Eat or Die: Food and the Act of Eating in Games

"Now this is the taste of being alive!" "It makes life worth living!"

These are the things we reflexively say when we eat something especially good. But inside these words is a meaning that goes beyond simply tasting nice. The sense that a tiring day is undone by eating food that suits you; the sense that it was good to be alive; the sense that, so, things are bearable yet. The sense in which all of these blend into one is precisely salmat—the "taste of living." For what one eats connects directly to how one lives, and is taken, too, as a measure of a humane life. In a word, food has settled into a meaning, for humans, beyond the intake of nutrition.

The act of eating is taken as an important element within games as well. As befits a medium that expresses the many parts of life, games have gone on representing cooking, food, and the act of eating. That players seek out food in games for all sorts of reasons is, no doubt, a natural phenomenon following from these many modes of representation. Perhaps, just as "food" (食) is in our lives, "food" (食) in games long ago moved beyond the mere act of eating. If so, was food, from the earliest games, the same as it is now? What meaning does the act of eating carry, genre by genre, within games? Is there a genre in which eating is especially important—and if so, which, and why did it become that way?

1. A Genealogy of Food in Games

When you call to mind the role of food in games, three things come up broadly: a consumable for recovery and survival, a support item for buffs, and a trade good. Add in the content one can enjoy in connection with food, and naming just a few probably will not be enough.

Bubble Bobble. Source: Nintendo Store

This kind of food functioned as points in early arcade games. Take a game like Bubble Bobble. The characters in Bubble Bobble did not go hungry in the first place; food simply popped out as you played along. Here, food was as good as a sign converting play performance into something visual. Following real-world worth or degree of fullness, it appeared in such a way that a plate of cake or a bowl of ramen gave a bigger score than a single piece of fruit.

Final Fight. Source: Game Informer (https://gameinformer.com/2020/08/25/the-top-10-health-items-in-gaming)

Food, which had taken price and fullness as its scoring criteria, gradually advanced into a device for recovering health. So it is with the food that appears when you smash trash cans and crates in Final Fight. These foods—whiskey, fruit, sushi, barbecue, and more, varied in kind—become the stamina for the characters to fight again. The recovery amount of these foods was applied by the same law as the foods that had functioned as points: the greater an item's fullness, the higher its recovery rate, and foods that could not serve as a meal had a lower recovery rate. The way of recharging body and mind by eating something appears together with this symbolism, leading players to accept it naturally.

That said, it is hard to regard the food in these cases as perfectly represented. The food that pops out of trash cans and crates has its cooking process omitted, and stays whole without ever spoiling. That food of unknown origin should restore the body is, in fact, an impossibility. Within this, there is neither wariness nor anxiety about something being digested. The reason this era's game foods cannot be perfect elements of representation is that the food does not function as ordinary fare. What is demanded of these foods is the role of fuel to sustain violence.

The campfire and Festival Food of Mabinogi.

This function of food meets a change as we enter the era of online games. Now food, beyond the role of points or recovery, becomes a device for firming up the bonds between players. Mabinogi's campfire is famous for representing a model of romantic adventure—playing instruments and sharing food. As the saying goes that people grow close over meals, the act of sharing one another's food before a campfire worked as a new form of fellowship. Here one might say food settles the player as a resident within the game world. At the same time, food in online games also played a large role in strengthening stats. Likewise, Mabinogi's "Festival Food" is one example of food functioning as a buff. The better the quality of the ingredients, the more powerful the festival dish's effect, and through the stats boosted here one can fight more easily. Eating festival food can also be seen as a kind of rite, a prayer for a successful hunt.

The role of food in games, developed this way, forms a genealogy: points—recovery—communion and buff. This genealogy seems to show every element of food that a game can represent. But upon reaching the survival game, food advances one step further, into yet another aspect.

