During my social-isolation I have been seeking more escapism and ways to socially connect. Where is better to escape to than the surreal/realistic world of The Sims where you can live vicariously through your Sim by going to a bar or hugging someone in the street?
To keep your Sim alive, it is necessary to fulfill essential needs such as energy, hygiene, social, and hunger. Food is a vital substance for Sims to meet their hunger needs and can also carry the benefit of increased mood. Failing to feed a Sim leads to their starvation and death. Thus, cooking is also an essential skill for Sims and the more cooking skill they achieve the more complex dishes they learn to cook. Sims can learn to cook everything from eggs and toast to lobster thermidor.
Today I threw a birthday party for my Sim child to age him into teenage-hood. I had to make an important decision: whether to bake him a chocolate, funfetti, or a simple white cake. I settled on chocolate as this indulgent option would be what I would choose to eat, and the picture looked most appetising.
But why was this a decision that the game developers decided to give me? And why did I put so much effort into making my decision? None of these cakes had any benefits over the other ones- they don’t give the Sim differing levels of enjoyment or satiation. But the chocolate cake just looked tastier than the other cakes. So how do video game developers make good food?
Food plays such an integral part in the structuring of our everyday practices, thoughts, and emotions. To make a game like Sims a realistic simulator of everyday life it has to include food dynamics such as hunger, cravings, likes and dislikes, cooking, different cuisines, and even dietary choices such as vegetarianism. These are universal experiences meaning that the Sims is relatable cross-culturally. Due to its universality, food exists in games to remind us of our humanity (Beck, 2017). By recognising the humanity of our avatars through simulating mundane physical needs, we become more emotionally connected to them making us more immersed in the game (Mohney, 2016). I felt the need to cook the right cake for my Sims child because I had met his physical and emotional needs since birth and this was a big life milestone for him (and for me since most of my Sims’ children get taken away by social services for neglect)!
Food is a recurrent theme in many video games of all different genres and there exists a huge variation in the choices of flavours and cuisines. Due to improved technologies, there has been a recent boom in highly detailed cooking elements in games. Final Fantasy XV (FFXV), a high budget Japanese role-playing game released in 2016, is famed for its cooking minigame. Players can cook one-hundred-plus photo-realistic recipes which replenish their health. Hajime Tabata, the director of FFXV, described the production process of developing and perfecting these dishes (Reynolds, 2016). The development team went camping to mimic the setting of much of the game and took photos of the food that they could cook outdoors. They taste tested all this food and if it wasn’t deemed tasty by the team then it wasn’t put in the game. The foods were the photographed from many angles and scanned to create 3D images for the digital artists to input into the game graphics. The designers used touch, taste and sight to inform their rendering. By using sensory experiences, they were able to faithfully mimic familiar taste-texture-appearances of food.
“Recipes were just one element of the camping scenes, but the catalyst for our obsession was the high quality of the food graphics that the camp team was able to create in the pre-production phase. We have to create truly delicious-looking food scenes similar to those that appear in movies and anime.” Hajime Tabata (Reynolds, 2016)
Tabata describes the imagery as ‘meshi-tero’ (a term generally equivalent to the English phrase ‘food porn’). These beautiful photo-realistic renderings invite players to create delicious dishes which not only replenish their characters’ health but also appeals to the players themselves. It achieves a greater sense of reality, immersing players in the game and making them emotionally connect with the characters. The visual effects of this food also makes many players feel hungry, making them crave the bubbling broths, textured grains of rice, and shiny meat glazes (Wilde, 2018). To make food ‘real’, game developers must create a phenomenological experience including sight, texture, and sound. By enhancing these senses, game developers increase a player’s embeddedness within the game.
The processes of cooking in games can have a social benefit. Gathering around the camp fire at night with your team to cook a meal can give you special boosts that helps your team during the following day such as increased attack, defence and magic. Besides this, it allows players to connect with the other members of your computer-controlled team (Reynolds, 2016). Every character has a favourite food and when you feed it to them, they gain special perks. Shared meals within the game kindle relationships. Learning the preferences of team members and risking your (virtual) life to seek out the necessary ingredients is not only motivated by a desire to build experience but also to make the team members happy. Hand gestures, facial expressions and happy dialogues expressing gratitude from team members can increase the enjoyability for players. Food is both a biological and social need- both “good to eat” and “good to think” (Lévi-Strauss 1991). Video games recreate this everyday reality of humanity as eating food is often necessary both to survive and to socialise (Nardi, 2010).
