The Olive Tree
I thought this was a touching game. I have listened with anxiety to news reports of famine and destruction of homes in Palestine over the summer, and fervently hope and pray for peace.
In this game, you are an olive tree that needs to be nourished in order to produce. You add more water and leaves to balance your growth, and then use it up to produce. Expending some energy to survive, and more to create the next ‘generation’.
Simultaneously, outside of your control, a story plays out of a Palestinian farmer helping you grow and passing you on to his daughter. Like him, you experience hard times and lack of the resources you need to live. Each ‘season’ is actually a large amount of years.
Like the olive tree in the name, being a symbol of peace, I hope for peace for both Palestinians and Israelis.
There is a curious coincidence (although it’s likely due to a specific common source) between this game and something in my own religion. Since it’s not relevant to most players, I’ll put it in a details tab here and not include it on my IFDB review.
Summary
The Bible compares Israel to an olive tree on numerous occasions, especially in Romans 11.
The Book of Mormon has a much more extended version of this same analogy in Jacob 5, by far the longest chapter in the Book of Mormon. It’s also one of the most unusual; I used some Python data analysis to try to determine authorship of the Book of Mormon a few years ago. I took every chapter of the Book of Mormon along with some bible chapters, the writings of Joseph Smith, some of my own writings, Charles Dickens, some random creepypastas, and a couple choicescript games and SCPs and used some cosine distances of wordprints to cluster them into groups.
My findings were not publishable because the model couldn’t distinguish between me and Charles Dickens, so it was not a workable model. But, it split the Book of Mormon into different clusters based on similarity, and Jacob 5 was by far the most unusual chapter, very distant from the others.
In it, it describes the House of Israel as an olive tree that is wilting and begin to rot. The owner takes a lot of care of it (fertilizing it, pruning it, watering it, etc.). This step is repeated so much that, since I’ve read the Book of Mormon in multiple languages, I have a lot of these terms memorized (like German ‘ringsum hacken’). Basically the tree is going bad, so they take pieces of it and graft it all around the vineyard. Then those go bad, and they go against praxis and graft their pieces back to the main one and back and forth. In the end, the tree only has a little good, so they carefully water it, dung it, feed it, and ringsum hacken, taking off the most evil branches one at a time so that they don’t kill it by removing it all at once, and adding in the other branches.
The message is supposed to be that there is great evil now in the world but it can be overcome by feeding the good and removing the worst of the very bad, and that the greatest strength is in unifying disparate branches. So this game, with its emphasis on repeatedly watering and growing the olive tree and looking for peace in the world and especially between Israelis and Palestinians was directly relevant to one of the most memorable pieces of religious literature that I believe in.