Of Food and Games
I'm not sure if my parents know this but when I was 16 I wanted to be a
chef. I wanted the freedom, the discipline, the chance to work with weird flavours.
I'm now in a very different place and I have just come from a talk with a writer who tied their love of literature to recipes (she's Kate Young if you're interested.)
Following this, I thought about my most important food and media memories. I remember firstly, and mostly, the scene in The Godfather where Clemenza stops Michael to make sure before he becomes a 'man' that he knows how to feed a family. His spaghetti and sausage recipe is one I've replicated numerous times in my life. It is truly a thing to behold.
It's an amazing scene because it forms as much as a part of Michael becoming a 'man' in the Mafia as his shooting in a restaurant a few scenes later.
With that, and considering several other moments I've seen that encourage food as conversation or indeed character development (Pose Christmas Epiosde take a bow) I have started to consider the concept of food in videogames. What it is, whatr it means, and how it can be used as both a player growth and also a plot point.
There's a great Giant Bomb series that has just started, ludicroudly named Jan Can Cook; Ben Appetit that is trying to create meals that are inspired by the world of videogames. It's absolute instanity, bad (perfect?) camera angles in place and just a loose sense of the concept. But these are mavericks - corn dogs infused by energy drinks are testament to this. What I am interested in is the ways in which games can use and provoke food as a game point.
So I'll start with where I started - you may expect it, but it's the Streeets of Rage Roast Chicken
In the game, the item feeds you back to 100%. It's a roast chicken, hidden in a bin. And you're playing as a disadvantaged person fighting on the aforementioned streeets. I know I'm going to get called for this, but the concept of a nice roast dinner must seem so appealing to the characters who are out policing on a decrepit city. And therefore, the chicken becomes something aspirational. It's more than just a chicken - it feeds because it's aspirational. It's the 1% that is exemplified by the final boss, Mr. Big. It's a horrible hint about what you could be.
The next food saga that really stands out (please exclude me ignoring such tie ins as Chester Cheetah and Cool Spot. For me is the Cooking Moma series on Nintendo consoles. I find these titles fascinating as it entered an era where the entire dynamics of what a game was, and, even more specifically, who it was marketed to, became such a paramount concept.
Therefore, I can't get my head around whether Mama was appealing to a generation, or trying to encourage one.
[img]https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2015/3/4/1425486699559/Mama-Cook-007.jpg[/img]
The concept of the Mama was a great one, gamifying an act that many people would be aware of, and in addition potentially introducing recipes that were unknown to people before hand. However, the game was sanitised, with many of the Japan-centric recipes changed, and the game, rather than having a focus on helping to cook, instead relied on being perfect, so that 'Mama' would be proud. It feels, still, like a wasted opportunity. One would only need to add real world recipes to the gamification to have the title become something else.
And then there was Cooking Guide
[img]https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/917OHi2vBqL._SL1500_.jpg[/img]
At the tail end of Nintendo's let's make everything for everyone era, there was Cooking Guide a title that was a literal recipe book. What's notably interesting about this title is the cultural differences that abound. In Japan, there are ramen, egg, and noodle recipes, but the game's localisers scrambled to figure out what this would mean in the UK and US. Sadly this meant a bunch of very generic recipies
that really, did nothing.
So where are we now? In Breath of the Wild, cooking is a centrepiece of the buff system, likewise in Monster Hunter,. In Pikmin 3 the quality of ingredients is prized as there are damn near pornographic selections of fruits in place. They are beautiful. But putting this all together reveals a common truth about the UK vs. Japan.
In Japan, the concept of produce, ad takingpride in the quality of the work that is done to food is taken a priority - it only takes a cursory glance at a ground floor of any mall to see that. They made food, and they are proud of it.
In the UK, much like the muddling through of videogame recipes, we just look for something to see us through, to give us a 'buff' for the next session. And that's heartbreaking. Japanese videogaming has got it right. We should take pride in what, and how we cook.
And even if that's something like Mama's 3 veg dishes that just cook, and costs 90p to make, we should celebrate that.
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