Delicious Pixels: Food in Video Games 9783110716603, 9783110716474

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Agata Waszkiewicz Delicious Pixels

Video Games and the Humanities

Edited by Nathalie Aghoro, Iro Filippaki, Chris Kempshall, Esther MacCallum-Stewart, Jeremiah McCall and Sascha Pöhlmann Advisory Board Alenda Y. Chang, UC Santa Barbara Katherine J Lewis, University of Huddersfield Dietmar Meinel, University of Duisburg-Essen Ana Milošević, KU Leuven Soraya Murray, UC Santa Cruz Holly Nielsen, University of London Michael Nitsche, Georgia Tech Martin Picard, Leipzig University Melanie Swalwell, Swinburne University Emma Vossen, University of Waterloo Mark J.P. Wolf, Concordia University Esther Wright, Cardiff University

Volume 6

Agata Waszkiewicz

Delicious Pixels

Food in Video Games

ISBN 978-3-11-071647-4 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-071660-3 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-071668-9 ISSN 2700-0400 Library of Congress Control Number: 2022933855 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Agata Waszkiewicz Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Contents Preface

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Introduction: Feminist Food Studies 1 The Food Language 3 Food Studies: Critical, Feminist, and Intersectional Queer Crip Feminist Politics of Food 8 The Body That Eats… 11 … and the Body that is Eaten 13 15 Concluding Remarks: Digital Food Activism Few Words about the Structure of the Book 16

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Part : Ludic Food and Food Game Genres Chapter 1: Playing with Ludic Food 21 Conceptualizing Ludic Food 23 Ingredients, Crafting, and the Concept of Playbour Cooking Mini-Games 33 Food of Labor, Food of Joy 37

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Chapter 2: Gendered Food Practices in Cooking Games 40 In and Out of the Kitchen: The Gendered Food Spaces 41 44 Evolution of “Cooking Games” Genres Cooking Inclusively 48 52 Conclusion: Narrative Cooking Games Chapter 3: Food Preferences and Food Choice in Veg*an Video Games Veg*an Diets as the Sites of Feminist Resistance 56 Tofu and the Vegaphobia in Video Games 59 Digital Veg*anism 61 An Explicit Veg*an 62 Veg*an by Omission 64 A Veg*an Player 66 Conclusions 67

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Contents

Part : Cozy Cooking: Abundance, Safety, and the Aesthetic 71 Chapter 4: Three Tenets of Cozy Cooking Food Abundance in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild 76 Emotional Safety of Gendered Food Labor in Spiritfarer 80 83 Cozy Aesthetics of Food Conclusions 86 87 Chapter 5: Coffeehouses as the Spaces of Safety In a Pursuit of Authenticity, One Coffee Bean at the Time 91 Let’s Talk about Coffee Coffeehouses and Bars as Liminal Spaces 95 Conclusions 99

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100 Chapter 6: The Aesthetic of Video Game Food Beautiful Pixels 102 The Stillness of Digital Foodporn 104 107 Competitive Haute Cuisine The Hyperrealism of Final Fantasy XV Food 109 Concluding Remarks: The Aesthetics of Intimacy in Japanese Food 113 Art Chapter 7: Lollipops and Popsicles: The Erotic Sensualities of Food 117 Eating Sex Gazing on Bodies, Gazing on Food 120 Popsicles, Lollipops, and the Subversive Queer Gaze 124 Orgasmic Food Pleasures 129 Conclusions 131 Chapter 8: Non-Hegemonic Masculinities in Dating Simulators 133 Defining the Dating Simulators Genre 134 Chicken Ever So Tender: The Emotions of Comfort Food 135 Culinary Masculinities of Colonel Sanders 140 Queer Fatherhood and the Emotions of Food 143 The Seductive Art of (Queer) Cooking 146 149 Conclusions

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Chapter 9: The Hunger that Devours: the Representation of the Disordered 151 Eating Feminist Approaches to the Disordered Eating 152 Digital Games for Change 155 The Subversive Play of Consume Me 157 161 Consumed by Hunger in Shrinking Pains Conclusions 165 Concluding Thoughts Bibliography Ludography Index

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VII

Preface Food in video games takes many forms. From the titles where food and cooking play only a minor role to those in which it is the main theme, food can become a crucial tool of constructing reliable worlds and the intimate, fleshed out relationships between the characters. However, although in the last decades critical food studies has been growing as an interdisciplinary and intersectional discipline, drawing critical attention towards the representation of food in various media, there is still not much of discussion on the function of food within game studies. Although a lot of my game research gravitates towards more structuralist analysis, what matters to me the most is the ways in which games engage with the player and how they use their various affordances to create narratives that are meaningful, political, and which focus around the underrepresented and marginalized identities. Without a doubt, it is the unapologetic intersectionality of food studies that made it so appealing to me. Feminist and queer game scholarship is continuously growing in response and with an influence on the still inherently masculinized game industry and cultures, but food studies grew from the intersectional feminist activism and cannot be understood without it. For this reason alone, I believe that game studies can benefit greatly from a closer intersection with food studies and that the perspectives that form the latter can enrich the way one thinks and writes about the role of food in video game worldbuilding and in connecting the identities of the characters populating their narrative with the identities and lived experiences of their players. Thus, this book aims at introducing critical food studies to game scholarship, showing the unique ways in which food is utilized in both video game gameplay and stories to convey its rich and complicated intersections with culture and politics. Because of the uniquely interactive character of video games, the majority of games I discuss focus on food preparation rather than just consumption. Thus, I discuss the three stages of interacting with food represented in many of these titles, that is: gathering of the ingredients, the actual process of cooking, and its presentation to both the in-game characters and to the players. The thing about food is that it is always there, the very quality that makes it so easy to ignore and forget about it. This book aims at bringing the academic attention back to digital food and to show how significant it became in the recent decades as, on the one hand, a world-building device, and, on the other, a crucial link between the in-game and out-of-game identities and experiences. In the book I argue that food serves as the means of creating an intimate, cozy, and safe world and a close relationship between the players and the characters. In the discussion I use predominantly the frameworks and theories from trans-inclusive https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110716603-001

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feminist studies, food studies, and, of course, games studies. In the latter case, I utilize the definition of coziness withing video games as proposed in a report written after an annual game developer conference Project Horseshoe, in which three main tenets of coziness are identified: the ludic and narrative safety, the abundance of resources, and the visual softness. Although I recognize that food can be a source of tension, abject, and fear within any narrative medium, in this book I focus on the opposite, showing how it constructs narratives, gameplay, and relationships that are characterized by slowness, mindfulness, safety, and, in the end, intimacy.

Assuming an Intersectional Approach Thus, this book is about food but also the ways food intersects with various axis of powers and how it influences identities of those who eat, prepare, and share food. As it is shown in the first chapter, the critical food studies are not a homogenous group and those who write about sociological, cultural, and political meanings of food come from variety of disciplines including, but not limited to, feminist studies, queer studies, critical race studies, and disability studies. Thus, before moving forward I believe it might be beneficial to address my understanding of some concepts used throughout the chapters such as “gender,” “queer,” and “intersectionality.” Drawing from cultural theorists like Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Candace West, Don Zimmerman, José Esteban Muñoz, and many others, gender and sexuality can be understood as “discursive practices.” For West and Zimmerman, rather than “property of individuals [gender can be considered] as an emergent feature of social situations: both as an outcome of and a rationale for various social arrangements and as a means of legitimating one of the most fundamental divisions of society.”¹ Similarly, Butler has emphasized its performative character, arguing that there “is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results.”² The social construction of the terms of masculinity and femininity explains that these concepts change over time and differ among various cultures, but also rejects the binary understanding of gender.

 Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman, “Doing Gender,” Gender and Society 1, no. 2 (1987): 126.  Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (London: Routledge, 1999), 34.

Assuming an Intersectional Approach

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Defining queerness is even more difficult since it “thrives on ambiguity, openness, and the spaces among different ideas, communities, concepts, identities, and processes.”³ In its ever-changing, fluid character, queerness can be understood as anything from “a social force, a complex network of erotic and affective ties, or an entire shared culture,”⁴ but it always strives to subvert the heteronormative hegemony and binarity of sexes, genders, and sexualities. In my research, I make sure to implement the approach of intersectionality, a concept coined in 1989 by Kimberlé Crenshaw, an American critical race theory scholar, lawyer, and civil rights advocate, which refers to the ways in which race, gender, class, and other social identities (with the special emphasis on the marginalized and non-normative ones) overlap and interact with the structures of power and oppression, thus shaping the everyday experiences of marginalized genders. Assuming an intersectional perspective in a project such as this means not only recognizing the variety of perspectives brought by researchers of different marginalized identities, but also recognizing the importance of the contexts in which the given texts were created. Not all of the researchers quoted here disclose the information on their pronouns. In such situations, I try addressing them in a way that avoids potential misgendering and causes discomfort. In many situations, I use pronouns provided on the public social media accounts or in the official biographical notes available on the university and personal websites. In case that any mistakes crept their way into the text, I would like to offer my most sincere apologies.⁵ Ensuring inclusivity additionally meant that I uphold high standards to those whose work I decide to use. Thus, I made a conscious effort to exclude those scholars who have voiced transphobic, homophobic, or racist beliefs, or who have abused their power and caused other trauma and pain. I apologize if I have not always managed to do so for a lack of information or access to one. Another issue that I would like to discuss before moving forward is the cultural context of the creation of the titles chosen for analysis. The games have all been released in English and are available in the Western countries. However, it is important to stress that while many of the discussed titles have been developed in Europe and the United States, the most striking and defined examples of the video game food come from Japanese games. From the Cooking Mama ser-

 Deborah Kuzawa, “Queer/Ing Composition, the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives, and Ways of Knowing,” in Re/Orienting Writing Studies: Queer Methods, Queer Projects, ed. William P. Banks, Matthew B. Cox, and Caroline Dadas (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2019), 152.  Darieck Scott and Ramzi Fawaz, “Introduction: Queer about Comics,” American Literature 90, no. 2 (2018): 200.  In case that anyone wishes to quote me or the book, I use they/them pronouns.

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ies, which inspired and revolutionized cooking games genre, to Pokémon Sword and Shield (Game Freak 2019) or Final Fantasy XV (Square Enix 2016) in which cooking together becomes a way of creating intimacy between the characters, food in Japanese video games points towards the many layers of meaning food has in that culture and the complex roles it plays in the daily social rituals. Video games, like other texts of culture, cannot be discussed outside of their social and political significance. Rather, like “other contemporary narrative forms, videogames express complex ideas of national identity and belonging, as well as social and political critique. The relationship between the Japanese videogame and ‘Japan’ is thus the relationship between a text and its context.”⁶ Similarly, Martin Picard signaled the separateness of Japanese games from the Western ones by introducing a term, “geemu,” which has been since used in the English-speaking game scholarship to acknowledge the transmedial character of Japanese storytelling, embedding individual game titles in the larger franchise spanning through several media but also reflected in merchandise and the robust fan cultures. I recognize the differences of the contexts in which these texts were made and read, but I believe that it is impossible not to acknowledge them and the impact they had on the Western digital games. As a white European person without a fluency in Japanese language, I was limited in access to what has been written and released in English. Due to this and while trying my best to remain mindful of their context, I have made two choices. First, the games that I have chosen are available in English and have been officially released on the Western market. Second, I have limited my analysis of these texts to the ways in which they have influenced the representations of food in both Eastern and Western video games. When discussing Cooking Mama (Cooking Mama Limited 2006) and Pokémon Shield and Sword, I focus mostly on the ludic aspects of their cooking gameplay, juxtaposing it with practices encountered in non-Japanese games. In other places, I offer a more in-depth analysis of the way The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Nintendo EDP 2017) and Final Fantasy XV structure character intimacy through the shared experiences of cooking and eating together, emphasizing the prevalence of the emphasis on the interpersonal significance of food in Japanese games. However, at the same time I recognize that I only scratch the surface here and I hope these complex relationships are explored in more detail by those with more expertise in the context of Japanese food studies.

 Rachael Hutchinson, Japanese Culture Through Videogames (Abington, New York: Routledge, 2019), 3.

Taking a Village to Write a Book

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Taking a Village to Write a Book Writing this book has been a unique and important experience, although I expect that can be said about the majority of book-writing endeavors. There are several reasons for why that is true for me and not the least important of them relates to the fact that the first draft was written in the 2020, during the beginning of the global Covid-19 pandemic. Being able to focus on a passion project like this gave me a way to structure my days, weeks, and months that helped me to cope with fear, anxiety, and the never-stopping flood of grim news and updates. I never expected to write about food. I have never considered myself a foodie and I do not enjoy cooking. However, as food scholars continuously emphasize, people are necessarily affected by the relationships they have with food and eating and that has always been fascinating to me. My own relationship with food was not always easy and I was often finding myself in the struggle over controlling what and how I am eating, making me necessarily aware of food’s fascinating influence over all the spheres of one’s life. This awareness has shaped the way I approached certain topics in this book and has often guided my curiosity. Because of its circumstances, the book was written mostly in solitude of the consecutive lockdowns caused by the pandemic. However, there are several people whom I would like to thank for their help on various stages of its preparation and for sharing my excitement about it. I am grateful to my friends for their continuous support on all the stages of this project. First of all, I would like to thank Anna Oleszczuk, who recognized how much this book meant to me even before I did, who encouraged me to submit my proposal to De Gruyter and who found and forwarded to me their call for books. Secondly, I want to thank Mateusz Kominiarczuk and Martyna Bakun for their emotional support and help with figuring out the structure of various chapters. I also want to thank Marta Usiekniewicz, food studies scholar who provided me with the essential critical food studies readings, thus becoming my guide into the new for me discipline. I would also like to extend my sincere thanks to my editors: Esther MacCallum-Stewart, for the insightful and attentive feedback, and Rabea Rittgerodt, for approaching every single interaction with me with warmth and kindness, which made all the difference. Last but not least, I want to thank my parents for their unconditional support and enthusiasm for this and every other of my projects and endeavors.

