How Digital Games Have Handled Food, and What We Are Really Looking At on Those Screens

Anyone who ever wrestled with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles at the arcade will remember that what got our battered turtle hero back on his feet was a single slice of pizza. Every hit chipped away at his health, and the moment he stepped on a pizza that had rolled out from somewhere, it filled right back up. At a glance this recovery mechanic looks perfectly natural, but think about it a little longer and it turns strange: the idea that merely stepping on a slice of pizza heals the damage of a beating doesn't quite add up.

In the virtual world of digital games, which runs on sight and sound alone, food—centered as it is on taste and smell—and the act of eating it seem somehow ill-fitting, and yet across the history of games they have always been present, sometimes as the lead, sometimes in a supporting role. This may be akin to the way "mukbang" content thrives in a visual medium incapable of conveying taste or aroma, but in games—a medium of process—the act of eating and the things eaten take up a larger volume still.

What is the act of eating in a game? The single apple on the screen, the whole roast chicken, the lovingly set table of food—none of it actually passes the player's lips, yet each asserts its presence as a stand-in for something else. As technology thickened and genres split apart, this business of eating, rendered in digital space, developed alongside them, and above all it quietly shifted its weight from picking up what lies on the ground toward making something with one's own hands.

Food You Pick Up and Fill With — The Thing That Vanishes on Contact

In the earliest digital games, food simply lay somewhere on the screen, and all the player had to do was touch it. The Nibbler-type "snake games" are a prime example. As the snake crawling across the screen swallows the food laid out in dots, its body grows one segment longer—a rule that makes it intuitively clear that to eat is to accumulate. Coldly described, it is merely the visual image of a moving stick touching a differently colored dot, but through the naming of "snake" and "food," it arrives—by way of "the act of eating"—at intuitive understanding. On top of this, the rule that eating food lengthens your body by exactly that much, and that the increased length ultimately brings about game over, ties the act of eating to the fact that eating grows the body, helping us understand dot-by-dot movement as something closer to eating.

* Google's free snake game. The rule of a playable character that lengthens upon colliding with an object enters the realm of "game" through the metaphor of a snake eating apples. It's worth pausing, too, on the Genesis-like motif of an apple and a snake, of all things.

The way we read colliding with a dot as eating something did not stop at a snake eating its food; it expanded. Son Son, an arcade game hugely popular in Korea as well, populated its progression with various snacks as objects yielding bonus points. The method was likewise to collide the playable character with objects, but by setting those objects in more detail as food, we could now speak not of "earning points" but of "eating." By the time we reach Bubble Bobble, this approach turns the game outright into a snack party: from simple fruit, through candies that aid play, to large bonus points staged as enormous treats raining down—strongly tying the act of acquiring something in a game to food.

In the belt-scroll action era of the 1990s, food takes on a different job. Around this time games began to appear that, rather than spending a chance the instant you bumped into an enemy, gradually whittled away your chances through a health gauge—the belt-scroll genre being representative.

Where a health gauge exists, food and the act of eating began to take on the role of refilling depleted health. In Final Fight, smashing a roadside oil drum or telephone booth would send a roast chicken or an apple rolling out to restore the hero's health—which, thought through the same way as before, has its own rather absurd corner. The natural way to treat a hero beaten to a pulp, his health drained, isn't really to gnaw on roast chicken but to apply ointment, put on a cast, slap on a bandage.

* In Final Fight, a character whose health gauge has dropped "eats" food by pressing a button beside a food object. Why smashing an oil drum should produce barbecue from within remains a mystery, but we don't think that far.

The notion that eating something restores you is, if you press the point, less first aid than a far more leisurely act of nourishment and recovery. Thanks to the concept—widespread across East and West alike—that eating something makes the body healthy (the idea of food and medicine sharing a single source), we don't particularly quibble at the scene of health filling up the moment we bump into food.

From the earliest days of digital games, food has been bound very tightly to the rules of the game as it took its place within virtual space. And behind this, we can see, lie the basic notions we generally hold about food. Since the rules that unfold in virtual space are, in the end, played by someone in reality, most rules cannot help but be re-creations of something familiar from reality—and the motif of food was an enormously useful piece of universal cognition for explaining rules in each given situation.

The Arrival of Cooking — A Stage Inserted Before Eating

Without going so far as a rigorous analysis, it seems that the role of each game's playing time was no small factor in why the food in games came to contain not finished dishes from the outset but a process of obtaining ingredients and making something—the so-called process of cooking. When we reach the age of role-playing games that stretch across tens or hundreds of hours on the back of save/load functions, and the online games that extended these quasi-permanently on a server basis, the food in games begins to be produced as the result of cooking, generating additional fun by re-creating the very process of making rather than the finished product.

In The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the player roams the fields cooking the mushrooms, meat, and fruit they have gathered. The function of these dishes is a buff—letting you endure the cold, or raising some stat for a while—and because the game seldom directly tells you the "correct" recipe, many players who don't rely on separate guides go through a process of tossing this and that into the pot, sometimes producing an unidentifiable "dubious food." This process of learning by feel which ingredient yields which result quietly reminds us that cooking was, at its origin, knowledge built up through countless trials and errors.

