by Destiny 2 it has a rich history, history and tradition spanning the universe dating back billions of years, even to the beginning of time. Although Destiny 2 and its ongoing expansions do a great job of strengthening the narrative framework, while the collection of lore that players around the world can read enriches it. The flower game is one such example.
Although it doesn’t appear in any cutscenes, you can get information about the flower game by talking to Eris Morn after completing the “Beyond” quest in Shadowkeep. Tradition is part of the book Unveiling, which tells a more extended narrative in all its entries. This tradition creates a compelling origin story for many of the themes and conflicts that appear in the DESTINY universe, but its narrator is unreliable since it follows the Darkness talking to the Guardians.
Destiny 2: The Garden, the Gardener, and the Winnower
To understand the play of flowers within Destiny 2it is useful to understand another entry Unveiling which details the Gardener and the Conqueror. Darkness claims that it and the Gardener (the Light) lived together in a garden before time existed. Darkness claims it and Light existed as an ontological dynamic of advanced mathematical structures without antecedents or components.
In this garden, Light planted seeds in the morning, while at night Darkness harvested and shaped what would live and what would die, killing the failed crops. During the day, the Gardener and the Winner play a game, eventually called the flower game. This garden as a focus seems to be a metaphor for existence and reality – before and after spacetime and the laws of physics that make up causality. In this metaphor, the garden represents the space from which all universes could arise.
The flower game in Destiny 2
Just as the garden represents a reality in which all possible universes can exist and die, the flower game represents the physical creation, expansion, and end of these universes. Within the primordial garden, presumably the Black Garden, the simulated realities created in the flower game took on shapes and patterns in a two-dimensional floral grid.
- Rule one: A living flower with less than two living neighbors is cut. Is dying.
- Rule two: A living flower with two or three living neighbors is connected. This lives.
- Rule Three: A living flower with more than three living neighbors is starving and overcrowded. Is dying.
- Rule Four: A dead flower with exactly three living neighbors is reborn. It comes back to life.
- The only game allowed in the game is the arrangement of the initial flowers.
In this allegory, as the play of flowers unfolds, the same pattern always dominates and leads to the final shape. Darkness found this pleasing, while Light did not. The Light desired complex and diverse patterns to simulate, existing in a harmonious universe together. According to Darkness, the Light decided to achieve this by transforming itself into a new canon that promised the diversity it craved.
To keep the game balanced, Darkness did the same. However, his rule followed the idea of simplicity – existence is a struggle, and only the shape that can exist and dominate above all is worth living. This ideology is reminiscent of the Sword Logic followed by the Hive Gods. The DESTINY the universe was created when these new rules (Light and Dark subcategories) entered the flower game. The old rules, cast aside, became Vex.
Destiny 2 is now available for PC, PS4, PS5, Stadia, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S.