Introduction Feminist Food Studies Video game food comes in many shapes and forms: in the famous Candy Crush Saga (King 2012) match-3 game, the player needs to move pieces of various candy around the boards to complete levels; in Mario Bros platformer games, mushrooms increase the protagonist’s strength and grant them new powers; food has become a main theme of countless restaurant and cooking simulator titles; it can be found, made, consumed, discarded, or utilized as a building resource. However, in this book I want to focus on the specific uses of food in creation of the sense of coziness, mostly in independent games that emphasize feelings of safety and visual softness rather than high-stress environments characteristic to many mainstream action genres. This use of food in such cozy games can be seen through the example of games showcased during Wholesome Direct, a show created by the Wholesome Games group in 2020 that aired for the second time as a part of E3 conference on June 6, 2021, featuring trailers of 75 independent games belonging to various genres but sharing the cozy aesthetics. Throughout this book I repeatedly link video game food with coziness, following what many of the developers featured during the show already know: food is inherently tied to emotions and through its familiarity allows the creation of a strong bond between the player and the game or its characters. Many of the titles, like Hot Pot For One by Rachel Li and Qin Yin (2021), which conveys the feelings of loneliness in a foreign country by the act of cooking a “a hot dish intended for six people,” or Venba (Visai Games 2021), in which an immigrant woman reconnects to both her son and her mother’s culture through food, recognize that “food is never just something to eat”⁷ but rather that it entangles people in a complex web of meaning. Before diving into the discussion of food in digital games, one should first talk about food itself and its place within contemporary critical food studies. How does one start to even discuss food, a concept that, while often taken for granted, is anything but simple? Although critical food studies emerged as a separate discipline in the late twentieth century, food has always fascinated and attracted scholars who pondered about its nutritious and health values, sociocultural meaning, its ontology, epistemology, and aesthetics. While throughout the centuries philosophers were occupying themselves with the issues of food’s in-

 Margaret Visser, Much Depends on Dinner (Toronto: McCleland and Stewart Weidenfeld, 1986), 12. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110716603-002

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Introduction: Feminist Food Studies

fluence on one’s health and the ways in which overindulgence threatened one’s moral purity, the field of critical food studies emerged as a result of increasing awareness of the hegemonic relations of power and their influence on the lived experiences of sustenance, consumption, and preparation. The new discipline, which arose from the joined efforts of the scholar and activist, initially struggled against a critique which deemed it irrelevant and redundant, precisely because of omnipresence and the universal need for food. Although food scholars come from a variety of disciplines, including but not limited to philosophy, cultural anthropology, sociology, history, cultural studies, psychology, medicine, and nutritional sciences, they all share the conviction that “[f]ood matters. It has weight and it weights us down.”⁸ Food is never just food. It is more than the sum of calories and its nutritional value and it cannot be divorced from its larger social context. It influences the way humans construct and perform culture, social relations, and individual identities. Food is an intersectional issue and the practices and hierarchies of its preparation and consumption are inherently gendered, racialized, and relate strongly to social class. Roland Barthes, French literary theorist and structuralist probably known best for his influential essay The Death of the Author, has been fascinated by the significance of food as a concept, arguing that it is “a system of communication, a body of images, a protocol of usages, situations, and behavior”⁹ which “has a constant tendency to transform itself into situation”¹⁰ for it always signifies the values of power. Although eating is a basic physiological need shared among different species, each food choice, each method of its preparations, the customs surrounding it, the emotional impact, and the meaning attached to it vary substantially. Historically, Western anthropologists studying nonwhite cultures used the concept of edibility as a tool of colonization which deepened the disparity between what they considered “civilized” and “uncivilized.” According to such distinctions, the meticulously prepared, expensive European haute cuisine is a sign of luxury and status for those who can afford it as opposed to the meals of those who live in poverty and hunger as well as the cuisine of indigenous people, thus being a difficult to uphold term considering the significance of food and its social role in many non-Western cultures. To emphasize the intersectional context, some scholars write about “food voice,” which Anne Hauck-Lawson defines as “the dynamic, creative, symbolic, and highly individualized ways that food serves as a channel of communica Warren Belasco, Food: The Key Concepts (Oxford: Berg, 2008), 2.  Roland Barthes, “Toward a psychosociology of contemporary food consumption,” Food and culture: A reader 2 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997), 25.  Barthes, “Toward a psychosociology,” 29.

The Food Language

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tion.”¹¹ Through food voices, people convey different food experiences, positioning food as both personal and social. The aforementioned quote from Barthes refers to food as a means of communication and the theorist is not alone in making this comparison as it emphasizes personal attitudes and emotions arising around food and acknowledges its role in social rituals and relationships. The significance of food and meals varies across different cultures and countries, but it can have different meanings for different families or people. According to Judith Goode, food is a crucial element in construction of a cultural identity which can “communicate a positive identity and solidarity.”¹² In her book about relations between consumption and the representation of bodies in contemporary women’s fiction, Sarah Sceats wrote about food “as currency or language and eating as an exchange,”¹³ drawing attention to the importance of food as a means of strengthening romantic and family bonds, with the special emphasis on how food establishes closeness between mothers and daughters. Offering, accepting, or denying food gifts all play a significant role in these cultural rituals and family customs while differing substantially between cultures. It is not possible to summarize the entirety of a discipline that is so diverse and it is not my intention to try. Instead, I will offer a brief guide to the main trends in the field and introduce the authors who concentrate on the intersections between food and gender, race, and class and whose work influences the textual analyses in this book. First, however, one needs to consider the definitions of food and the concepts that relate to it.

The Food Language Food, foodstuffs, foodways, foodscapes, food event, and food voice—the language used in discussing food may not seem complex, but like everything that has to do with food, it acknowledges the multitude of its context. Foodstuffs refer to raw and unprocessed ingredients that are used to create a dish (for example, flour that can be made into a crusty and scrumptious loaf of bread). On the other hand, foodscapes describe the food environment of a given person

 Anne Hauck-Lawson, “Hearing the Food Voice: An Epiphany for a Researcher,” Digest: An Interdisciplinary Study of Food and Foodways 12, no. 1– 2 (1992): 6.  Judith Goode, “Food,” in Folklore, cultural performances, and popular entertainments: A communications-centered handbook, ed. Richard Baumann (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 238.  Sarah Sceats, Food, Consumption and the Body in Contemporary Women’s Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 185.

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or a group. The concept is crucial in discussing a person’s or, more often, a group’s accessibility to food. Writing on representation of food in the South American literature, Urszula Niewiadomska-Flis acknowledges that foodscape “is more than just the sum of its parts: landscape + food. Foodscape, as a physical space connected with food-related activities (foodways), is then a geographically situated reminder of the social interactions framed through foodways.”¹⁴ Finally, foodways is an even broader term encompassing “the entire range of food habits, behaviors, customs, and cultural practices associated with food consumption.”¹⁵ Foodways, then, refer to the wide range of traditions, beliefs, and behaviors relating to food in the given region or period. While analyzing foodways, food scholars concentrate on the relations between the methods of food production, distribution, and consumption in the current industrialized and globalized context. By studying foodscapes and foodways one can understand how the geographical location influences one’s food choices and food habits and just how closely food influences the creation of especially marginalized and oppressed identities. The studies, for example, find that BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) neighborhoods in the United States differ in the accessibility to supermarkets in comparison with white neighborhoods, the phenomenon referred to as “food deserts.” The inability to purchase affordable, nutritious, and healthy food results in the disparities in health outcomes and leads to further stigmatization of the already marginalized groups. As was already mentioned, the definition of “food” itself also poses certain problems. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, food is a “material consisting essentially of protein, carbohydrate, and fat used in the body of an organism to sustain growth, repair, and vital processes and to furnish energy,” usually in a solid form as opposed to drink, as well “inorganic substances absorbed by plants in gaseous form or in water solution.”¹⁶ However, the definition becomes further complicated in the context of what is considered edible, inedible, healthy, and unhealthy. The opposition between edible and inedible defines food in terms of the nutritious value it has for humans rather than other species, but even then this category is, unsurprisingly, not universal. In the introduction to Consuming the Inedible: Neglected Dimensions of Food Choice, C.J.K. Henry re-

 Urszula Niewiadomska-Flis, Live and Let Di(n)e. Food and Race in the Texts of the American South (Lublin: Wydawnictwo KUL, 2017), 24.  Jennifer Berg et al., “Food Studies,” in Encyclopedia of Food and Culture. Vol. 2 Food Production to Nuts, ed. Solomon H. Katz (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2003), 16.  Mirriam-Webster, s.v. “Food,” accessed June 15, 2020, https://www.merriam-webster.com/ dictionary/food.

The Food Language

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marks “about the frequency with which nutritionists neglected, in their intake records, the ingestion of substances which they did not recognize as ‘food’.”¹⁷ In the described example, the students cataloging eating practices of Epio women who were consuming caterpillars stumble against the problem when they realize that caterpillar is not listed in the nutrition composition tables: Anthropologists long ago established very clearly that many foods are culturally defined, and above all that the concept of ’inedible’ is wielded as a social strategy to demarcate and highlight the boundaries that groups create between one another. Accusing members of another group of being cannibals is perhaps the most dramatic example of this worldwide tactic (…). Derogative stereotyping of the cuisine of another nation is a more common, and less sensationalist, example of the same ploy: the English used to mock the French as ’frogs’ because some French ate cooked frogs’ legs, while poor ’whites’ in the ’Deep South’ of the United States used to label African Americans as ’coons’ because they occasionally hunted and ate raccoons.¹⁸

As this quote shows, the definition between edible and inedible is influenced by more than the biological components of given consumables; rather it reflects colonial practices. However, even when considered edible, food tends to be judged and categorized on the spectrum according to the other arbitrary binarities such as simple-sophisticated, tasty-disgusting, and healthy-unhealthy. This proves that although taste is commonly considered to be individual and subjective, meaning that what one person finds tasty is not necessarily such for somebody else, even raised in the same culture and society, it is also externally structured and manipulated. It seems that, when discussing personal food preferences, taste is often considered one of its most important qualities. However, “taste” in itself is a complex concept with at least two main meanings: in a physiological sense it refers to the sensory interpretation of the taste receptors located mostly in the taste buds on the tongue, while in an aesthetic sense it can refer to an ability to express moral judgement and to “recogniz[e] quality and [express] values.”¹⁹ In the former sense, the mainstream Western thought considers taste as the lowest of the senses not only due to its proximity to carnal, and, therefore, sinful pleasures but because of the incorrect belief about its simple construction. However, as Jukka Gronow put it in The Sociology of Taste: “[w]hereas need and taste con-

 C.J.K Henry, Consuming the Inedible: Neglected Dimensions of Food Choice (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), xi.  C.J.K Henry, Consuming the Inedible, 5.  Nicola Perullo, Taste as Experience: The Philosophy and Aesthetics of Food (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2016), ix.

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Introduction: Feminist Food Studies

stitute two distinct and antithetical discourses on food, pleasure cannot be separated from taste (taste is a source of pleasure) nor taste from pleasure (tastes are either pleasant or unpleasant).”²⁰ However, this prejudice has long been denounced not just due to the actual complexity of the chemical processes that are closely intertwined with memory and recognition, but also due to the influence of social and cultural variables that shape it. From Aristotle to Immanuel Kant and beyond, many European philosophers have been eagerly promoting the idea of taste as a skill, allowing the differentiation between arbitrary concepts of “good” and “bad,” be it axiological or epistemological. This belief that the world can be divided according to binary values has been reinforcing the division between “high” and “low” culture and is another method of hegemonic oppression: by ascribing value to the products of culture that historically has been created mostly by white, cisgender, heterosexual men, the appreciation of alternative or lower culture has been subjected to ridicule, and patronization thus once again creating a gap between the dominant and oppressed groups. While it is worth to notice that although historically and globally cooking tends to be considered a domestic and, thus, feminine activity, the introduction of culinary hierarchy in the form of high and low cuisine hierarchy is not a universal phenomenon.²¹ However, it is still prominent in Western cultures as demonstrated, among others, through the example of the attitudes towards Japanese and Chinese cuisine with the former considered elegant and elitist and the latter considered a form of fast food. In the introduction to Eating Identities: Reading Food in Asian American Literature, Wenying Xu discusses notes that “the racialization of Asian Americans has been achieved [in the United States] prominently through the mainstream’s representation and appropriation of Asian foodways. (…) When it’s not representing Asian food as disgusting, mainstream culture exoticizes and romanticizes Asian food.”²² Thus, food can be used as a tool of reinforcing Otherness by tying to racist, sexist, homophobic, classist, etc. stereotypes.

 Jukka Gronow, The Sociology of Taste (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 1.  Vicki A. Swinbank, “The Sexual Politics of Cooking: A Feminist Analysis of Culinary Hierarchy in Western Culture,” Journal of Historical Sociology 15, no. 4 (2002): 464.  Wenying Xu, Eating Identities: Reading Food in Asian American Literature (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007), 8.

Food Studies: Critical, Feminist, and Intersectional

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Food Studies: Critical, Feminist, and Intersectional The twentieth century food discourses have seen a rise of women writers who tirelessly worked on exposing the oppressive hegemonic and patriarchal ideas dominating in academic writing and instead introducing feminist perspectives to the discussions around food: M.F.K. Fisher who published on food through the 1940s; Mary Douglas, an anthropologist known for her analysis of the role of food in the creation of the social and group identities whose influential discussions of food taboos were included in 1966 book Purity and Danger; or Laura Shapiro who provided one of the first historical overviews of women’s associations with food. Known for her critiques of the way that corporate conglomerates control the nutrition—resulting in the 2002 book Food Politics—in 1996 Marion Nestle established a food studies program at the nutrition department at New York University, giving a foundation to the new discipline. The first decade of the twenty-first century saw the rapid increase of the discipline with scholars directly engaging with feminist, ecofeminist, queer, and intersectional perspectives on food. Some of the important works published in this period include Sarah Sceats’ in-depth study Food, Consumption, and the Body in Contemporary Women’s Fiction published in 2000, Arlene Voski Avakian’s and Barbara Haber’s 2005 edited collection From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies: Critical Perspectives on Women and Food, the introduction of which directly called for the development of feminist food studies, or Psyche A. Williams-Forson’s 2006 Building Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power, which was one of the first examinations of African-American women’s food experiences. Like many new, intersectional disciplines, critical food studies have been majorly shaped by the works of Black scholars. Writers such as Toni Tipton-Martin, Psyche Williams-Forson, Michael Twitty, or Vertamae Grosvenor offered valuable insight into the ways food is entangled in the colonialist power relations and its significance in creating the cultural identity. These and the following works by Black scholars ensured that the growing field of critical food studies remains not just feminist but intersectional. In the context of food studies, by applying intersectional perspectives one ensures that their analysis incorporates frameworks from feminist, gender, queer studies as well as disability studies, African and African American studies, Asian studies, and other fields, and that it draws from the works of the scholars and creators with diverse lived experiences. Kyla Wazana Tompkins states that: [a]s many food studies scholars in the social sciences have noted, foodie culture is founded on problematic racial politics in which white, bourgeois, urban subject positions are articu-

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Introduction: Feminist Food Studies

lated, on the one hand, through the consumption and informational mastery of foreign, that is, non-Anglo-American food cultures and, on the other hand, performed though romanticized and insufficiently theorized attachments to ‘local’ or organic foodways, attachments that at times suspiciously echo nativist ideological formations.²³

Food is central to development of racialized identity. The way food was used to oppress and control enslaved Black and Indigenous people and, later, how certain foods—such as chickens and watermelons—started to symbolize the exaggerated, ridiculed Blackness in Jim Crow’s America, and how, finally, several African American soul food dishes were appropriated by white Americans as “southern food” are all examples of the complicated relations between food and identities. On the other hand, the globalization, which rapidly causes the fusion between Western cuisines—which, of course, hardly denote a homogenous category—and those originating in Asian or African countries, does not necessarily denote equality since a “taste for diversity of food does not always accompany a taste for tolerance.”²⁴ Describing her own past experiences as an adventurous foodie, Lisa Heldke coined a term, “cultural food colonialism,” which, bearing similarities to the ideologies of Western colonialism, dangerously fetishizes non-Western cultures. In a deeply personal text, she wrote: “I found myself thinking about how disturbing and complicated it was to be tasting the food of people who were in the middle of calamitous famine.”²⁵ Thus, she drew attention to how food still can be used as a colonizing tool in a way which is often omitted from the general discussion.