2. From Food to Provisions: Food in the Survival Game

As said above, food in games was an index for getting a higher score, a recovery item for sustaining play, and also a support item needed to strengthen communal experience and ability. And most of these properties are inherited by the survival game, where food begins to function as something for maintaining the player's body.

Don't Starve, blunt right down to its title, is a game where you have to worry about every meal, every moment. Threats to survival appear in plenty, monsters among them, but what comes at the player as the greatest anxiety is, before anything else, hunger. The same can be seen in Oxygen Not Included, a game from the same studio: a world where food resources are scarce, where even calories must be weighed carefully. Caloric energy is as good as lifespan, and the presence or absence of provisions puts you squarely at the crossroads of life and death.

Project Zomboid.

Project Zomboid, set in a world overrun by zombies, requires you to survive in a similar way. To stay alive here, you must learn how to light a fire, find seeds and farm, and ready the tools to make food. At the same time, distributing appropriate resources to teammates and checking how far the leftover food has rotted are essential. Canned goods, provisions that help over the long term, are useless without a tool to open them. This is the same in The Long Dark—which even represents, with a sense of realism, the way you waste energy when you do not use the proper tool. In such extreme conditions the player has to find ways to eat food and to preserve it. The reason is simple: to survive without dying, and keep a foothold in this world a little longer. And in this respect, food in the survival game comes to be seen as a consumable and, at the same time, an object of investment. In a survival game, in fact, leaving food aside matters more than eating it. The act of eating comes to presuppose production, storage, and distribution. The player must therefore solve the present hunger and, at the same time, calculate even future hunger.

In the traditional action game, death was an event brought by the enemy. But the death that appears in the survival game occurs with the passage of time. So what the player faces in a survival game is not only the enemy. Time, too, is something to be overcome, and in that process the greatest variable becomes the player's own body. At this point food takes on a meaning different from earlier genres. Food, which had been the means of points, recovery, communion, and buff, changes into the essential condition for maintaining survival. The recipes and effects of food grow concrete, and the situation careens toward the extreme. The player must prepare even for the coming winter, for disaster, for being unable to move. And through it all, hunger is sure to arrive, and the body is consumed accordingly. Here the property of food in the survival game is revealed for the last time: even if taste and aroma cannot be implemented, hunger at least is represented to the point of obstinacy. The less the provisions, the more it is the pressure of hunger that tightens its grip on the player. Hunger leads straight to game over. In that sense, the survival game has more persuasive power in conveying the sense of sustenance than the five senses.

3. What Is Represented by Eating

Food in games began with points and the means of recovery, then expanded all the way to communal experience and the condition of survival. This genealogy can also be seen as the result of how we have imagined human life and the body. So why do humans, why do games, ceaselessly seek to represent these elements? And why is this represented most concretely in the survival genre?

To cook and to eat is an act that has become utterly taken for granted in our daily lives. We are always thinking we want to eat something, and we are in fact eating—yet perhaps we have never properly thought about the essence of the act of eating. That to live, a person must ceaselessly secure resources; that the matter of making a living was, from the start, hard. What lets us experience that, if only indirectly, is, I think, the survival game. The survival game restores this sense with a primal tension. But one important part is omitted from this restoration: namely, that real-world hunger is a social problem, whereas the survival game's hunger has to do with personal management. The player dies if they fail to secure food, but that death is not a social tragedy—only a failed playthrough. This happens because the medium of the game, even when it seems to handle society itself, places individual action more at the center. And so there always remains a certain measure of blank space in the way a game handles something. So it is with the matter of food.

Even so, that we feel a certain "taste of living" within a game is an undeniable fact. This does not mean only having survived in the game. Just as in reality we eat good food and think it was good to be alive, the enjoyment and satisfaction felt in a game grant us a sense that life is worthwhile. Even if taste and aroma cannot be conveyed, it lets us feel, at least, a hope about how we will go on living from here. In this respect, what a game represents through food may be the sense of living on—one more "taste of living."