[editor's View] On How a Medium That Cannot Eat Approaches the Instinct to Eat

Eating is essential to an animal's survival. Humans are animals too, so we die if we do not eat; every human being is, at bottom, bound up with the act of eating. Yet the fact that we call what humans eat not "feed" but "food," "provisions," reveals that human eating is not composed of physiological need and the survival instinct alone. To gather ingredients and cook them into a dish—or to accumulate those same ingredients and process them into the resource we call provisions—is a process that is at times social, at times political and economic, and in many cases one we read back through a cultural frame.

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.

Watched Cooking, Played Survival: The Empty Seat Between Cooking-Survival Entertainment and Games

There are many cooking games—the kind where you take a customer's order, combine ingredients, and finish a plate within a time limit. Yet the "cooking survival" format that television has spent so long refining has rarely managed to establish itself as a genre within digital games. This asymmetry is the starting point of this essay. Why has cooking become a game that works so well on broadcast, while in games it has never stood at the center of a competition contesting the quality of the cooking itself?

Welcome to the Nomi Cup: The Greatest Wa-gall Cooking Contest Under Heaven

The cake is a lie. Anyone who has played Portal cannot help but know this line. The game's AI, GLaDOS, promised the player a cake as a reward for clearing every test chamber—but the offer was false. More precisely, the cake exists; it merely sits in a room the player can never enter. After this mischievous scene, some players began, in earnest, to bake the cake beyond the screen—the Black Forest cake. Piecing together the fragments of a recipe that had flickered past on the monitor, they baked it and posted the photos. GLaDOS's cake was a lie, but it did not stay a lie forever.

But Nothing Tastes of Anything in Game Cooking

A great many of a game's play elements and mechanics are realized by imitating those of reality. Simulating any number of acts or phenomena—natural law, administrative procedure, the common sense of the humanities—is the basic stuff of games. One of the pleasures you feel while playing is hunting for how these copied phenomena and acts of reality come out similar and how they come out different.

How Like a Dragon Remembers Korea's Flavors: From Yakiniku to Kimchi, Scenes of Korean Food in Games

The Like a Dragon series tells stories of yakuza and criminal organizations, but at its center there always lies human desire. The desires to make money, gain power, win love, and dream of a better life are the principal engines running through both the main story and the substories. The player is led to grow characters, expand businesses, romance, indulge in entertainment, and desire something without end. What is interesting is that this desire is often translated, within the game's systems, into a matter of "hunger" and "fullness."

A Review of Consume Me: The Rise of the Personal Game and the Shifting Meaning of Eating

Consume Me is a game with many peculiar facets, in more ways than one. Developed by the Chinese American developer Jenny Jiao Hsia and her collaborator AP Thompson, it won the Seumas McNally Grand Prize—the grand prize—at the 2025 Independent Games Festival (IGF). Despite winning at the most prestigious indie game festival in the global game scene, there is not a single instance of this game being reviewed in domestic game media. Setting aside, of course, Korea's game webzines with their interest only in industry discourse, even among the more than 1,000 Steam reviews, Korean-language reviews number a mere three. Why has this happened? According to Metacritic, seventeen outlets reviewed Consume Me, including major game media such as Edge and Eurogamer, as well as general-interest papers like the Guardian. Yet in Korea uniquely, almost no criticism of Consume Me arose at all.

Was That Mandu Really So Tasteless? Recollections of 2000s Cooking Flash Games

The Gohyang Mandu man spat out the dumpling along with his withering verdict. Mandu folded so carefully by a child's little hands gets rejected, over and over. Does the filling take sesame oil? Can you pan-fry a coiled one? This is the player, mouse in hand, turning the problem this way and that. Most children who played flash games in the 2000s will remember this one.