Queer Crip Feminist Politics of Food With the rapid increase in the fast food and processed food options, scholars, nutritionists, and media celebrities began to urge consumers the return to organic, natural, and authentic food. Critics proclaiming “the fall of everyday home cooking”²⁶ in the late twentieth and the early twenty-first century feared the

 Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century (New York: NYU Press, 2012), 2.  Elspeth Probyn, Carnal Appetites: Foodsexidentities (London: Routledge, 2000), 103.  Lisa Heldke, “Let’s Eat Chinese!: Reflections on Cultural Food Colonialism,” Gastronomica 1, no. 2 (2001): 77.  Michael Pollan, “Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch,” The New York Times (July 29, 2009), para 7.

Queer Crip Feminist Politics of Food

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loss of cooking abilities of modern families, expecting it to lead to destabilization of family bonds and their traditional values. Thus, several movements emerged in the response to “the Big Mac phenomenon,”²⁷ offering the alternative to the fast food perceived as the symbol of fast-paced, deindividualized capitalistic culture and promoting diets that are healthy, organic, raw, or otherwise “authentic” and “traditional.” One of the most important movements promoting these ideas is the Slow Food movement which emerged in Italy in the late 1970s first as a gastronomic and, later, political and social association. Carlo Petrini strived to reposition food as central to human culture, considering it as “far more than a simple product to be consumed: it is happiness, identity, culture, pleasure, conviviality, nutrition, local economy, survival.”²⁸ The movement emphasizes the need to slow down and appreciate food, its taste, and values with the sensitivity to modes of its production. In his Slow Food Nation: Why Our Food Should Be Good, Clean, and Fair, Petrini explains how these three adjectives summarize movement’s main postulates: food should be rich in flavors, diverse, but also sustainable and produced with consideration to the geographic and cultural region of its origin, without exploitation of the workers. These and similar postulates have been thoroughly criticized by some feminist scholars, including a philosopher Kim Q. Hall who opposed them for being marginalizing and ableist. In her powerful article, Hall creates a “Queer Crip Feminist Politics of Food” in order to show the significance of food in the context of lived experiences of people with disabilities. In order to do so, she is drawing both from queer theory and, more importantly, crip theory developed by such theorists like Callie Sandahl, Robert McRuer, and Alison Kafer, all of whom structure crip theory as closely intertwined with queer theory. Regardless its long history of pejorative and derogatory use, the term crip (much like queer, in fact) is “fluid and ever-changing, claimed by those whom it did not originally define.”²⁹ For Kafer, “crip theory is more contestatory than disability studies, more willing to explore the potential risks and exclusions of identity politics.”³⁰

 Carlo Petrini, Slow Food Revolution: A New Culture for Eating and Living (New York: Rizzoli, 2006), 73.  Carlo Petrini, Slow Food Nation: Why Our Food Should Be Good, Clean, and Fair (New York: Rizzoli, 2007), 166; emphasis original.  Carrie Sandahl, “Queering the Crip or Cripping the Queer?: Intersections of Queer and Crip Identities in Solo Autobiographical Performance,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 9, no. 1 (2003): 27.  Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Indiana University Press, 2013), 15.

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Introduction: Feminist Food Studies

To present her argument, Hall uses the set of rules compiled by Michael Pol³¹ lan in his 2009 book Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual which reflects the ideology of the Slow Food movement: ‘Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food’ (2009, 7); (2) ‘Avoid foods that are pretending to be something they are not’ (23); (3) ‘Eat foods made from ingredients that you can picture in their raw state or growing in nature’ (31); (4) ‘Don’t ingest foods made in places where everyone is required to wear a surgical cap’ (39); and (5) ‘It’s not food if it arrived through the window of your car’ (43).³²

While these rules reflect the mainstream Western mindsets, they reveal a normative and hegemonic understanding of food and health which is marginalizing to a number of groups outside of the white and Western privilege. The romanticization of the food that is “authentic” lies in the vagueness of the definition of the term but also ignores the economic and political situation of many groups of people. Furthermore, such narratives ignore the disparities between the white and BIPOC neighborhood and their accessibility to supermarkets and fresh markets, but also ostracizes the people whose disabilities might limit their ability to prepare their food themselves and who greatly rely on fast food chain restaurants and frozen and pre-made dishes bought in local supermarkets. Since Hall’s intersectional critique concentrates first on people with disabilities, she further points out how the definition of “healthy food” relies on its consequence on one’s health and weight perpetuating the fatphobic perception of the almost malnourished body as the normative beauty ideal. In other words, “these sources advise us to avoid fast food because it disables eaters, workers, nonhuman animals, communities, and secure food systems.”³³ Finally, Hall points out how the abovementioned arguments reinforce the stereotypical perception of woman’s occupation and responsibility, revealing that the nostalgia for the past food in reality hides the fondness of the stereotypical patriarchal gender roles. The abundance of options from food that can be ordered, purchased in the pre-made state, to technological improvements that facilitate and speed up the process of cooking has benefited women. Finally, Hall criticized the second rule proposed by Pollan explaining that it:

 Pollan’s work, including the popular The Omnivore’s Dillema (2006) and the articles published by The New York Times, have been consequently criticized by feminist scholars for placing the blame for the degradation of the state of contemporary eating habits on women.  Kim Q. Hall, “Toward a Queer Crip Feminist Politics of Food,” PhiloSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism 4, no. 2 (2014): 177.  Hall, “Toward…,” 177.

The Body That Eats…

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is based on an assumption that appearing to be something that one is not is always suspect and potentially dangerous, an assumption about food echoed in statements that purport to ‘justify’ violent attacks against transgender people. The metaphysics of purity informing Pollan’s second rule assumes there are clear and stable boundaries that distinguish between what is and isn’t food, what is and isn’t edible. This is similar to the assumption that there are clear and stable boundaries between genders that must be legible to others at all times.³⁴

The Body That Eats… As Hall’s writing clearly shows, it is difficult to write about food without the mention of the body. This is exactly this shift from food to eating that characterizes the change occurring in food studies in the last quarter of the twentieth century, a move which for Tompkins “weds food studies to body theory.”³⁵ The food is not only crucial to the formation of the identities by tying in to the spatiality and patterns of eating, for example through the repetitiveness of the meals commonly eaten with one’s family, but through the way it brings the attention to and emphasizes one’s body. Elspeth Probyn encourages her readers to think about “what bodies are and do when they eat… In eating, the diverse nature of where and how different parts of our selves attach to different aspects of the social comes to the fore and becomes the stuff of reflection.”³⁶ It seems difficult to separate food, or, more specifically, the act of eating from the physicality of the body, but the focus on the physical and physiological processes required for the food to be chewed, swallowed and digested facilitates the ventures into another dimension of analysis. It is difficult to discuss food and eating in isolation from the body that eats, as food enters the body through a mouth, is savored by the tongue, is swallowed and travels through the throat to the stomach which digests it and breaks into elements, to finally be disposed and rejected in the form of excrements. In its different stages, the food can be a source of immense pleasure and shame, both of which tend to coexist. As Lisa Piatti-Farnell admits in the study of intersections between food and horror in film, “there is a certain unavoidable Otherness about the very process of eating. (…) While eating is commonplace, and foods can be either known or unknown, there is a layer of unfamiliarity that is intrinsic to consumption: when food is outside of our bodies, it is inevitably ‘not us’, it is something that—conceptually

 Hall, “Toward…,” 180.  Tompkins, Racial Indigestion, 2.  Probyn, Carnal Appetites, 14– 15.

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Introduction: Feminist Food Studies

and physically—does not belong to us.”³⁷ This fascinating property of food to transform itself but also the bodies that consume it result in the wide range of psycho-social reactions from positive (e. g., excitement, thrill, desire) to negative (e. g., abject, disgust, fear). The concept of abjection, introduced in the 1980s Powers of Horror by Julia Kristeva, Bulgarian-French philosopher and psychoanalyst, is commonly used to describe the feelings of anxiety and fear in contact with substances that commonly cause the reaction of disgust, primarily connected with the fluids and waste produced by the body as well as rotten and decaying food. The theory of abject is often applied in the research on the ways horror genres utilize food, but it also often informs the studies on the approaches and representation of non-normative bodies, especially in the context of eating disorders. The abject blurs the lines between body and the other, forcing one to consider the ideas of excess and scarcity in how they transgress the boundaries, posing questions about the very definitions of bodies (where does a body end and begin? What is “me” and what is the “other”?) and normativity (what and why is considered normative?). For Kristeva, abjection is a process which forms in childhood but can be experienced in adulthood in the response to the substances which are perceived as a threat to one’s very identity. The natural processes related to food are often considered taboo and if not ignored, they threaten to draw attention to the materiality of one’s body—something that goes against social and cultural conditioning. These food anxieties manifest in Western cultures as “a moral panic about excessive desire (particularly in women), about a refusal to regulate one’s needs and impulses.”³⁸ The obsession with excessive desire, as presumably represented through excessive appetites and fatness, can be additionally tied to the theory of abjection. The bodies that do not conform to the normative expectations of thinness threaten the idea of the “clean and proper body,”³⁹ a concept used by Kristeva after Mary Douglas, who discussed the idea of food-related taboos especially in the context of religious dietary restrictions. Once again, food finds itself entangled with the sexual politics of power when it is used to symbolize, control, and oppress the feminine-coded bodies. The eating bodies are constantly monitored, scrutinized, and judged and how and what they consume becomes a reason to marginalize or oppress them, to  Lorna Piatti-Farnell, Consuming Gothic: Food and Horror in Film (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 4.  Samantha Murray, The “Fat” Female Body (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 57.  Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 76.

… and the Body that is Eaten

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shove them under the label of “otherness” when they do not conform to the masculine, white, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied, and young ideal.

… and the Body that is Eaten In the previous section, I discussed the ways in which body as the active agent in the process of consumption can be a source of anxieties. Now, I want to turn to the ways in which these anxieties feed the patriarchal and hegemonic power relations, positioning some bodies as passive objects. Elspeth Probyn, American gender studies scholar known, among others, for her influential work on the intersections between food, sex, and identity (e. g., 1999 articles “Beyond Food/Sex: Eating and an Ethics of Existence” and “An Ethos with a Bite: Queer Appetites from Sex to Food,” as well as the 2000 book Carnal Appetites: Foodsexidentities), 20 years ago asked provocatively whether “food is now replacing sex as the ground of identities, be they gendered, national, postcolonial, collective or individual?”⁴⁰ Both food preparation and consumption are both sensual and sexual activities. In her work, Probyn examines ways in which food shapes one’s identity and, consequently, allows to perform one’s sexuality. By bringing the focus back to the body, she shows that food, rather than a tool of oppression and source of anxieties, can be empowering or intimately pleasurable. The former can manifest through the choice of vegan or vegetarian diets some identify as a powerful tool of resistance. The latter, for Probyn, manifests in the deeply personal and intimate nature of both food and sex: “The simple point is that the hands-on encounter with food connects us with surfaces, textures, tastes, smells, insides, and outsides.”⁴¹ These intersections, once again, migrate and dominate the erotic language. The intersections between food and sex are omnipresent and the experiences of either are indistinguishable from each other. Probyn, however, also recognizes that eating can become an act or rebellion as “eating and sex provide the opportunity to go beyond a model whereby the body is an inert entity that passively accepts what goes into it.”⁴² While Probyn explores the positive and exciting aspects of food-body relation, Carol J. Adams investigates the ways patriarchal power relations manifest through food-related language directed at specifically women’s bodies. Adams  Elspeth Probyn, “Beyond Food/Sex. Eating and an Ethics of Existence,” Theory, Culture & Society 16, no. 2 (1999): 220.  Probyn, Carnal Appetites, 60.  Probyn, Carnal Appetites, 72.

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Introduction: Feminist Food Studies

is a prominent American feminist, writer, and activist, known for her analysis of racial, sexual, and colonial politics of meat. In two influential books, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (1990) and The Pornography of Meat (2004), Adams draws parallels between meat eating and the notions of masculinity in the Western world. The stereotypical association of meat consumption with tough, hegemonic masculinities results in coding vegetarian and vegan diets as feminine, allowing for the emergence of veg(etari)anism understood as a tool of resistance. Furthermore, she explains that in the masculinized discourses of meat, animals “are made absent through language that renames dead bodies before consumers participate in eating them,”⁴³ deeming animals the “absent referent.” Furthermore, through the metaphorical, domineering language, this oppression relates not only to animals, but also to women who in popular culture and advertisements are often coded as products that are attainable and consumable. Adams unpacks the objectification, or “thingification,”⁴⁴ of women and animals, noticing the way they tend to be gendered, fragmented, and fetishized. The examples of this are present in Western cultures from the explicit imagery that sexualizes meat and objectifies women as “sexy pieces of meat” to the way women are referred to in different languages as “chicks” or “bitches.” For Adams, the metaphorical consumption of the female body and the literal eating of the animal meat are ethically equal and both represent patriarchal values and serve to strengthen male power. Additionally, the shift from the body that eats to the one that is being eaten reflects the consumer and capitalist structures: Before someone can be consumed or used, she has to be seen as consumable, as usable, as a something instead of a someone. This process of viewing another as consumable—as something—is usually invisible to us. Its invisibility occurs because it corresponds to the view of the dominant culture. The process is also invisible because the end product of the process—the object of consumption—is available everywhere.⁴⁵

Objectification is necessary for the oppressor to distance themselves from the oppressed, and fragmentation ensures further loss of identity of the latter. Where Probyn recognizes how similar senses participate in the enjoyment of pleasures derived from both food and sexual activities (“If oral sex isn’t sex, is it eating? Conversely, when is eating sex?”⁴⁶), Adams reveals the ways in which this correlation is politicized and how it serves the patriarchal discourses. The Western    

Carol J. Adams, “Why Feminist-Vegan Now?” Feminism & Psychology 20, no. 3 (2010): 304. Carol J. Adams, The Pornography of Meat (New York and London: Continuum, 2003), 38. Adams, The Pornography of Meat, 14. Probyn, Carnal Appetites, 61.