Let’s consider another, equally social (but often less positive) game: Overcooked. Nicknamed ‘Divorce Kitchen’ in China (McKeand, 2020), Overcooked requires multiple players to work as a team in the kitchen to prepare, cook and serve up orders within a time limit whilst avoiding a number of hazards and obstacles. Several times my ex-boyfriend stormed out of the room whilst playing this game due to his frustration at our failure to cooperatively cook burritos (not the cause but perhaps the symptom of our break-up). The ability to work together under such high-pressure conditions is essential to produce this food. So perhaps the way that this food is made tasty is through the blood, sweat and tears that goes into the effort of making it. Real food is a social endeavour that brings people together to eat, cook, and talk. These themes are being mimicked in video games to create an authentic food experience.
But many food games are much more casual, involving low stakes and little or no story line (Ho, 2019). Indeed Pac-Man is cited as the first video game to introduce food as a main theme. Food was chosen as it was iconic, easily identifiable and universal (Mohney, 2016). They are also widely symbolic as they are recognised as being delicious and desirable creating a motivational reward. Thus, food can be used as a reward in games. Food is also a common theme in games where the only enjoyment comes purely from the experience of cooking or eating itself (Ho, 2019). Cooking Mama is one such casual game where the only consequence for failing a level is disappointing or angering Mama (a crime indeed, but at least it’s not death). Players play this game simply for the enjoyment of chopping the onion into perfect cubes and hearing it sizzle in the pan. People play video games because of their interactivity- they require actions (Galloway, 2006). The purpose of food in games is not just to keep your avatar alive or gain money but also to allow the player to enact the processes of cooking. This mimics experiences that we have had in real life but also allows us to imagine what the food tastes like.
Indeed, the desire to know what video-game food tastes like has had a huge influence on social media. Players get so immersed in games that they want to eat them (BBC, 2019). Blogs, video tutorials, recipe books, and fan meet-ups all allow gamers to try the foods that the games make them crave. Binging with Babish is my all-time favourite, he cooks food from TV, films, and video games (see for example his recipe for the famous Portal cake) (Binging with Babish, 2019). His videos show what these virtual foods would look like and taste like when brought into the ‘real’ world, effectively bringing them to life. This trend has gone even further, and bloggers, chefs and companies have begun to produce food specifically targeted at people who play video or PC games (BBC, 2019). With titles like ‘Top 10 Gamer Foods’ and ‘The Perfect Gamer Food’ these often are lists of snacks which can be made from stereo-typically basic ingredients such as crisps, supernoodles, and biscuits.
Despite the seemingly trivial nature of this conversion of virtual food to real-life food and body experiences, a study has highlighted the problem that this relationship can have (Chaput et al., 2011). This study took a sample of 22 normal-weight teenagers and found that they ate a bigger lunch after having played games for an hour vs relaxing for an hour. One possible explanation for this is it being a ‘mental-stress effect’, where gamers eat fatty and sugary food to ‘reward’ the brain after experiencing mental stress. Some refute this claim by arguing that playing games makes them forget about the real world and their own needs (Limer, 2011). Whatever the explanation for this phenomenon it is evident that gaming can affect the body, making players have cravings, consume specific foods, or suppress their desire to eat completely.
Food in video games functions as a universally recognisable entity which immerses players in the game experience and emotionally connects them to their avatars. In-game cooking and eating also mimic the social experiences of these process in ‘real’ life, thus building both ritual and ‘real’ relationships. Further, food is included in games by developers simply due to the enjoyment that people gain from the phenomenological experience of cooking. The photo-realistic and authentic textures, sounds, and appearance of food can increase the enjoyment of players but can also make them hungry and give them specific cravings. Virtual food can become very real bodily experiences. This desire to eat virtual food and make it real is reflected in the prolific availability of online recipes and tutorials on how to make video-game food. However, this can also manifest in negative bodily experiences where the diets of adolescents are influenced by their screen time. The lines between the virtual and the real phenomenological experiences of food are becoming increasingly blurred.
Bibliography
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Food for Thought 