How Games Represent Farming: Five Types and What They Mean

In 2020 a rather striking thing happened in the world of games, in Korea and Japan at nearly the same moment: a single game brought down the websites of both countries' rural development agencies. Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin, a platform-action game that folded the rice farming central to East Asia's food supply into surprisingly fine detail, sent its players hunting down every scrap of agricultural information they could find—because in this game, the minutiae of growing rice are effectively what governs the character's growth. This longing for a virtual paddy field flattened the servers and made the news.

The Ghost Games: A Parry Through Chanbara's Tangled Family Tree

Chanbara (ちゃんばら) is a compound of chanchan (ちゃんちゃん), the onomatopoeia for the sound of clashing blades, and barabara (ばらばら), the onomatopoeia for the sound of blood scattering. Originally a term of derision for the slapdash Edo-period costume dramas churned out in bulk, it is now used as a genre label covering films, novels, games, and plays in which samurai, ninja, and the like carry on their action with bladed weapons. There is even a sport called chanbara that uses foam swords and padded weapons, so the term itself can be said to circulate widely, indifferent to genre or medium.

Can Religiosity and Gameness Coexist? — Jesus Simulator

This past April, two games—I Am Jesus Christ and Jesus Simulator—became a talking point among gamers. Heavy with religious color from the titles alone, these games drew the attention of reviewers and the games press even before release, and the journalists who played them discussed the works' significance and limits while disclosing their own religious backgrounds: Protestant, Buddhist, Catholic, and so on.

Representation and the Aesthetic Aura in Games: On the Solid Narratives of 1979 Revolution: Black Friday and Mixtape

Representation close to the real has, ever since media were born, been an ideal and a desire long held by the creators who make media and the users who consume them. Games, too, have never been free of the ideal of "representation close to the real." Through the chain of modalities that has the user manipulate and decide actions and then confirms the result back to them, games have realized a sense of immediacy that other media seldom reach; and the immediacy a player feels through a game has been the game's own particular way of drawing near to the real.

Why Farming Games Became “Healing”: Between Pixel Farming and Real Fields

In farming simulation games such as Stardew Valley and Story of Seasons, players are given the chance to become farmers living in idyllic rural settings. These games share a similar narrative premise: leaving the city behind, inheriting a family farm, and beginning a new life. What the player first encounters is usually a long-abandoned plot of land overrun with weeds, rocks, and dead trees. The core experience of these games lies in gradually clearing the neglected farm, cultivating the soil, planting crops, tending livestock, and ultimately enjoying the rewards of steady daily labor. Along the way, interactions with the townspeople offer moments of warmth and community.

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.

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

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.

[Journal Club] Gaming Between Pleasure and Guilt: The Gaming Subculture and Cultural Dissonance of Young Indian Men

TEXT: Snodgrass, J. G., Dengah, H. F., Upadhyay, C., Else, R. J., & Polzer, E. (2021). Indian Gaming Zones as Oppositional Subculture: A Norm Incongruity "Cultural Dissonance" Approach to Internet Gaming Pleasure and Distress. Current Anthropology, 62(6), 771–797.

"Who's Going to Read This?": On the Development Journals of Karateka and Prince of Persia, and on Keeping a Record

March 5, 1990 … The Apple version of Prince of Persia sold fewer than 150 copies last month. To think it's dying out there like that. I can't believe it. Rory passed along to me what Latricia T., the marketing manager, supposedly said: "It's just an arcade game. Arcade games don't sell, you know." — Prince of Persia development journal (Starbeez, p. 297)

Authorship as a Joke? Reading Bryan Hikari Hartzheim's Hideo Kojima: Progressive Game Design from Metal Gear to Death Stranding

Bryan Hikari Hartzheim's Hideo Kojima: Progressive Game Design from Metal Gear to Death Stranding examines the games Hideo Kojima directed or took part in producing, following a range of media theories. It also trains an intensive light on the trajectory of Kojima—who has been read, or has induced himself to be read, as a storyteller who consistently holds to anti-war, anti-nuclear thematic concerns, as "the one responsible for directing everything," and as a celebrity of the game industry.