Concluding Remarks: Digital Food Activism

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fear of the subversion of the hunter-prey dynamics manifests in slaughterhouse horror narratives which depict the protagonists falling victim to the carnivorous monsters. Despite the popularity of these narratives in Western fiction, it is the Black body that has long been positioned as edible. While studying the representation of the Black consumable body in antebellum novels, Tompkins explains that the trope “finds its roots in the violent intimacies of the slave economy and continues to be expressed today in a variety of visual and literary representations of blackbodies, including Little Black Sambo, Aunt Jemima, and Uncle Ben.”⁴⁷ This “discursive eating of the black body”⁴⁸ manifests in the use of food metaphors to describe the color and appearance of Black people. This assertion of power through objectifying language is particularly visible in the erotic context where Blackness is often fetishized as the exotic and, thus, exciting otherness. As Erica Owens and Bronwyn Beistle, who were analyzing the descriptors used in the personal advertisements for white people seeking Black sexual partners, argue sexual desire for the black other implies the threat of losing whiteness by having a nonwhite child. The perceived social danger of sexual contact with a racial ‘other’ is implicit in the ‘one drop rule,’ which declares ‘black’ any person with one drop of ‘black blood’ regardless of appearance (…) Such fear of ‘darkening’ propels an ever-more urgent desire on the part of some whites to assimilate the threatening black body, to incorporate and render it harmless or inert.⁴⁹

Depending on the used metaphors, they diminish the “white fear” either by feminizing and diminishing Others through the comparison with such foods as chocolate, caramel, brown sugar, coffee, or olive.

Concluding Remarks: Digital Food Activism As has been repeatedly mentioned, the critical food studies developed and remain in close proximity to the activistic feminist movements. In the introduction to Food Activism: Agency, Democracy and Economy, Carole Counihan and Valeria Siniscalchi define food activism as “efforts by people to change the food system across the globe by modifying how they produce, distribute, and/or consume  Tompkins, Racial Indegestion, 90.  Erica Owens and Bronwyn Beistle, “Eating the Black Body: Interracial Desire, Food Metaphor and White Fear,” in Body/Embodiment: Symbolic Interaction and the Sociology of the Body, ed. Phillip Vannini (Farnham: Ashgate, 2016), 201.  Owens and Beistle, “Eating Black Body,” 204.

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Introduction: Feminist Food Studies

food”⁵⁰ through “people’s discourses and actions to make the food system or parts of it more democratic, sustainable, healthy, ethical, culturally appropriate, and better in quality.”⁵¹ Arguably, it is impossible to separate food studies as an academic discipline from food activism in the same way activism is an inherent part of gender studies, queer studies, Black studies, or other intersectional or feminist fields that arose around the marginalized identities or pressing social issues. Finally, food studies are not far behind other forms of activism, understanding how easily food discourses occupied the digital spaces. In their recent book titled Digital Food Activism, Tanja Schneider, Karin Eli, Catherine Dolan, and Stanley Ulijaszek engage in the discussion on food activism through social media and other digital platforms, pointing out how prevalent digital food activism is despite the relatively lack of academic coverage—a phenomena mirrored in media studies which until now paid relatively little attention to the intersections between food and digital games. The activist side of food studies strives to centralize labor and teach communities necessary skills to grow and distribute food to empower the local and regional, while on the other side the efforts aim to restructure the debate, ensuring that the previously and commonly marginalized voices reclaim control over the discourse. Feminists explore ways in which food establishes Otherness, embedding the discussions about food in the context of its influence on the body. As Alice Julier emphasizes in the first chapter to Feminist Food Studies, “if an activist food studies is a possibility, then an intersectional feminist food studies is a necessity.”⁵²

Few Words about the Structure of the Book Undoubtedly there is a difference between the body of work conducted on food within digital game studies and within other media, such as literature or film. At the same time, those game scholars who are interested in food show understanding of critical and feminist roots of food studies, placing themselves in these parts of video game scholarship that are the most intersectional. Although I firm-

 Carole Counihan and Valeria Siniscalchi, eds., “Introduction” in Food Activism: Agency, Democracy and Economy, ed. Carole Counihan and Valeria Siniscalchi (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 3.  Carole Counihan and Valeria Siniscalchi, “Introduction,” 6.  Alice Julier, Critiquing Hegemony, Creating Food, Crafting Justice: Cultivating an Activist Feminist Food Studies, 14.

Few Words about the Structure of the Book

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ly believe that critical food studies could benefit greatly from expanding their interest into games (and, of course, not just the digital ones), the goal of this book is to introduce critical food studies to game studies. There is a lot that can be said about food in video games, because there are just so many various titles that play with food and all the meanings that it brings into human interactions, but as I found myself drawn to two main topics or questions, they remain the main focus of the book. On the one hand, I discuss the ways in which food is utilized to emphasize the positive qualities of the gameworld such as its safety, softness, and accessibility. On the other, I draw the reader’s attention to the ways food can become a crucial part of one’s identity and how game developers can use food, from foodstuffs to emotionally-charged and socially or culturally significant dishes, to create a bond between the player and the character. In terms of its structure, the book is divided into two uneven sections. The first asks how does one play with food in video games. The chapters within it investigate the ways that food is operationalized within games’ gameplay and how its role changes depending on the game genre. Because, as I already noted and will keep on emphasizing, regardless of whether food is there to be found, cooed, consumed, or picked up and thrown at an enemy, food is rarely just food, and it is always entangled within the various axes of power and meaning. And thus, the chapters collected in that section investigate this meaning but with the focus on what ludic functions the food has and how its choice, form, and shape influence the experience of play. The second and the longer of the two sections shows how food is used in the creation of cozy gameworlds. Here, I assume the understanding in which coziness can be created within games through the abundance of resources, the feelings of safety within the world and gameplay alike, and through the soft, beautiful, colorful, and vibrant visuals. I discuss the ways food’s abundance creates safe environments and allows for the intimacy between the characters or between them and the player.

Part 1: Ludic Food and Food Game Genres

Chapter 1 Playing with Ludic Food It has been almost two weeks. In few minutes the sun will set and the monsters will attack and kill me if I am not close to my campfire, protected by its warm flame. I am quite stressed and my stomach is grumbling: if I do not find food, I will starve before the morning. I have already stripped the nearby forest from berries and picked all the carrots, so my best hope is to hunt for rabbits and set traps for birds for which I have about enough seeds. The above describes one of my several, similar early-game experiences of an independent survival game Don’t Starve (Klei Entertainment 2013).⁵³ Despite the title, starvation is not the only threat in the world of the game but food still plays a crucial role in it. The game’s robust and detailed crafting system is unique due to its careful consideration of how different items of food affect each of three main in-game statistics: hunger (represented by an icon of a stomach), health (represented by heart), and sanity (represented as a brain). Although in subsequent playthroughs the game offers a choice of one of several characters, the first story follows Wilson, a nineteenth century scientist, who finds himself trapped in the vast wilderness with nothing on him but his clothes. He is then visited by Maxwell, a dark wizard reigning over the land and the game’s main antagonist, who taunts him, before disappearing in a cloud of smoke: “Say pal, you don’t look so good. You’d better find something to eat before night comes!”⁵⁴ Left to his own devices, Wilson quickly learns that the world, called the Constant, is an unfriendly and dangerous place where without fire nights can prove deadly. Food in Don’t Starve can either be found (e. g., carrots, berries, mushrooms) or hunted with beginner-level tools (e. g., rabbit Morsel or Monster Meat), and almost all can be cooked on a campfire or in a crock pot—the process which increases their nutritional value and even grants additional benefits. After the Reign of Giants DLC, certain foods acquired the ability to prevent overheating (cold foods) or freezing (hot foods). Finally, while all items classified as food can be edible even if the consumption is not always advisable, several can have other uses: as bait, as offerings, as food for captured egg-laying birds, or as materials used in crafting.  The series currently includes four downloadable content expansions: Don’t Starve: Reign of Giants (2014), a multiplayer DLC Don’t Starve Together (2014), Don’t Starve: Shipwrecked (2015), and Don’t Starve: Hamlet (2018), which added new characters, items, and recipes.  Klei Entertainment, Don’t Starve (505 Games, 2013). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110716603-003

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Chapter 1: Playing with Ludic Food

From edibles to food as resource, from raw to cooked and rotten, from lowcalorie vegetables to nutritious meat, Don’t Starve engages in food discourses by acknowledging the complexities of food. Throughout this book, I scrutinize ways in which digital games use food and the broadly understood process of its preparation as devices of creating in the emotional engagement in the players and structuring moments of intimacy between them and the characters. Thus, I find it beneficial for the clarity of the arguments presented through these chapters to begin by discussing the various ways in which food can be operationalized in games as a ludic component. While such a structuralist approach to game studies is not necessarily favored by many feminist and queer game scholars, I find it a crucial step of analysis when discussing food as a worldbuilding device, especially considering how firmly it tends to be embedded in the gameplay, rather than just the story (with the two, obviously, quite closely intertwined). My argument, over and over again, is that food can be used to construct the unthreatening, welcoming, and safe world and show relatable, meaningful relationships between the characters and the characters and the players. While Don’t Starve aims to do the opposite, it still ties food to safety: it is at the campfire, where the food can be cooked, where the characters can rest for a moment, and experience the few moments of much needed relief. Food adds to tension when it is lacking, but nothing in the game brings as much comfort as seeing and, more importantly, having it in one’s inventory. Thus, it shows the importance of food gathering and food preparation as the player’s gateways into the game world, the means of investing and engaging them into it. Some of games do not feature cooking but rather showcase the characters’ relationship with eating. However, in the majority of the cases, the player is invited to participate in various stages of food preparation. Because of this, I believe it to be beneficial to discuss in more detail the definition of “food preparation” and “cooking.” As the next chapter will discuss in more detail, despite the common use of the term “cooking games” to describe a genre of food and cooking-focused games, cooking in digital games is not a homogenous activity. From time-management games in which cooking is happening mostly off-screen as the gameplay relies on serving the dishes to the customers to cooking conceptualized through a series of mini-games, in-game cooking can take seconds to even hours. Another difference between various types is its focus on different parts of the process, pointing towards an understanding of food preparation as a complex activity comprised of several stages. Based on this, I believe that video game food preparation can be divided into three main components: gathering of the ingredients, cooking, and presentation. I return to the aesthetic of presentation in the later chapters, while first focusing on the ingredients and cooking in the context of which I discuss how

Conceptualizing Ludic Food

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they are structured in the gameplay of various genres and their meaning-making role for the given story. I begin by scrutinizing the relationship between ingredients and recipes, acknowledging that double understanding of the latter as the dominant ruleset and also a vital ingredient that has to be discovered and unlocked in order to access a specific dish. I identify the games that focus on the early stages of preparations as those which rely the most on exploration and which offer freedom in crafting and constructing the surrounding. Secondly, I point towards the ways games operationalize cooking itself as a series of minigames that are distinctively different from the game title. Additionally, I show that such an approach to cooking often is used to emphasize the social function of food and has a potential of creating intimacy between the characters and the players.

Conceptualizing Ludic Food Despite the fact that the meaning of food has not been yet explored in video game context to the same degree as other media, that is not to say that game scholars have not recognized its significance. One of the earliest analyses of video game food comes from Astrid Ensslin. In her article, she uses Jürgen Habermas’ dialectic of the private and public spheres to discuss the gendered character of the food representation in different game genres, namely what she calls “family (or society) simulations”⁵⁵ and first-person shooters. Subsequently, she lists five ways in which the digital food interacts with the human player and is manifested in the digital gameworld. Acknowledging the scale of this human-game relationship, she identifies these ways as manifestations of a larger “cyborgian foodways.” She begins by remarking that not all games feature food at all, providing the example of many racing and sports games,⁵⁶ and those in which food is present as a part of the gameworld. Secondly, Ensslin proposes a division between “concrete (e. g., food, drink and medicine) and abstract (energy, health and stamina) energy supplies, where the former can often be seen in adventures and simulations, and the latter in FPSs, and where there exist various combinations of the two.”⁵⁷ Thirdly, she mentions the spectrum between “organic (genetically unmodified and unprocessed foods)

 Astrid Ensslin, “Do Avatars Dream of Electric Steak? Video Games and the Gendered Semiotics of Food,” Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds 3, no. 1 (2011): 38.  The research about the presence of product-placement foods.  Astrid Ensslin, “Do Avatars Dream…”, 43.

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and synthetic (genetically modified and processed foods, medicines, drugs and magic potions).”⁵⁸ The fourth category describes food according to its complexity: in such a case, one can ask whether food presented in the specific title is a complex, multi-ingredient dish or simple foodstuffs. The fifth and last division brings forth a concept of a “culinary triangle” as introduced by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in 1966 based on his observations about the cultural impact of food stemmed from the research conducted on the behaviors of the tribal societies of North and South America in the mid-twentieth century. The three vertices of the triangle are delimited by three forms each food can take: raw, which is the purest in the sense that it is unmarked by humans; cooked, which is a product of a cultural process; and rotten, as a product of natural decomposition. The triangle is complimented by the three main types of food preparation: boiling, roasting, and smoking. Unsurprisingly, for Lévi-Strauss it is the latter that is of higher value due to his perception of nature as representing the process of regression as opposed to the sophisticated (cultured) methods of food preparations that add value to food. Another typology of food functionality has been compiled by Tom Tyler in his chapter titled “Meaning of Meat in Videogames.” There, the author recognizes how the multiple layers of sociocultural meaning of meat are reflected in video games, identifying its four main functions: restorative, sustenance, enhancement, and resource. In the following section I discuss each of these categories in the context of more broadly understood ludic video game food. First, food can be presented as a restorative, meaning that its primary function is to restore character’s health points, especially in the genres that represent health as a separate statistic visualized as a numeric value (through “health points” or “hit points”) or with a visual representation such as hearts. Such use is, for example, common in many action games in which the collected food restores points of health, usually measured in points or percentages and visualized as a bar (often of green or blue color). In these cases, health can be restored through consumption of various foods which are either found or crafted (e. g., by cooking), and often coexist with other restoratives such as potions or medical kits, including bandages, pills, or vaccinations—interestingly, both of these alternatives tend to be more effective than food, a pattern I will explore further in the chapter.

