques the functionally inert plants of predominantly visual video game environments, this risks reinforcing the treatment of plants in purely instrumental “functional” terms and repeating what Michael Marder identifies as Western marginalization of flora’s rooted, headless alterity, and reifying narrow anthropocentric values of agency and centrality. Indeed, passivity is key to video games, and game studies regrettably marginalize visuality. I propose that questionably “visual” and “inert” background assets (exemplified by grass) offer rich and underexamined terrain for analysis wherein the “plantscapes” dwarfing humanity might challenge disciplinary understanding of agency/interactivity and foreground/background.
