Discovering in-game environments in ‘layers’
Rather than being visible and/or marked as interactable immediately, elements of the natural game environment appear like background first and only belatedly, e.g. once the player has improved specific skills, become highlighted and interactive. For example, in the Hero of the Valley series of fantasy games, players first perceive plants as part of the static background image but later obtain the skills to harvest specific types of flowers or berries, which gives them a greater incentive and focus to deliberately seek out and reflect upon these aspects of nature (e.g. considering in which environments they occur etc.). It also mimics the real-world transformation from ‘plant-blindness’ and ‘related ‘nature deficit disorder’ to gradually re-assessing seemingly familiar spaces and noticing new things rather than framing plant awareness as an unrealistic ‘default’.