 Astrid Ensslin, “Do Avatars Dream…,” 43.

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Secondly, food becomes sustenance when its consumption can “simply stave off hunger”⁵⁹ envisioned as a statistic separate from health. In the case of the previously mentioned Don’t Starve, food can be considered both restorative and sustenance. On the one hand, it is a restorative because it can occasionally restore health (or sanity) points. On the other hand, its most important function is to wave off hunger, represented as a separate icon twisting, withering stomach [Figure 1] signifying the increasingly painful, and more importantly, physical sensation associated with the feelings of hunger. Alternatively, the life simulation franchise The Sims (Maxis 2000 – 2020) incorporates hunger as one of several different metrics measuring the capacity of Sims’ bladder, energy, fun, social needs, and general hygiene. Where, similarly to both Don’t Starve, hunger can result in death, in The Sims it additionally influences one’s mood and performance at school or work—this is an interesting addition as it connects the physical sensation and its social consequences.

Figure 1: The visual representation of hunger through the imager of the crunching, decreasing in size stomach.

Despite the relative commonness of ludic hunger, it is a rather rare subject of digital games narratives, very few of which explore the global threat of famine and the individual trauma of starvation. In the aforementioned survival games, hunger is reduced to the role of a timer, informing the players about time that has passed since the last in-game meal. If its main purpose is then to add sense of urgency to the world, hunger is coded as an oppressive force and, indirectly, one of game’s antagonists. Such understanding is problematic for several reasons. First, by presenting hunger as a disembodied experience that is unrelated to the experience of one’s body it is constructed as a nuisance, a tedious and aggravating requirement that needs to be met rather than feedback from one’s body about the need to be fed. Secondly, considering that survival games  Tom Tyler, “Meanings of Meat in Videogames,” in Literature and Meat Since 1900, ed. Seán McCorry and John Miller (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2019), 234.

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often feature and promote tough masculinities through narratives surrounding soldiers and fighters, they present food and eating as necessary, but not derived from any possible pleasure. One eats to survive, and food is required to be nutritious rather than delicious. This utilitarian and pragmatic approach to food seems to dominate in survival and early action adventure games. The third type of food function, enhancement, encompasses a variety of power-ups, that is items that temporarily increase maximum values for health, enhance possessed abilities or grant new ones. Among the most recognizable examples of food-as-enhancement one can find collectible Mushrooms in Super Mario Bros series (Nintendo 1985–) or fruit Power Pellets which grant temporal immunity from the enemy ghosts in Pac-Man (Namco1980). Enhancements can also be crafted rather than found, as it is in the open-world adventure game The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Nintendo 2017) known for its elaborate cooking mini-games that allow the player to experiment freely with various ingredients in order to discover new recipes. There, the qualities of the specific dish depend on the recipe—for example these prepared with Spicy Pepper acquire a “spicy” effect that offers resistance to cold. Thus, while on their own peppers are restoratives which refill half of Link’s Heart Container, dishes made with their help such as Spicy Sautéed Peppers or Spicy pepper Steak have, apart from restorative qualities, additional characteristics of an enhancement, proving these two categories are not mutually exclusive and can coexist. I come back to Breath of the Wild in the fourth chapter. The last category in Tyler’s typology describes food as a resource, in which food “provides not just a temporary enhancement, but permanent improvements and upgrades.”⁶⁰ Using the example of Age of Empires series (Ensemble Studios, 1997– 2021), in which food is used as a type of currency exchanged into citizens and soldiers, he describes situations in which food still is still possibly meant to be consumed, even if not by the protagonist or the player’s avatar, but through the purchased troops. However, I argue that this category should be broadened to encompass other uses of food-as-resource in which food maintains its perishable, and thus, temporary, functionality. Thus, it no longer needs to be “consumed” for it to be efficient, where instead it is utilized as tools, building material, ammunition, and other. Hence, two subcategories of food-as-resource can be distinguished: 1) where food still is considered edible, but is consumed only by in-game animals/creatures of human NPCs perceived as a group; 2) where food is not considered edible and is not consumed.

 Tom Tyler, “Meanings of Meat,” 236.

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As mentioned earlier, Don’t Starve offers several examples of food as resource falling under both of these subcategories. The first type seems to include more examples as it features previously mentioned uses of seed and fruit as bait (food is still consumed by birds and hares) as well as meat gifts and sacrifices offered to humanoid Pigs and Pig King in order to recruit them (consumed by the Pigs). However, food can be also incorporated in the production of objects such as Pan’s Flute, a magic item, or a Ham Bat, which, like the name suggests, is a melee weapon. Putting aside the examples that seem to be included in a game purely for the sake of the visual gag or which are consistent with the game’s food or plant theme (e. g., in games from the Plants vs Zombies series of tower defense games, the first of which was developed by PopCap Games in 2009), the difference between the two proposed types problematizes the concept of “edible” food. In their paper aptly titled “When it Stops Being Food”, Bodil Stilling Blichfeldt, Marie Mikkelsen, and Malene Gram pointed out that “the question of how edible food is ideologically and culturally transformed into inedible waste nevertheless remains largely unanswered.”⁶¹ Furthermore, “food-waste practices may thus be internalized as habits that help consumers determine whether or not something is edible; in other words, when food is food and when is it trash/excess/garbage/non-food. Therefore, in-home transformations of edible food to waste might be deeply grounded in cultural and ideological food ways and practices.”⁶² Although not all food is edible in video games and which types are considered edible varies between games, games like Don’t Starve show appreciation for food rather than mindless wastefulness: all food that can be found is considered edible, if not always healthy. Furthermore, the way it can be repurposed in several different ways from eating raw to being used as an ingredient of a more complex and, thus, more nourishing dish, to the possibility of reusing it to gain advantage or even to be gifted, thus realizing food’s social functions, shows deep appreciation and the reflection of food sustainability.⁶³

 Bodil Stilling Blichfeldt, Marie Mikkelsen, and Malene Gram, “When It Stops Being Food,” Food, Culture & Society 18, no. 1 (2015): 90.  Blichfeldt et al. “When It Stops Being Food,” 91.  Luke van Ryn, “‘It Takes Food to Make Food’: Survival and Sustainability in Don’t Starve,” in Proceedings of DiGRA Australia (2020), 1.

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Ingredients, Crafting, and the Concept of Playbour The process of gathering ingredients for the dishes, although seemingly belonging to a different category of tasks, in many games is both the most important part of cooking and the one that takes the longest time. In this situation, the significance of the ingredients vastly surpassed that of the completed dish—a relation emphasized by the fact that often the dishes quickly disappear from the screen after being contrasted with the longer periods of time during which the ingredients are featured. Ingredients can be obtained in a variety of ways. In Don’t Starve, for example, picking up berries from the bushes and plucking carrots from the ground requires only one click of the mouse. It is, however, difficult to judge the length of these activities in such way: for instance, the immediate action can be prolonged when it becomes combined with the longer search and exploration of the unknown areas, extending the period between the beginning of the search and the collection of the item. What is more, other ingredients are more difficult to find. The action of obtaining rabbit meat is comprised of several actions, although it is also one of the easier ingredients to collect and can be considered an early-game task. Although it is not a complex action, it is composite of few others: here, the player needs to locate a rabbit and then either ambush it and kill with an axe or trap under a basket. This means that before either of these can happen, they need to craft a weapon or an item —either requiring the previous collection of other non-edible ingredients or creating several stages of gathering and crafting. This is significant because in order not to starve, the player has to constantly monitor their inventory not just for food but for other ingredients, weapons, or traps that will allow them to collect more food items. Cooking itself is also part of the mechanic, but once the ingredients are collected, the cooking can be done rather quickly by inserting them into a crockpot or the fire. The type of food that is made depends on the unlocked recipes, which means that as the players progress through the game, they can make dishes that are more complicated and thus more effective in terms of hunger sustenance and health restoration. The focus on gathering the ingredients in an unforgiving survival game is not surprising. Forcing the player to monitor their character’s life, health, and sanity statistics, it creates a constant pressure to find and gather enough resources before they drop to zero or before the night falls (during which moving in the darkness away from the fire can be lethal). At the same time, collecting ingredients becomes an incentive to explore the world and to never stay too long in one place—although with the progression, it becomes possible to build a sturdier campsite and even grow one’s own food, the game requires flexibility and the

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constant exploration and discovery of new parts of the map. Thus, it is not surprising that the other genres in which the primary way of interacting with food is through collecting or growing are those with open or at least complex worlds designed for exploration like role-playing games or slower, more cozy life simulators. A somewhat different strategy can be seen in the farming simulator games which, unlike the previously mentioned exploration-based games, lock the play area to one farm. Games like FarmVille (Zynga 2012) or Stardew Valley (ConcernedApe 2016) have not only influenced the independent game industry and the genres of games referred to sometimes as small, slow, wholesome, or cozy, but also because they represent the way of conceptualizing in-game cooking int terms of crafting. As it is showed later, this has its own nontrivial consequence, namely that of pushing food preparation process from a creative, fairly little restricted activity to one that is defined by strict rules and the behaviors associated with labor. Craft and crafting seem to be yet another of those terms that prove to be difficult to define. However, in the context of digital games one can describe it as “the thoughtful manipulation of materials by the player to create something else within the context of the game.”⁶⁴ In their article, Anne Sullivan, Mel Stanfill, and Anastasia Salter also point out the that “real world crafting practitioners value creativity, expression, and mastery of material, but the act of crafting itself is often viewed by society as reproductive, feminized labor and therefore devalued. Because of this, crafting systems in games have been designed to more closely resemble masculinized, productive labor in the form of repetitive, manufacturing-like mechanics.”⁶⁵ This difference results in what often is a simplification of the crafting process to encompass solely a time bar or animation cycle, thus divorcing a craft from the specific materials (or, for example, foodstuffs) that are used in the process. They argue that these changes reveal the ways of (de)valuing gendered labor in the video game context. Finally, they notice that “[g]iven the devalued status of craft, it is perhaps unsurprising that crafting systems in games (an often-masculinized domain) minimize the reproductive labor aspects of crafting, instead representing it as productive labor tied to manufacture. The labor of craft-centered play is repetitive and often time-sensitive, the

 April Grow et al., “Crafting in Games,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 11, no. 4 (2017).  Anne Sullivan, Mel Stanfill, and Anastasia Salter, “Crafting Is So Hardcore: Masculinized Making in Gaming Representations of Labor,” in International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2020), 1.

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kind of gameplay sometimes referred to, with derision or enthusiasm, as ‘grinding.’”⁶⁶ This issue very closely relates to the concept of “playbour,”⁶⁷ originally evoked especially in the context of farming simulator games. Farming simulators are games that embraced the repetitiveness of easy tasks and offered the experiences based not just on mundane, everyday tasks but those that would otherwise be considered in terms of labor. The paradox of playful labor that is performed in these games by players is sometimes referred to as “playbour”, which is “a term invented to describe forms of labor carried out in or around computer games and popular culture more generally.”⁶⁸ What is often problematized in these games that rely on simulation of the activities that are usually connected with labor is that they require players to engage in repetitive, mundane, and often simply tedious tasks, which can be not only interesting but enjoyable for the players. Although currently this reflection is no longer surprising, as the researchers and developers have embraced the potential of the games to “annoy, anger, disappoint, sadden, and hurt,”⁶⁹ at the beginning it was considered somewhat controversial because of standing against what Roger Caillois considered to be the defining characteristic of play. In his often cited comment, he emphasized that play—and thus digital games—cannot be productive and is “an occasion of pure waste: waste of time, energy, ingenuity, skill, and often of money … play must be defined as a free and voluntary activity, a source of joy and amusement; a game which one would be forced to play would at once cease being play.”⁷⁰ In order to explore the relationship between playbour, food, and more generally understood play, I want to take a closer look at a farming simulator, FarmVille. Due to their immense popularity FarmVille and its 2012 sequel FarmVille 2 ⁷¹ captured the attention of journalists, media, and game scholars alike. After its

 Anne Sullivan, Mel Stanfill, and Anastasia Salter, “Crafting Is So Hardcore,” 3.  I treat “playbour” as an already recognized term in game studies, and for this reason throughout the book I use in its original form adhering to the British English spelling despite the use of American English norms in the rest of the book. This can lead to strange situations in which the word “playbour” (British English spelling) appears in the same sentence with the word “labor” (American English spelling).  Joyce Goggin, “Playbour, Farming, and Leisure,” Ephemera. Theory & Politics in Organization 11, no. 4 (2011): 357.  Bonnie Ruberg, “No Fun: The Queer Potential of Video Games That Annoy, Anger, Disappoint, Sadden, and Hurt,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 2, no. 2 (2015): 108 – 24.  Roger Caillois, Man, Play, and Games (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 5 – 6.  In 2019 Zynga released FarmVille 3—Animals for Android and IOS. Due to its initial release this was only in Philippines and Thailand.

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launch on Facebook, FarmVille became the site’s most played title for over two years, facilitating the development of many free-to-play and casual titles and, after 11 years, was shut down on December 31, 2020. By changing the public’s perception of the casual gaming market they were among the first games that allowed for the gradual blurring of the lines between, and then to a large degree rejecting, the dichotomy between “hardcore” and “casual” playstyles. The game follows a character who, having inherited the farm from their grandparents, moves from the city to the rundown farm with a task of first restoring and then cultivating it. Their new responsibilities are many, from farming, planting, harvesting, taking care of animals that supply milk, eggs, and meat to crafting various more elaborate products and dishes to be sold on the market. The gameplay is structured in such a way that it can be played in short intervals between other activities, in a way that has become a trademark of casual and mobile games, many of which were heavily inspired by FarmVille’s success. Alenda Y. Chang offers an analysis of farming simulator games with the focus on FarmVille (Zynga 2009), framing them as pastorals, that is a type of escape narratives, often literary, set in the rural contexts which tend to romanticize countryside and country pleasures. As the genre was popular through the ages from Ancient Greece and Rome to the seventeenth century, it can still be found in contemporary fiction, currently becoming “a flabby descriptor connoting any kind of idyllic, temporally removed way of life, rural in nature and ostensibly full of simpler pleasures.”⁷² In this sense, despite the feature of technology and the “flows of industrial capitalism,”⁷³ games like FarmVille can be understood as pastorals due to their high idealization of country work. Moreover, the technology featured in these games “permits the displacement or erasure of labor, waste, and natural contingency. In FarmVille, work that typically takes entire seasons to come to fruition, that in the physical world is vulnerable to all sorts of natural reductions, is condensed into the easy work of a few minutes and hours.”⁷⁴ The labor, which in reality takes time and energy, in games takes less time and effort, realizing the romanticized visions of rural life featured in pastoral novels. In her book, Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games, Chang discusses the consequences of such simplifications in more detail: “[f]arm games offer bucolic paradises where the use of machinery and intensive agricultural methods never leads to environmental degradations, where animals may be harvested for their products without coming to noticeable harm, and  Alenda Y. Chang, “Back to the Virtual Farm: Gleaning the Agriculture-Management Game,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 19, no. 2 (2012): 238.  Alenda Y. Chang, “Back to the Virtual Farm.”  Alenda Y. Chang, “Back to the Virtual Farm,” 241.

