Shall I Put It in the Omelet?": Taste good or Taste fool!

In Food Is Culture, Massimo Montanari likens cooking to a linguistic system. Each ingredient functions as a lexeme, the recipe becomes the grammar, and together they finally make a system of meaning—the dish. Cook for yourself and you feel the plausibility of this account. The sense in which a soy sauce changes its use depending on whether it is jin-ganjang or yangjo-ganjang (a darker, blended soy versus a naturally brewed one), and on the ratio at which you cut it with water, certainly resembles the shift in meaning that comes with the usage and arrangement of synonyms. A system of taste holds just that much complexity. When you see that even Epicure: Navigating the Emergent Geometry of Food Ingredient Embeddings, released by KAIKAKU.AI—which made a splash by claiming to pack the relationships among the world's cuisines into a mere 2MB—defined each ingredient as vocabulary and token to carry out a semantic interpretation of their relations, you could say Montanari's thinking was considerably ahead of its time.

That video games always falter at representing taste is, in that sense, doubly so. To begin with, the fact that no "output device" exists to convey taste is fatal. Of course, the video game is not a medium for representing fact, and since the only way to convey taste so far is still food itself, this is not really cause for much concern. So the other problem can be said to loom larger: the problem of representing the very concept of "taste" in game-mechanical terms. From Montanari's vantage, it becomes the problem of having to build a system in which the lexemes lined up inside the game can each create a different meaning according to how they are assembled. And language might actually be the easier case. Language, in that you can grasp its context from the utterance itself, has a relatively transparent form of final output. But taste, owing to its essential untransmittability, is in a more troublesome state. How do you project onto a quantified world the way a contextual difference among lexemes manifests as a different "taste"?

In truth this is a rather hopeless task. The "stat buffs" that various games with cooking mechanics apply are, frankly, just a stopgap—garnishing your naengmyeon with mandu does not, after all, raise your intelligence. Which is perhaps why we ended up with a boss like the one in the Gohyang Mandu game, raging that anything other than the one fixed recipe is wrong. When you presume that cooking is grammatical, the attendant difficulty lies in the complexity of its combinations. The fact that eating kimchi together with an Ace cracker produces the taste of kimchijeon, the kimchi pancake (it really does!) means that a different signification—a different "flavor"—is at work than when you eat the kimchi and the Ace cracker separately. So then: chew a vegetable cracker along with it and will you get the feel of a vegetable pancake? What if you eat it with a snack heavy on seafood flavor? The sense that the semes carried by individualized ingredients govern the final meaning by "being added or subtracted" is, above all in its being a "causal relation of appropriately unexpected meaning-creation," not easy to represent. In that it can be reproduced again, it can be called a kind of causal relation. The meaning itself has a mutability hard to describe as merely a combination of individual elements; but once it is fixed by a single law (= a recipe), the result rises into the domain of the reproducible. I have been talking about cooking all this while, yet the game that best reflects this structure is none other than 5th Cell's Scribblenauts series, where you solve puzzles by typing words directly to spawn game objects. In the end, Montanari wins. Cooking really does seem to be a language.

Scribblenauts Unlimited

Now it is time to talk about Omelet You Cook (hereafter Omelet). Granted, it is hard to say this game handles "cooking" in the traditional sense. The omelet is already well made, and the player merely places toppings on it. But the earlier case of kimchi and the Ace cracker is not so different from Omelet's gameplay: the result changes according to how various ingredients are arranged. The game was originally completed in its basics in four days at the 2024 GMTK Game Jam, and early on it felt like a Balatro of sorts with a placement mechanic folded in. Well received on the spot, it soon launched into early access; afterward, taking in various opinions, it came to handle more complex modes of connection as things crept in—ingredient types, classification by tag, differences in scoring by adjacency and non-adjacency, ingredient states such as sticky / spicy (burning) / spoiled / packaged. The finished, released game offers no play limited merely to what you place. Now you have to weigh complex combinations: which tag of ingredient you set adjacent to or apart from which, which direction a given ingredient faces, how many ingredients of a certain tag sit on the omelet… With a bit of exaggeration, Omelet is the game with the most dynamic combinations of food ingredients—and combination effects—of any game now in existence.

The problem comes after this. So—can the combinations Omelet creates actually set a flavor in motion? I have been speaking of the possibility of cooking, of signification through ingredient combination, but tracing such possibilities is only a desire to once again make the video game a "simulation." A medium that cannot output taste in the first place, however it interprets and applies taste, produces nothing more than an output virtually assigned within a quantified world. It may grant diversity to ingredient combinations, but clothing the result onto the world "convincingly" is an entirely different matter. And Omelet is a game that knows this impossibility all too well.

