I was going to play video games all weekend long and post about them to make up for the lack of a games column in recent printed issues. But the sun showed up, so I broke character and took advantage—played a few pickup games of basketball (yes, real basketball); stopped by a farmers market; drove to Olympia and wandered around downtown; came back home and did some minor gardening with the girlfriend. Of course, it all comes around full circle.

“For a second, I actually thought that planting something next to our walkway would attract a Cinnamonkey,” the gf said.

She’s recently become addicted to Viva Piñata, a year-old Xbox 360 game where you build a garden and use it to attract living, breathing piñata-creatures (she begged for the game, so I gave it to her on V-Day, aww). When it came out in ’06, the game was marketed to Pokemon-loving kids, complete with a cartoon TV show tie-in, but its sales were awful because the game is both too simple and too complicated. Though there’s no way to die or lose, my girlfriend still has to consult a Web site called Piñata Island every minute or so to make sense of the game’s obtuse multi-garden plots and planting strategies. Planting strategies!

On the flipside, real-life gardening is relatively new to my life, and it blows my nerdy mind. Sort and arrange on a small patch of grass, and if you do it right, you get food. It’s like Tetris, only with a high score you can eat. So on a sunny day, all I could think about were games with green thumbs. Are you familiar with these? Pretty much any weird concept has been converted to a video game by now (dog-walking, cow-milking), but farming games have done surprisingly well in the past decade. Animal Crossing on the DS requires that you power the game on every day to manage a town’s trees, fruits and weeds—and it has sold millions. Harvest Moon has been going since 1997, making you play through seasons of growing crops, reaping the harvest and—hoo boy—finding a wife so your male character can make an organic baby (no same-sex marriage on this farm, sorry). Shigeru Miyamoto, the man behind Mario and Zelda, even made a gardening-inspired strategy game called Pikmin a few years back (and years later, released the worldwide-smash puppy-raising sim Nintendogs).

The earliest days of games were about the fantastic and unreachable—Asteroids, Space Invaders. And games have generally kept this up; even recent “normal” games like The Sims or Rollercoaster Tycoon at least let gamers play god. But what happens when normalcy becomes the new fantasy? When you plant apple trees to attract purple piñata horses? Hope this doesn’t come off as trying to sound deep, but maybe these games are a reaction to urbanization, to being out of touch with our hunting/gathering roots—hell, in Viva Piñata, everything in the game can be broken open to reveal wrapped candies. Kinda creeps me out when I think about it.

Is a bizarre sense of normalcy going to be the new gaming wave as mass appeal ramps up? As the original gaming generation becomes moms and dads, and companies shift their development accordingly? I fear this—already, there’s a game based on The Office in which you race to file the most documents within a time limit. Some people would love for games to be more like movies, going on about how games can be artistic, but at this pace, they may wind up more like a Sunday afternoon…and then what the hell will I do to have a break from normalcy? Pick up a fucking shovel? Or, heaven forbid, the Wii-Shovel?

[Since Games hasn’t run for a few weeks in print, I’m trying out an online column with either reviews or whatever else is recently relevant about games. Next week, assuming I get a copy in time, I’ll talk about the Lost video game that comes out this week.]