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where key natural resources like clean water and nutrient-rich soil are always available and never subject to competition.”⁷⁵ This attitude towards nature and its products easily translates into the way food is conceptualized in these games. Through the game, the player gains experience points by completing various tasks from harvesting crops to crafting objects requested by NPCs and featured in missions and quests. The way food is created makes it undistinguishable from other types of crafting. This means that there is little ludic difference between crafting edible and inedible products: each crafting system follows a similar pattern, differing by the ingredients used for the process. Unlike many other similar titles, in FarmVille food is not consumed by the player character but is produced with the intention of being sold or given away. Importantly, neither of the two happens on-screen, but rather is equated with the completion of the mission or task, upon which the dishes and other crafted products disappear from one’s inventory and transform into in-game currency. Thus, food is not important for itself but is a means to an end. Deprived of its context, it becomes a purely decorative item: it is of no narrative reason for the specific foods to be included in the recipe list and not the others and the differences between them are purely ludic, depending on the number of ingredients used and time required for the making. Finally, the foods and other items are ontologically equated through the language used to describe them: the players collect materials rather than ingredients and produce craft items rather than dishes. As one of the most recognizable titles that introduced and popularized the farming simulator genre, FarmVille games present an interesting case study. The specific way in which they connect crafting with labor restructures greatly the understanding of this mechanic. At the same time, food in these games is accidental, in the sense that it is neither a primary focus and that it is not contextualized outside the gameworld. Food is collected and crafted into dishes, but it could have been as easily replaced by non-edible products. At the same time, one can notice some similarities between farming simulators and cooking games, especially of the time-management genre. As both focus on the production, they privilege efficiency, quantity over quality. Food, in a way, is derived of both its ludic and story-related function: it offers neither sustenance nor comfort. What is more, the critique offered by Chang regarding the romanticization of the process of production and the life on the farm, embodied as the fantasy of those whose livelihood does not depend on it, can be applied to the representation of

 Alenda Y. Chang, Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games (Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 2019), 172.

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food. The farms always offer lush, healthy, ready to be plucked trees and ready for harvest crops—granted one does not leave the game unattained for days, since abandoning the farm in real life was causing the passing of time. Thus, all of the nature and, by extension, food items and dishes produced from it, is taken for granted.

Cooking Mini-Games Some games feature both robust crafting and ingredient collecting mechanics as well as introducing the more complex cooking mechanics. By “robust” I mean here cooking which takes a substantial portion of play time and is possibly structured as a separate, independent mini-game. This last term, sometimes in literature equated with “nested game,” “game within game,” and others, refers to a discrete in-game structure that differentiates itself from the composite game (e. g., game title) by the use of different rules, mechanics or gameplay, point of view, perspective, or aesthetics. One of the first definitions of mini-games was coined by Amin Tavassolian, Kevin G. Stanley, Carl Gutwin, and Aryan Zohoorian who studied them as effective tools of balancing time in multiplayer games. For them “[m]inigames are simple activities contained within a larger game, and are common in commercial titles . . . [and are] generally short, selfcontained play experiences within a larger game framework, but with their own internal logic, game state, and mechanics.”⁷⁶ Mini-games can be used in all game genres to emphasize a particular action or sequences different from what can be considered “the main gameplay.” Although often they are associated with such skills as lockpicking, hacking, or even dancing and playing an instrument, they are also often utilized in the context of food. In fact, many games discussed in this book structure present cooking as mini-games, perhaps most notably Battle Chef Brigade (Trinket Studios 2017) discussed in the most detail in the sixth chapter in which mixing ingredients in the pot, stirring, and other actions one performs during cooking are replaced by the timed match-3 puzzle game. The other, and perhaps the most recognizable, example of the use of mini-games to signify cooking comes from the games in the Cooking Mama series, discussed in the most detail in the next chap-

 Amin Tavassolian et al., “Time Balancing with Adaptive Time-Variant Minigames,” in Entertainment Computing—ICEC 2011, ed. Junia Coutinho Anacleto et al. (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, 2011), 174.

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ter, in which the player performs various actions required in order to cook the specific dishes while instructed, corrected, and judged by the eponymous Mama. Let’s consider an example from one of the 2007 installment of the franchise, Cooking Mama Cook Off. The game demonstrates an extremely detailed approach to cooking which is separated into several singular, primary actions. For example, in order to prepare spaghetti in squid ink, one needs to complete nine different actions such as crack an egg, add ingredients (i. e., cake flour, semolina, egg, bread flour, and olive oil), knead, stretch the dough, cut the dough into pasta, stew, drain the pasta, prepare the squid, cut up into pieces, mince garlic, and stir fry. At the beginning of each action, the player is presented with a screen featuring a list of icons representing separate stages of preparation, each with a short description of how to perform specific actions with the Wii Remote. At the end of each of these activities—all of which take only few seconds—the players are scored based on the accuracy and speed. Cooking Mama is, however, a unique example, due to the fact that cooking fills its entire gameplay and it offers little to no additional story. For this reason, it places itself on the extreme end of the spectrum and, while being a very influential title without which one cannot discuss the evolution of cooking game genre, it remains its own category. Another result of its scarce story is the basic character of the relationship between Mama and the player and the player character. Apart from the praises or occasional bursts of anger, Mama is always a distant entity. This is not the case in a game from another large, transmedial, and multitext franchise, that is the Pokémon series. In particular, Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield are of interest here as examples of games balancing these various stages of preparation. Although cooking is by far not the main focus of the game, its three-stage structure resembles somewhat Cooking Mama’s attention to detail, while at the same time emphasizing the emotional significance of sharing food. Although such a type of cooking is rare in Pokémon games, food has been present in them since the 1999 releases as restorative and enhancement. The theme of the games means that it is not the protagonist of the game who consumes the food. Instead, they can find and purchase special items such as berries and candy which can then be fed to the Pokémon in order to heal them, temporarily enhance their skills, and even strengthen their bonds with their trainers. In 2019 double releases, Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield introduced a more complex system in which players can additionally cook curry dishes. The game offers at least one hundred and fifty different recipes which need to be discovered by the players through experiments. All the recipes are comprised of two types of ingredients: berries, which adjust flavor (spicy, dry, sweet, bitter, sour, or neutral), and special or key ingredients which modify the type of curry. For ex-

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ample, Fancy Apples are the required base ingredient for Apple Curries, while Pungent Root allows one to make Herb Medley Curry. While some of the key ingredients are singular food items (e. g., sausage, boiled egg, or pack of potatoes), others are multi-ingredients, processed foods (e. g., bread and instant noodles). However, these more complex foods have a different status than the curries prepared by the player, as they cannot be made but only obtained in their already ready state. Once in a possession of the ingredients, one can begin the mini-game, also comprised of few parts. After selection of the ingredients, the player is moved to the cooking screen which features a crock pot. There, all three stages of cooking take place: fanning the flames, stirring the food, and putting one’s metaphorical heart into food (“put your heart into it”). Just like in Cooking Mama, the player’s performance is scored. Depending on the precision and speed with which all three tasks were performed, the food can be given one of five ranks, influencing the efficiency and type of enhancement it provides to the Pokémon it is then fed to. For example, the perfectly prepared curry is given a golden rank and restores the entire health of a creature, its power points (which indicate how many times it can use a specific move in a battle), and grants additional experience points and increases the friendliness of the given Pokémon towards their trainer. However, due to the lack of precise feedback and transparent rulesets, it is difficult to recognize the quality of one’s cooking and the expected rank—an element which fits within the notoriously difficult, unforgiving, and thus inaccessible game series. Although exploration is an important element of the Pokémon games, the structuring of the cooking itself points towards the fact that rather than purely ludic, it also is significant for the story and, specifically, the relationships between the characters and their Pokémon. At least two main elements point toward it: on the one hand, the rather vaguely phrased “friendliness” boost as well as the visual representation of the cooking process in itself. After the dish is completed, it is presented to a viewer through a close-up illustration. Additionally, it is always prepared on two plates, in two portions: one for the player character and the other for their Pokémon. Before the official score (“taste rating”) is presented, the character is seen tasting the dish, and their expression serves as the first hint upon how well the player did. In case of obtaining the lowest score, the character’s (and, correspondingly, the Pokémon’s) expression changes to reflect the unpleasant taste. Each better score is accompanied by a corresponding animation, showing an increasingly positive reaction. Thus, the best possible result causes the character’s eyes to glow and makes them eat curry much more vigorously. On the one hand, the fact that the character finishes food regardless of their opinion of its taste, a decision on which the player has

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no influence, positions its functionality over the pleasure. On the other hand, however, food also creates a bonding experience for the character and their creature, as suggested by the short moment during which they can share their meal together. Rather than being used to feed the Pokémon, this is instead a moment of intimacy between them. The role of food as a means of strengthening the bond between those who share it is one of its most crucial sociocultural functions. Substantial psychological and sociological research has been conducted on the way people engage in food sharing “as a way to establish trust, build and define relationships, and forge treaties between clans, cultures, and nations.”⁷⁷ Food habits related to interpersonal relations can be found in virtually all social groups, from family members and romantic partners to other social relations including in professional and work environments, as collective eating is a ritual recognized across species, “functioning to knit members together and/or to constitute hierarchies.”⁷⁸ Thus, feeding one’s pets, virtual and non-virtual alike, can be understood “a practice of meaningful care across the species divide [which is] an act of intimacy because it involves a giving and receiving that connects bodies and changes subjectivities.”⁷⁹ Feeding the other in Pokémon Sword and Shield, because of the asymmetric relationship between the human trainer and the creatures they capture, raise, train, and force to fight, has a different meaning than the practices of food sharing from other games like discussed in the sixth chapter Final Fantasy XV. Despite the non-human character of the creatures in Pokémon, the moment of sharing food is just as important for them as it is in the game where time spent together eating creates the bonds between four best human friends. Pokémon games have always emphasized that intimacy between the trainers and their creatures, for example by giving the latter personified, human-like traits and emotions and portraying them as able to form close relationships with their owners going beyond what they have been trained to do. At the same time, it should perhaps be noted here that the relationship between the trainers and their Pokémon has been notoriously discussed and criticized due to the violent character of the Pokémon battles, with some pointing towards the toxicity of the relationship between them. The latter especially allowed PETA, the animal rights organization, to parody the franchise through the Poké Sabrina C. Gregersen and Omri Gillath, “How Food Brings Us Together: The Ties between Attachment and Food Behaviors,” Appetite 151 (2020): 2.  Tora Holmberg, “Walking, Eating, Sleeping. Rhythm Analysis of Human/Dog Intimacy,” Emotion, Space and Society 31 (2019): 29.  Tora Holmberg, “Walking, Eating, Sleeping,” 29.

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mon Black and Blue (PETA 2012) Flash browser game released as the part of their campaign against animal violence. Nevertheless, it can be argued that the food plays an important role in those games as a form of bonding and creating intimacy and personal relationships between the Pokémon, their trainers, and, through extension, the players. In the case of Shield and Sword titles, the introduction of cooking mechanic continues to showcase the intersections between food, care, and the interpersonal relationships. What is more, it serves as an apt example of a not food-focused game in which, however, cooking is prioritized over the collection of the ingredients. This is not unusual, and many titles connect closely food’s meaning making abilities with the action of cooking, especially when it is not its primary focus.

Food of Labor, Food of Joy The two different approaches, one that places greater emphasis on ingredients gathering and the other on cooking itself, at times overlap with the two styles of food preparation. The first structures it in terms of labor (or “playbour”) and it is more preoccupied with the following recipes and guidelines as well as the overall efficiency, that is speed and quantity, of the produced food items. The second often structures cooking as a creative activity, allowing the players to experiment (to a various degree) with the ingredients in order to search and unlock various available recipes. Maryann McCabe and Timothy de Waal Malefyt define creative cooking as “a dynamic within the framework of cooking conventions (time frame, budgets, family wishes and preferences) but also involving individual agency to build on or reinvent existing materials. Everyday cooking operates within and against a given set of materials, aesthetic choices and existing experiences of knowledge that form a framework from which cooks make creative decisions.”⁸⁰ Culinary creativity is then dependent on the presence of constraints which inspire improvisation. There are multiple ways in which one could interpret culinary creativity in video games. If “[h]ome cooked meals are creative even if the cook attempts to follow a recipe exactly, because the circumstances surrounding any repeated

 Maryann McCabe and Timothy de Waal Malefyt, “Creativity and Cooking: Motherhood, Agency and Social Change in Everyday Life,” Journal of Consumer Culture 15, no. 1 (2015): 51.

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activity alter the process and outcome,”⁸¹ then the randomized meal preparation in Overcooked should be considered an act of creativity as well. However, while changes to the order of ingredients do not impact taste, quality, nor the appearance of the dish, the artistic improvisation can be more rewarding in craftingbased games like Minecraft (Mojang 2011), Don’t Starve, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild or Pokémon Sword and Shield in which the player can (or needs to) experiment and improvise in order to discover new dishes. The epitome of the creative cooking seems to come in the small, experimental game experience titled Nour: Play with Your Food, the release of which has been announced for 2021 on several platforms by the Terrifying Jellyfish developer. In its official advertisement materials it is described as “an experimental food art game designed to make you hungry. Free from the constraints of scores, time limits, and realism, Nour lets you play with your food as if you’re a kid again, with no mess to clean up.” Hence, Nour is an example of a game that enacts the joy and creativity of cooking without the recipes. The game features several types of food that can be, quite literally, played with. Due to lack of other objectives or time restrictions, the players’ only goal is to experiment with the foods and controls to find out the possibilities offered by different levels and foods: often, mashing buttons allows them to throw ingredients into the dishes (with varying degrees of accuracy), levitate or drop foods and ingredients, in the chaotic process of constructing and deconstructing. Nour is not a cooking game but as a game entirely focused on the celebration of food, it embraces the joyful experimentation and creativity experienced by many cooks. The experimentation process does not come from the attempts to find new tastes or, as it more often is a case in digital games, new ludic functions, but from the desire of being surprised by the strangeness of the ideas of the developers. While some levels seem more intuitional as to how a player might be able to interact with the food-related objects, others are more difficult to guess, including bathtubs filled with giant scoops of ice-cream or levitating donuts that can be magnetically brought together into a large ball of food, reminiscent of the Japanese puzzle-action game franchise started with Katamari Damacy (Namco 2004) in which a Prince is tasked with recreating stars and the Moon destroyed by his celestial father, by using the eponymous katamari, that is a magical ball allowing encountered objects to stick to it in order to create planet-sized installations. Like Katamari games, Nour explores the mechanics of chaos and the joy that comes with the unrestricted play.

