Alice Bucknell | Playing with Food | Factory+ (2024)

All views expressed are that of the writer.

Black coffee and grilled squid skewers: I’m in the kitchen gully of my ship, whipping up the chaotic favourite culinary combo of an impossibly glamorous gender-bending ghost called Gwen. This is Spiritfarer (2020), a cosy game about dying, released during the woozy and grief-stricken heat of the world’s first COVID summer. By following a recipe book with fifteen food types—ranging from stimulant to pub to fine dining—or simply dropping a bunch of ingredients into the oven to improv a new dish, I can prepare grub for my ghoulish lodgers, growing closer to them through the love language of food. I’m playing as Stella, a millennial Charon-incarnate. Gwen, a tall femme deer with majestic antlers, is my first passenger. Lucky for me, a “damn fine” cup of black coffee—her words—will plug the void ‘til we reach Everdoor, the cosmic portal where I ferry spirits to the great beyond.

Food in video games is nothing new. “Eat or be eaten”: it turns out the biological maxim has currency in the virtual realm too. Consumption is the conceptual backbone of Pacman (1980), the highest-grossing arcade game of all time. From Super Mario mushrooms to Skyrim cheese wheels, food has long been gaming’s most popular power-up, but more recent technical advances have ushered in a culinary pivot. From death doulas cooking squid skewers to toast simulators, gaming has started to take playing with its food seriously.

Inside the Blade Runner-inspired Cyberpunk 2077 (2020), I’m roaming the neon-soaked back alleys of Night City, famished and in desperate need of grub. I prowl the street vendors to see what’s on offer—artificial “Eezybeef” and the nicotine-stuffed soda “Nicola” seem to be top of the menu tonight, alongside “pizza” topped with roasted bugs and a gratuitous serving of metallic rainwater. The game’s grotesque, hyper-synthetic eats are a critique of a near-future capitalist consumer culture that places next to no value on nutrition. As players, we’re even refused the pleasure of good-looking junk food: the 8-bit burgers and plastic-texture pizzas are so unappetising they became a point of gamer outcry.

“There is no satisfying consumption mechanic in gaming!” howls the disembodied Reddit collective consciousness, and they do have a point. Rarely do food-centric games offer a sense of satiation; players have to turn back to “real life” for that. But perhaps this insurmountable hurdle for food in games could be framed differently. Instead of replicating real food, it may help us understand food systems in a new light.

In Final Fantasy XV (2016), a title that has been heralded as having the most beautiful edible graphics of all time, the chef of your party knows over 100 recipes. You play as Prince Noctis in a gameplay that pivots from a bros bachelor party in a sick convertible to a monarchy-coded maxxed-out revenge fest. But despite the drama, there’s plenty of downtime spent camping, cooking, and eating. Each dish was meticulously crafted in real life by the art direction team—who also went out camping to prepare the pixelated fare—then 3D scanned the dishes into the virtual environment, taste tested, and adjusted them accordingly in the game. Blurring the line between real and virtual in both aesthetics and prep, Final Fantasy XV is a gateway into a much queerer relationship with food and its political and ecological systems that indie games can engender.

Another genre is the cosy game, around since the 1980s but that became massively popular in the domestic downtime and peak global anxiety of the pandemic era. This type of gameplay prioritises open-world, creative exploration that’s absent of competition and fail states. Contemporary cosy peaked with the release of Animal Crossing: New Horizons (2020), a game in which you can unlock over 140 recipes—ranging from Blue Marlin Carpaccio to the fluffiest anime-coded pancakes you'll ever see—and vend your fare to villagers or cook purely for your own pleasure. With over 45 million copies sold, making it one of the most popular titles in gamer history, the success of Animal Crossing reveals both a desire for a safe, bounded world and a deep, almost existential need for nourishment in game worlds.

For more examples of quasi-therapeutic games, consider the obscenely popular Terrarium: Garden Idle (2018) – you’ve probably witnessed someone tending their pixelated Terrarium garden on the subway. Or farming simulator Stardew Valley (2016), which gleefully gives first generation Pokémon 8-bit nostalgia. Cooking Mama (2006) was an addictively simple meal prep simulator and a prophet of the cosy revolution to come. Its analogue today might be Yakiniku Simulator (2022), where players meditatively turn bite-size beef strips atop a personal grill until they are perfectly crispy.

But to label cosy games as pure escapism is to avoid the full story. Even when playing alone, the emphasis is social: in both Stardew Valley and Spiritfarer, food is the technology through which you befriend your kin, both living and dead. Peeling back the feel-good surface, this desire for nourishment of all kinds in gaming responds to real-world lack of social connection, scarcity and the threat of ecological breakdown. Some games make this mechanic more explicit: in Eco (2018), an online multiplayer world-building simulator, cutting down a tree leaves a ghost imprint on the landscape. Instead of being a player, you’re a “citizen”, and it matters how you tend to the ecosystems around you. Imagine the significance of this applied to real life: a kind of carbon memory for the environment, where agricultural companies were actively encouraged to tend to the ecosystems they profit from. These virtual food systems can be used as an imaginative aid, bringing physical food system problems into virtual focus.

The distinctly glutenous POV of I am Bread (2014) deserves a mention here. Controlling one corner of crust at a time, players navigate various disgusting domestic terrains as a slice of bread on a mission to get toasted. The game addresses the weirdness of this quest with equally awkward mechanics that are impossible to master. In its refusal of a rewarding playthrough, I am Bread channels queer game scholar Bo Ruberg’s concept of “no fun” gaming as well as game designer Kara Stone’s musings on posthuman playability—games that dislocate humans from the centre of the story. We can’t retreat into fantasy when we play games like this – they prompt deeper, if weirder, understandings of the food systems we are a part of, extract from, and ultimately, must return to.