Will a lobster tail really yield superb flavor just because you stick any old vegetable onto it and eat them together?

Had this game treated ingredient combination and the creation of taste in earnest, it would not have become as delightful a game as it is. Omelet's theme—the premise of cafeteria meals served to an animal teaching staff, and the ludicrous setup of being fired if you "slip up even once"—already reveals that it does not take the act of cooking all that seriously. The system that generates a fairly complex and varied interweaving of ingredients is, accordingly, not a very serious system either. This attitude goes beyond the theme. This game's cooking is, quite simply, a mess. The ingredients do not come down neatly. Cut carrots or french fries drop right in front of you with their packaging still on. That is mild. Canned goods ride up onto the rail can and all. Spicy food is so spicy it is on fire, and left alone it burns black—and if another ingredient is stuck to it, the fire even spreads to that ingredient. These setups do, of course, lend the game a cheerful puzzle element. A burning ingredient can be put out by shaking it quickly (and serving the food while it is on fire grants +3, a fairly high score!). Paper or plastic wrapping can be peeled off by lighting it with the flame of a spicy food, or you can cut it away using the scissors that are provided as an ingredient (!). For cans, too, you can use the wrench provided as an ingredient to pry off the lid, shake it, and use what is inside.

But praise for such elements is no different from a return to simulation. Omelet, on the contrary, strains to break away from this very possibility of becoming a "cooking simulation." A "Helper" that grants a constant effect, like Balatro's "Joker," overturns the various relations and effects that arise in the game. The representative case is "Enhanced Mold," which gives a bonus to moldy ingredients instead. Choose this Helper and you will strain every nerve to pack the omelet full of mold-covered ingredients. Nutrition, safety—no, even the question of taste—is wholly excluded here. Satisfaction is checked as a score anyway, and if the score is high, all is well.

Covered in mold like this—no matter, so long as the score is high.

If so, the game Omelet You Cook is no different from a depiction of the very collision site of taste (or cooking) and the video game. I have explained this and that about the representation of taste all this while, but in the end this is precisely the core reason video games are locked in a struggle with taste. How can the utility of "taste" be tied to quantification? Is it even possible to quantify the degree of deliciousness? As the popular maxim "hunger is the best sauce" has it, the way taste functions wavers in complex ways not according to the ingredient itself but according to situation, perception, emotion, and so on. And even if you grant identical conditions, a numerical conversion of taste itself is all but impossible—though you could, like the "fullness" gauge of the Mystery Dungeon series, register the degree of how full you are.

The delight the game Omelet holds arises from this collision. If you cannot avoid it, enjoy it. If assigning numbers is your fate, then break away from reality instead. Omelet, even while holding the possibility of becoming a relatively sophisticated simulator, strains to break away from that as far as it can. Is "the most sophisticated simulator" not a fantasy and a misreading to begin with? The breadth of possibility and the degree of simulation are, in any case, separate matters. If you cannot become complete reality, then increase the power of the unreal, as cheerfully as possible.

Omelet, therefore, lays bare a video game's ambivalent thesis—the part that looks like a weakness but is in fact its solid foundation. That is the fundamental impossibility of simulating reality. Omelet is no different from a truly bold meta joke. Yes: the video game neither aims at simulating reality, nor, even if it achieved it, would that be all that fun. It means there is little utility in immersing yourself too seriously in how to represent taste close to reality. Unless players are going to shove a clump of mold-covered omelet into someone's mouth in real life, it is enough to compromise reasonably—"this is about the extent of the effect, anyway." You do not, in fact, place a vegetable on a lobster tail because it is delicious; you do it merely because the rules demand it. Rather, is it not more meaningful to make someone eat, on purpose, what must not be eaten in reality, and to feel the thrill of transgression while watching them savor that taste (= watching the score reach its mark)? Yes—the video game has value worth enjoying precisely in that it often lets us attempt the pleasure of transgression, and indeed at times affirms it wholeheartedly. And when receiving such foolish affirmation, one is tempted to quietly swap "video game" and "simulation" into the position of homonyms—because only then does the affirmation of my foolish little act feel made real.

Achievement is understood only as score. So, as long as the score is satisfied, even the foolish desire to someday feed a human something forbidden gets affirmed.