 Maryann McCabe and Timothy de Waal Malefyt, “Creativity and Cooking,” 55.

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Without a doubt the above division on food preparation does not offer an exhaustive list, but rather aims at pointing towards some trends that can be recognized in digital games, both those in which food is of primary focus and in those in which it is not. The additional recognition of games in which food preparation is a task and which brings with it a sense of labor and those in which it embodies the purest, even chaotic creativity of cooking, can be useful in further discussion of currently evolving genres of cooking games. I return to it in the following chapters, when discussing the meaning of cooking for others for creating bonds with them, and for oneself—in terms of creating bonds between the characters and the players. The dimensions of food as fun and food as labor will keep coming back, revealing their deep entanglement with the perceptions and stereotypes relating to gender roles. The three stages of food preparation identified in this chapter will become the foundation for most case studies included in this book. The ingredients collection stage can determine whether the world is forgiving or hostile, the way cooking itself is integrated in the game can shape the relationships between the player and the characters, and the effects eating food has on them can additionally establish both of these aspects.

Chapter 2 Gendered Food Practices in Cooking Games When I was telling friends and acquaintances about the book and its topic, they reacted in very similar ways, regardless of whether they were gamers, scholars, or both. After the initial excitement, I would get game recommendations which, interestingly, would boil down to two main genres: mainstream action games in which food is used as a health booster and “cooking games.” What quickly became apparent from these conversations, though, is that although everyone seems to understand what the name “cooking games” denotes, the definition is broad and blurry enough that it encompasses a wide range of titles. This lack of precise definition as well as the large number of titles that can be described by this label has already drawn attention of various game scholars, making it an important starting point. Thus, I will start by offering a more detailed categorization of the types of cooking inherent to the cooking games genre, believing that tracing the evolution of the genre and its types can offer a sound foundation for the discussion of what food can do in digital games and what it means for the worldbuilding and establishing player-character relationship within it. Although the way cooking in games is presented varies substantially between genres, in the most basic sense it can be divided into two main approaches. The first one structures cooking as a skill that can be learnt and improved while in the second cooking is considered an activity rather than ability. One example of the latter comes from The Sims series. In the second (Maxis 2004), third (Maxis 2009), and fourth (Maxis 2014) installments, the player-controlled Sims can learn how to cook from reading cookbooks, preparing meals or watching cooking shows on the TV. The ability is considered an important one and its progression decreases the chance of burning foods and starting fires in the kitchen as well as unlocks new recipes for new and more satisfying dishes. While the available meals require specific ingredients and recipes, cooking is considered a point-based skill with more elaborate dishes being unlocked at higher levels. On the other hand, when cooking is considered an activity, it requires players to follow specific recipes (either provided by the game or in need of discovering by the players through exploration or trial and error experimentation). This can be seen in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim or the critically acclaimed open world Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, two vast open-world epic fantasy games, or the already discussed in more detail in the first chapter Don’t Starve. In such cases the cooking process usually requires the players to 1) collect necessary inhttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110716603-004

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gredients, 2) have access to a designated cooking space (e. g., kitchens, inns, or camps), cooking device or utensil (e. g., pots, cauldrons, or stoves), and 3) follow a recipe, which needs to be obtained or discovered (e. g., through trial-and-error experimentation). On the structural level, a popular way to represent cooking is through minigames (the meaning of which to the representation of cooking I discussed in more detail in the previous chapter). While some games use match-three puzzle to symbolize the process of mixing ingredients, other separate the process into smaller actions such as chopping and peeling vegetables, stirring the food, frying, or roasting. The Cooking Mama series (Office Create 2006 – 2017) represents cooking as a collection of such mini-games, imitating the real-life cooking through the use of the Nintendo DS touchscreen and encouraging players to make the accurate gestures. Cooking in video games can have one of many functions and forms, illustrated on three spectrums described by the sets of opposing descriptors: relaxingcompetitive, essential-optional, and rigid-creative. Although usually game cooking is limited by time restraint, the process itself still can be a source of pleasure and satisfaction for both the player and the character. The second division relates to whether the cooking mini-games are part of the main game or can be omitted, or whether there are any types or parts of activities that are not essential. Finally, many cooking games seem to omit the pleasure of cooking and its creative aspect. In the majority of cases the player is required to follow a strict recipe and the freedom is limited to the order in which the individual ingredients must be added. This strips otherwise creative activity from the component of experimentation that grants the ability to be surprised at the result, possibly “highlight[ing] the pleasure of restraint.”⁸²

In and Out of the Kitchen: The Gendered Food Spaces The gendered nature of food and practices related to cooking are emphasized continuously in critical food studies. Although virtually every human culture includes a division of food-related responsibilities and tasks, not all of these recognize the culinary hierarchy, “that is, the existence of ‘high class’ or aristocratic cuisine and a domestic, everyday ’low’’ cuisine”⁸³ which, in the cultures in which

 Elspeth Probyn, Carnal Appetites, 102.  Vicki A. Swinbank, “The Sexual Politics of Cooking: A Feminist Analysis of Culinary Hierarchy in Western Culture,” Journal of Historical Sociology 15, no. 4 (2002): 455.

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it does exist, tends to draw a distinctive line between the consumption and labor. While the latter does not have to be associated with women, the former tends to have high connotations with wealthy masculinity. Thus, most studies and discourses around food acknowledge the gendered division of labor, placing women in the role of main providers of food as the obvious starting point. Although “women wield considerable power in all cultures by their control of meal planning and cooking,”⁸⁴ rarely does this recognition translate into their higher status. In feminist writing, home is often considered a site of oppression where the gendered subjectivities are constantly reinforced and reproduced. If “the home itself is intensely political, both in its internal intimacies and through its interfaces with the wider world,”⁸⁵ it is even more true in regards to the kitchen. It is there that women perform the unpaid foodwork associated with a range of practices from planning meals to obtaining, storing, cooking, and serving food. Recognizing that the majority of this domestic labor has gone unnoticed and is taken for granted, the Anglo-American feminists constituting the Second Wave argued against the position of the “captive wives,”⁸⁶ urging for the deconstruction of the stereotype that bounds femininity to the kitchen space and the act of cooking, thus preventing women from achieving self-actualization. Despite their influence on the shift in perception of stereotypical gender roles and the impact of domestic labor, the Second Wave feminists have been repeatedly critiqued for the perception of women as a homogenous group, which, in practice, meant the lack of recognition of how race and class influence the experiences of women, including especially many African-American women who had to perform double the work both in their own kitchens and the kitchens of white employers. Finally, more contemporary writers argue against construction of the kitchen space and foodwork as “symbols of subservience, rather than pleasure and fulfillment,”⁸⁷ instead promoting the reconstruction of the discourse to emphasize kitchens as spaces that “afford opportunities to exercise agency and resistance for women

 Carole M. Counihan, “Introduction—Food and Gender: Identity and Power,” in Food and Gender: Identity and Power, ed. Carole M. Counihan and Steven L. Kaplan (New York: Routledge, 1998), 4.  Alison Blunt, “Cultural Geography: Cultural Geographies of Home,” Progress in Human Geography 29, no. 4 (2005): 510.  Hannah Gavron, The Captive Wife (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966).  Barbara Haber, “Follow the Food,” in Through the Kitchen Window: Women Explore the Intimate Meanings of Food and Cooking, ed. Arlene Voski Avakian (Oxford; New York: Berg Publishers, 2005), 68.

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who do not belong to the dominant race or class.”⁸⁸ An increasing number of scholars concentrate on the experiences, stories, and practices of the those who previously were excluded from the conversation, showing how food is used to share their culture, celebrate talent and knowledge, and how they can realize and exercise their agency and identities in the kitchen spaces. However, even despite these reaffirming and important narratives, the disparity between the public and private spheres remains at the center of these discourses. In her already mentioned analysis of video game food in the context of the division between private and public spheres, Ensslin draws from such theorists as Joan Landes and Nancy Fraser who adapted Habermas’ theory according to the dominant gender binary into feminine private and masculine public spheres. Ensslin compared the representation of gendered foodways in three games: the society simulator Desperate Housewives: The Game (Liquid Entertainment 2006) placing it on at one end of the scale, the first-person shooter Quake 4 (Raven Software 2004) on the other, and The Sims 2 (Maxis 2004) as an example of a game that “takes an a gendered approach to both spheres [and] is examined as a compromise between both polar opposites, which inhabits a place near the middle of the spectrum.”⁸⁹ Although Ensslin does not concentrate specifically on cooking games, she recognized their entanglements with the feminized private sphere end of the spectrum. In the case of the Desperate Housewives game, based on the American TV series of the same title, this is emphasized through the game’s focus on the food preparation as the crucial part of the gameplay. In order to fulfil the requirement of being a good housewife, the players need to keep one’s family healthy and happy which can only be achieved by submitting oneself to a culinary training process, “thereby reinforcing the importance of being a good cook in the game world.”⁹⁰ Thus, the game operationalizes cooking as a skill which needs to be learned and perfected as the player character advances through levels of “apprentice,” “cook,” “chef,” and “master chef” to “culinary artist.” It is interesting to notice the choice for the individual names since it reflects another often mentioned disparity between the conceptualization of the figure of a “cook” and that of a “chef.” There has always been a strong distinction between the concepts behind the words “cook” and “chef.” The difference, unsurprisingly, is gendered, reflecting the perception of women as cooks who are bound to their households and cook mostly for their family because of necessity, while men not only tend to have a  Angela Meah, “Reconceptualizing Power and Gendered Subjectivities in Domestic Cooking Spaces,” Progress in Human Geography 38, no. 5 (2014): 675.  Astrid Ensslin, “Do Avatars Dream…,” 39.  Astrid Ensslin, “Do Avatars Dream…,” 44.

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greater freedom to “pick and choose how to be a foodie”⁹¹ but also meet with less prejudice and far less negative associations, at the same time having more affordances attached to foodwork. Thus, for many white, middle-class men cooking became a hobby and leisure activity, something that can be enjoyed, celebrated, and done of one’s freedom of time. The changes in social expectations towards food preparation created spaces for men to become engaged in cooking and but still they do not “feel the force of the morally charged ideal of deferential service that appears in so many women’s reports.”⁹²

Evolution of “Cooking Games” Genres When asked about food in in video games, for many the first association is with the genre that is commonly simply referred to as “cooking games.” However, upon closer inspection it quickly becomes obvious that, as it often is, it is difficult to provide one specific definition of what the genre. What constitutes a cooking game? Or, in other words, how much cooking must take place in a game for it to be considered a “cooking game?” Gathering ingredients and food preparation are crucial parts of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild but the game is not categorized as such. Cooking and eating are also vital to many survival games such as Don’t Starve, but these two genres do not seem to overlap either. At the same time, what tends to be described by this name often to a large degree relies on management of the restaurant or the work of the server who has to make sure all orders are delivered on time. Arguably, game developers were drawn to the themes of food and cooking since the very beginning of the medium. One of the earliest examples is the 1982 arcade game BurgerTime developed by Data East, the Japanese video game and engineering corporation, featuring chef Peter Pepper whose task was to collect hamburger ingredients located on maze-like platforms. While its format seems more similar to the Donkey Kong games, one can see more direct origins of contemporary cooking games in the time-management restaurant games titled Fast Food Tycoon (also known as Pizza Syndicate in Europe) developed by Software 2000 and published by Activision Value in 2000. The game has been advertised as an economical or business simulation due to its focus on management skills required to build a successful chain of pizzerias. Released  Kate Cairns, Josée Johnston, and Shyon Baumann, “Caring About Food: Doing Gender in the Foodie Kitchen,” Gender & Society 24, no. 5 (2010): 610.  Marjorie DeVault, Feeding the Family. The Social Organization of Carin as Gendered Work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 149.

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three years later, the immensely popular Diner Dash (Gamelab 2003) follows in its footsteps by concentrating on the time-management skills of the player, shifting the focus from the perspective of overlooking the city to a more personal perspective of hard-working server Flo. Discussed in the most detail by Shira Chess in Ready Player Two: Women Gamers and Designed Identity, this and other titles in the long series of games following the protagonist and employing the similar premise and/or gameplay can be considered prototypes of the many other similar games that emerged after 2003, including many instructional apps and games based on television cooking shows such as: Iron Chef America: Supreme Cuisine (Black lantern Studios 2008), Hell’s Kitchen: The Game (Ludia 2008), What’s Cooking? with Jamie Oliver (keen games GmbH & Co. KG 2008) or America’s Test Kitchen: Let’s Get Cooking (Touchdown Entertainment 2010). However, these restaurant time-management games share the “cooking games” title with games about cooking which place the focus on the cook’s gestures. These tend to be constructed as a collection of mini-games and their most recognizable example is Cooking Mama (Office Create 2006) and its many sequels and spin-offs. Thus, the name “cooking games” often evokes a specific group of titles that are considered casual, that are often marketed at women, and have a similar type of aesthetic, story, and gameplay. Such games often feature the restaurant setting and often include time-management gameplay that prioritizes speed and quantity of served orders, positioning food preparation as one of several activities the players need to toggle, including managing the customers, collecting money and tips, renovating, customizing, and branching out the business. In her book, Chess scrutinizes the ways in which some video game developers started to perceive women as a potential new, untapped target for the game industry, in consequence creating an abundance of similar-looking games with similar themes that can possibly appeal to women player, thus including topics relating to these domestic and consumptive practices commonly understood as feminine. Recognizing the dangers of treating women as unanimous group with uniform desires, preferences, and play styles, in Ready Player Two, Chess traced shifts in the gaming industry forced to acknowledge the growing popularity of casual and independent games and to make space for the players who do not fall into the stereotype of a gamer understood as a white, middle class, heterosexual, white teenager. By examining “games for women,” she unveils industry’s assumptions about what constitutes normative femininities. As she states, it is important to discuss the popularity of casual games with women through research on gendered leisure. Hence, she draws attention to the nuisances of women’s leisure which, due to the nature of their household labor, tends to be fragmented both in the temporal and spatial sense, situated between

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the tasks and requiring little space or equipment. These restraints match the way casual games are structured, which include games that are easy to master and play, and which feature several short levels that can be easily paused and picked up on later. Furthermore, she emphasizes the parallels between “the management of time both in and out of the game—and to that end—of the player in the real world as well as the character in the game world.”⁹³ The popularity of Nintendo DS Cooking Mama (Office Create 2006) is reflected in the fact that it spanned a total of 13 sequels and spin offs, many of which do not focus on cooking (e. g., Gardening Mama, 2009 or Crafting Mama, 2010) while maintaining the same structure of several mini-games which in the main titles represent separate actions such as chopping and peeling vegetables, slicing meat, frying, and serving them on a plate. Chess categorizes Cooking Mama as a caregiving game since it features tasks related to motherhood and domestic labor. Through the game the eponymous Mama instructs the player how to perform various tasks, either praising the player’s efforts or scolding them in case of failure—her eyes then turn into flames as she tells the player not to worry because “Mama will fix it.”⁹⁴ Chess interpreted it as “an unsubtle reminder of women’s roles in the domestic sphere, suggesting that motherhood is constantly in the mode of fixing problems.”⁹⁵ Luke van Ryn situates the game in a broader context of the influence of the development of the technologies on the process of food preparation and the importance of the embodiment and growth of “gestural economy.”⁹⁶ In the research on video game embodiment, gestures are what allow for the interaction between the body, the hardware, and software. The importance of gestures and their dependence on the technology is what connects playing and cooking. In interviews, many women expressed their fear of gestures becoming irrelevant due to technological advancement. Furthermore, as van Ryn argues, “Cooking Mama complicates the timeliness… of play with a requirement of (fairly minimal) correctness,”⁹⁷ where arguably the mini-game approach to representation of cooking allows the shift from representation to performance, emphasizing the player’s involvement and enhancing the engagement in the process. However, Carolyn Cunningham noted that “[d]espite the ability to cook and arrange over

 Shira Chess, “Going with the Flo,” 85.  Office Create, Cooking Mama (Taito, 2006).  Shira Chess, Ready Player Two: Women Gamers and Designed Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 109.  Luke van Ryn, “Gestural Economy and Cooking Mama: Playing With the Politics of Natural User Interfaces,” Scandinavian Journal of Media Arts Culture (2013): 1.  Luke van Ryn, “Gestural Economy,” 7.