* A compilation of recipe guides from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, organizing the ingredients and effects of dishes that restore health and grant buffs. Source: the Nintendo minor gallery on DCInside.

In a variety of role-playing-based games, cooking is now called a "life content" hard to leave out. Materials obtained through gathering, agriculture, and hunting in the world called "nature" become cooking within the players' "city" or community—the counterpoint to the "nature" world—contributing to the advancement of the playable character, that virtual subject. It is at this juncture that the food in games finally rises to the seat of food as medicine. Eat to grow stronger—but to gain that strength you must first raise or harvest something, then trim and build it: the two now operate together. This moment, when the food you picked up to fill yourself turns into food you raise and build, makes the player a being who is reborn as a cook, beyond mere significance as one who eats.

Food You Die Without — The Re-creation of Survival and Provisions

The food and cooking in games—having begun as objects you simply bump into, then come to contain the process of cooking that artificially processes the products of nature into something beneficial to life—meet yet another rule and return to the oldest question food and cooking ever posed: eat or die. In fact, the core rule of every game that houses the survival genre touches on the problem of eating. "Eat or you die" may be, from the very start, another name for survival itself.

The player dropped into the Amazon jungle in Green Hell won't make it by watching a single hunger gauge. You have to tend separately to four branches of nutrition—carbohydrates, protein, fat, and even hydration—and eating nothing but meat scrapes the carbohydrate bar to the bottom. Bolt down raw meat and parasites latch on, sanity drains away, and the moment that balance collapses, the body buckles into hallucination and illness. The Long Dark, in which you wander the snow-covered Canadian wilds, is much the same. Each foodstuff carries a freshness rating, so carelessly putting spoiled or raw meat in your mouth means bracing for food poisoning, and cooking over fire is presented as the most basic survival skill for lowering that risk. In games like these, cooking is not some option for stats but a desperate bit of handiwork that tames the dangers lurking in raw things, turning them into something barely edible.

This gains more weight once we enter the realm of management simulation, which presupposes the survival not of the individual player but of a society, a collective. In Banished or the Anno series, food is understood under the name of provisions. Provisions—pointing to the sustenance a large social collective needs to keep life going—become a more social concept, and here too the concept of cooking still operates. In many games that take Western provisions as their motif, the process of cultivating and harvesting wheat, turning it into flour, and baking that into bread is invariably depicted. The lump of meat that once stopped at simply resolving hunger is reborn as cuisine with the addition of spices, producing buffs like mood or happiness. Its significance as a buff, woven together with the foundational premise of "eat or die," steers the game's atmosphere in a complex way toward both positive and negative directions—and in effect, in these games provisions and cooking function as the game's central skeleton.

If the games of the earlier stages depicted food as something pretty and plentiful, then by the time we reach survival games food returns to being a condition of life measured against the ticking second. And yet this isn't a mere return to the starting point. The provisions that come back—having passed from food you picked up, through food you built—now also bear the fact that, just as humans have always done, they become safe provisions only after the process of being cooked, stored away, and dressed.

To Understand Food Through Games

Food that once needed only to be touched reinforced its meaning as recovery and nourishment that fills a depleted body; became food you fetch the ingredients for and make with your own hands; and then appeared as both an essential good you cannot survive without eating and a social resource. On one level, this current resembles the path along which human civilization has dealt with its food. The path from prey snatched up at random, to provisions stored and stockpiled, to food once again cooked and set out, is repeated once more in similar flow within digital space. The insight that Lévi-Strauss organized as the opposition of the raw and the cooked—that the act of cooking is the mark unique to humans by which nature is turned into culture—is, it turns out, being repeated yet again within the developmental history of digital games.

The way Lévi-Strauss draws culture out of food will be a familiar current even to those who have grown used to meeting the food and cooking re-created within games. For the very word "food" already carries, beyond the satisfaction of a biological instinct, the layered thickness of culture piled up tier upon tier. Just as the cathedral called the savior's flesh and blood bread and wine, just as a rite offered to heaven and earth invariably contained the process of setting out "devoted" food, food and cooking are not mere sustenance but the long sediment of culture heaped upon it.

And the food and cooking re-created in digital games likewise go on accumulating new meaning in the same vein. In World of Warcraft, food—which, unlike the instant-effect potions, worked in the sense of slow recovery and buffs—was upgraded from individual dishes to a full table setting, taking on the form of a rite where the whole raid party gathers before a raid; and the fictional dishes drawn with the inventive imagination of virtual space have even invaded reality the other way around, giving rise to new recipes. To call it a mere digital lump—tasteless, scentless, "food" in name only—is to flatten what is, in truth, anything but flat: the relationships that pass between people through that digital lump.

Living in this world is, all of it, a matter of eating. I sometimes joke that Kingdom of Animals, the documentary so often aired to fill time on television, is also a mukbang. My apologies to the Thomson's gazelle running for its life, but from the standpoint of this documentary's protagonists—the lions and hyenas—this is unmistakably a story about eating.

The story of eating settled, beyond biological need, into a sociocultural rite, and we, carrying the new meanings born that way into digital games, once again experience another kind of meaning laid out on the table. These meanings that the designer drew are born anew, once more, as new meaning from the players seated at the table. Just as the story of eating did not stay a story of eating, the story of eating drawn within games, too, seems by no means to stay a story of eating.