573 Stefan Schöberlein Garden Warfare – Videogaming’s Green Thumb Gardens and videogames make for strange bedfellows – and are thus ripe for a good joke. An episode of the ever-expansive The Simpsons perhaps put it best: its 1998 season sees the sibling pair of Bart and Lisa struggling with taking care of the family’s back garden, a task apparently so out of synch with their own enjoyment- and consumption-centered lifestyles that even forgoing their monthly allowance becomes preferable to keeping the yard in order. A seemingly much too strenuous, tedious, and even archaic scenario – their little yard outfits earn them laughter from the neighborhood bully – gardening just cannot compete with the constant stream of entertainment provided by TV or the momentary thrills of a carnival visiting town. The latter, ironically enough, brings with it a “Yard Work Simulator,” a Virtual Reality videogame that makes these children long to perform in an artificial game environment what they had previously refused to do in real life (see figure 1). Figure 1: Yard Work Simulator (Kirkland 1998, 03:00). This joke, of course, is not a new one. Even in the words of someone like Ralph Waldo Emerson, the sentiment of the Simpson children would have found an ally, with the celebrated transcendentalist, later in life, calling “pottering in a few square yards of garden” utterly “dispiriting and driveling” and arguing that gardening and sustained intellectual pursuits are “antagonistic [forces], like resinous and vitreous electricity” (1860, 100). Gardening and videogaming, it appears, are a quite discordant pairing, the former relishing in slow, manual labor and often generating a feeling of meditative relaxation in its practitioners (cf. Nakau et al. 2013), while the latter takes delight in spectacle, discloses at least hints of competitiveness, and necessitates, as N. Katherine Hayles has called it, bursts of “hyper attention” (2007, 187).