That’s right! This stream was about all the delicious sweet and savory foodstuffs that games have to offer. We talked about the great variety of recipes in Breath of the Wild, communally created mead in Valheim, and were really really really hoping we get to play the game Overcooked 2! Alas, the Steam gods weren’t on our side, but luckily there are plenty of games full of culinary challenges.
This week’s reading is Playing with Ludic Food, the first chapter in Agata Waszkiewicz’s Delicious Pixels: Food in Video Games (2022). This piece prompted all kind of discussion into the mechanics of food preparation in games across genres, gendered elements around the collecting of ingredients to the cooking of the meal itself, and finally the playbour that comes with a lot of these elements. We put theory into practice by playing Chef, a game that put us in charge of saving a failing restaurant. On a valiant attempt at a vegan run, we created a menu of bespoke sandwiches and salads, and even (at Aris’s request) reverse-engineered our best approximation of Greek grilled veggies. We also bumped up prices…again and again. In the end we prevailed, surviving an assassination attempt (we think), making a profit, and ignoring just how in the red the business will be for all time.