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96 dishes from worldwide cuisines, the game still positions the player as passive. Players do not engage in any creative aspects, such as designing menus. Instead, they follow instructions from Mama.”⁹⁸ This raises an interesting point regarding the way in which games like Cooking Mama and Diner Dash operationalize the rules of cooking and how rigidly they approach the necessity of recipes. Many of these games identify food as one of the themes that should be the most appealing to young women. However, as Chess argues, there is a double standard considering the relationship between women and food: while interest and the cultivation of skills relating to food preparation is highly encouraged, one is not meant to admit to having cravings or deriving pleasure from consumption. According to Chess, “[w]omen, it seems, are strangely situated in light of consumptive practices. While shopping is treated as an enabling mode of consumptive practice, something allowable, the consumption of food is rarely wholly acceptable. Women can binge-shop but not binge-eat.”⁹⁹ It is interesting to keep this dichotomy in mind when attempting to precisely situate “cooking games” in opposition to “games that incorporate cooking.” While already the choice of the names imply that the difference lies in the individual title’s focus on the cooking activity either as the primary narrative and ludic theme or one of the range of possible in-game activities, it is interesting to note which omit and which include the act of eating. Where many of cooking games, from Diner Dash restaurant time-management type to Cooking Mama mini-game format, concentrate on the preparation of food, the food is made for someone else and cannot be enjoyed, echoing the context of labor performed by women who are expected to feed the others before themselves. In Cooking Mama games, many of which are set in the non-descript kitchen that could belong in either a house or a restaurant, the preparation of a meal culminates in its presentation and assessment. In the newest title of the series, Cooking Mama: Cookstar (1st Playable Productions 2020), each meal ends with a “plate it and snap it” section in which players choose a plate and a way of serving, a setting (e. g., Mama’s kitchen, fancy restaurant, picnic) in order to take a perfect photo that can then be shared on social media. The intersections between the practices of sharing photographs of meals online and the aesthetics of food in video games are explored in more detail in the sixth chapter. Thus, there seems to be a certain disparity between how cooking games and games about cooking represent food as either prepared for others or consumable  Carolyn M. Cunningham, Games Girls Play: Contexts of Girls and Video Games (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2018), 36.  Shira Chess, Ready Player Two: Women Gamers and Designed Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 147.

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by the player-character. It is important to notice that this difference seems to overlap with the gendered target audiences of the games in question.

Cooking Inclusively Slowly, cooking ceases to be considered a solely feminine topic as proved by the number of independent titles that are not targeted at one gender in particular but rather are designed with the inclusivity in mind. Video game scholars have been advocating for inclusivity and diversity in the digital medium long before the 2014 #Gamergate harassment campaign revealed the abuse women and gender minorities suffer in the industry. Over ten years before it, Sheri Graner Ray remarked in Gender Inclusive Game Design: Expanding the Market that: [the] game industry does not see women as a market. They see women as a genre. We only have to make this one game for all women. So if you are a middle-aged woman and you want to play a game, you get pointed to FarmVille, or Words with Friends, or some of those social games that we—and I say we as the industry—have decided this is the game for women.¹⁰⁰

Writing about feminist gaming and the ways in which men constructed the identity of the “second person player,” Chess argued for inclusive game design, the principles of which she created by drawing from Ray’s frameworks. Through interviews with game designers and careful analysis of the titles perceived as “games for women,” Chess identifies and categorizes their five most prominent attributes: thematic, game-play, visual, character, and attributes that are excluded in comparison with the mainstream titles. Next, she considers each in more detail, differentiating ten specific, smaller aspects: 1) thematic congruence, which refers to whether games adhere to the list of topics that are considered attractive to the recipient of the “games for women,” which often include supernatural and gothic elements, crime storylines, but also relate to the stereotypically feminine interests such as shopping or cooking; 2) collaborative/social gameplay combined with the noncompetitive character of the game; 3) time positive gameplay, which is possible to be experienced in short intervals and does not penalize the interruptions in play; 4) low risk and lack of harsh penalties for failure; 5) gameplay that allows creative expression through the ability to customize character and in-game spaces; 6) lush aesthetics consisting of bright, saturated colors and round shapes with soft shadows; 7) non-sexualized character designs; 8)

 Shira Chess, Ready Player Two, 39.

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avatar choice, as opposed to the default character who is often male; 9) low levels of violent content; and 10) low harassment potential from other players in the case of multiplayer games and modes.¹⁰¹ Although Chess uses these guidelines as an assessment of whether a given title was designed for an intended female audience, it can be valuable in discussion of how games can implement inclusive design. These correspond closely with five feminist programming strategies proposed by Justine Cassell in 1998: “transfer design authority to [the] user,” “value subjective and experiential knowledge,” “allow use by many different kinds of users in different contexts,” “give the user a tool to express her voice and the truth of her existence,” and “encourage collaboration among users.”¹⁰² Although these strategies seem to be most closely describing online game modes and role-playing games due to freedom of character customization, there are some obvious parallels between the inclusive design and cozy games, which I discuss in the next section. However, they characterize rather well the turn away from gendered associations and design and describe the change in the independent game titles. Food and cooking are still popular among games created by smaller studios, adhering to the inclusivity of the design instead. For example, many of the aforementioned qualities are realized to some degree in the critically acclaimed local or “couch” co-op¹⁰³ party games Overcooked (Ghost Town Games 2016) and its sequel Overcooked 2 (Ghost Town Games 2018). In both cases, the narrative is rather straightforward as the players control a group of chefs chosen by Onion King (who is, quite literally, an anthropomorphized onion) to fight the impeding threat in the form of a giant spaghetti monster terrorizing the Kingdom. After the first failed attempt at stopping it, the chefs are sent back in time to practice their cooking skills and learn cooperation. It is the cooperation which is the most important aspect of Overcooked—the players need to communicate in real time in order to divide the tasks and success to prepare dishes in the progressively more chaotic environment. While the idea for the game might seem simple—

 Shira Chess, Ready Player Two, 42– 52.  Justine Cassell, “Storytelling as a Nexus of Change in the Relationship between Gender and Technology: A Feminist Approach to Software Design,” in From Barbie to Mortal Combat: Gender and Computer Games, ed. Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins (New York: MIT Press, 1998), 304– 305.  The name “couch co-op” tends to be used in reference of local cooptional games which require the players to use the same console, computer, or device (for example through a splitscreen but not necessarily), as opposed to the online co-op games that allow two or more people to play together regardless of the physical distance between them.

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the players have to complete enough orders showcased in the top left corner to earn stars and progress to the next sections of the game—they need to coordinate their actions in the ever-changing environment which continuously blocks parts of the kitchen from them. In some levels, for example, a kitchen might break in two as if due to an earthquake, separating the boxes containing vegetables, meat, and other ingredients from the chopping stations and the stoves, trapping half of the players on one side and the rest on the other, forcing them to constantly change their roles in order to cooperate in the most efficient way. The features meals include predominantly Western meals such as burgers, fried fish, vegetable soups, or pizza, as well as meals that became assimilated into Western-white foodways from other cultures like sushi, and sashimi in the first game and steamed buns inspired by bao or baozi in the second. The gameplay can be described as purposefully chaotic, requiring players to communicate and cooperate over the shifting levels in which parts of the kitchen are constantly separated, meaning that at various moments of play players have access only to one portion of the sections of the map that include chopping stations, ovens, sink, and delivery point. Overcooked marks an important step in the evolution of cooking games by both inclusive treatment of the characters (representing white and Black race, as well as featuring a character on a wheelchair) and the players, as well as subverting the expectation of the single-player character of the games. Through the introduction of high-paced, action-focused gameplay, it ventures into the action game territory reaching also to players who traditionally were not considered as interested in cooking. The overall aesthetic can be considered as what Chess refers to as “lush,” as it consists bright colors with realistic, diverse designs of characters. Although it would not be considered as cozy in the sense introduced in the fourth chapter due to its high-stress time-sensitive gameplay, the low-risk and the non-violent character of the game points towards the recognition of the desires of various types of players and allows it to be recognized in terms of inclusive gameplay. Although the character choice is limited to few pre-designed characters, Cassell’s call for freedom in play can be instead seen in food preparation. The recipes in Overcooked are rather simple, consisting of two to four elements which can be gathered in a random order. In one of the interviews, Phil Duncan, co-creator and designer of Overcooked, commented that: When we were developing the first Overcooked, the bulk of the development time was actually spent on balancing the process of preparing a recipe. Gradually, we added more and more touches so that the stress of the game came much more from the levels themselves

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and player interactions with one another than they did from the minutiae of preparing a complex recipe.¹⁰⁴

This freedom to choose the order of the ingredients, even if they are dictated by the pragmatism, directs the players’ attention towards the joy of cooking and the creativity that is often associated with the process. Culinary arts are peculiar due to their temporality and fragility of their creations, which perhaps partially explains why they are not always given the same respect as other artistic disciplines. It would appear, however, that both the luxurious and sophisticated haute cuisine and the simpler, but more authentic home cooking are validated through both the skill (in this case: the ability to follow recipes) and the creativity of the cook. Finally, that focus and celebration of food as it is prepared can be seen in several smaller games with less commercial success than Overcooked. Some, like short and simple Campfire Cooking (Layton Hawkes 2017), a puzzle game in which the player needs to move marshmallows around the campfire to symmetrically roast all its sides. With the moments of play framed through the scenes showing the family members interacting and bonding together, the game emphasizes the role of food in social meaning-making. Furthermore, as it poses little challenge as the presented tasks can be solved without frustration, it emphasizes the peacefulness of the actual family trip and with the intention to allow players share the intimate and relaxing feelings. However, Campfire Cooking would not be classified as a “cooking game” in its primary association as it utterly rejects the chaos, speed, and pressure offered by time-management games. An interesting comparison can be made with a simple, short production Good Pizza, Great Pizza (TapBlaze 2018), another restaurant-themed game focused on preparation of pizza rather than maintaining clients. While giving a nod to time-management games, it does not have its fast pace, but rather it allows a slower, almost meditative experience of food preparation during which players have time to enjoy soft, pastel colors and the aesthetic reminiscent of drawings made with crayons. Preparation of each pizza follows the same few steps with slight changes according to customers’ wishes: dough making, selection of sauces and ingredients which can be upgraded after each day from the accumulated tips, baking, and cutting in the desired number of slices before boxing and delivering. The customers are happier and tip better if their pizzas are delivered without delay, but there is no sense of rush and the game affords

 Aron Garst, “The Overcooked 2 Devs Reveal How They Made the Game so Addictive,” Wired UK, August 7, 2018.

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just enough time to enjoy the process and take a moment to decide the perfect amount of toppings, the placing of which is a very satisfying activity thanks to that soft plop that accompanies it. While each customer comes with a time limit after which they become inpatient and, therefore, unsatisfied with the service which can result in a lower amount or lack of tips, the game does not have the sense of urgency known from the other restaurant titles. In the majority of cases the player has enough time to enjoy the experience.

Conclusion: Narrative Cooking Games As the aforementioned examples show, cooking as an in-game activity has been changing in recent years to acknowledge the complexities of the process and its emotional context. It is important to notice that both restaurant time-management games and games that operationalize cooking through mini-games—that is two types of games constituting the most recognizable types of the “cooking games” genre—seem to divorce the activity from its sociocultural meaning. The dishes taught by Mama or ordered by the customers of the Diner Dash restaurants vary in terms of their origin and ingredients but are derived from their sociocultural contexts and lack personal meaning to the player. In other words, the difference between preparing a vegetable curry, spaghetti Bolognese, and shrimp gyoza is ludic rather than related to the story as it involves different mini-games. On the other hand, games like Campfire Cooking and Good Pizza, Great Pizza allow players to take time and create personal connection to the foods, either by embedding the process of preparation in personal narratives or by allowing slowness and appreciation to the warm, soft aesthetics. As more and more games begin to embrace the emotional impact and significance of food, one can expect the evolution of a cooking game genre. Recently, a Toronto-based Visai Studio announced a narrative cooking game titled Venba with an expected release in the winter of 2021. The story follows Venba, an Indian woman who immigrated to Canada with her family in the 1980s. Slowly growing apart from her son, whose experiences and language differ so substantially from her own, she desperately tries to strengthen the bonds with him while not losing the connection to her mother’s culture. To find the balance between the two worlds, she uses recipes from the cookbook gifted to her by her mother, using the familiar dishes to stay connected to home and to communicate with her family. However, as the book was damaged in the travels, many of the recipes are incomplete—this significantly influences the cooking gameplay, adding the element of experimentation to the process. When asked about this process, Abhi, the designer and programmer of the game, told me that:

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the dishes you cook have significance to the narrative too. You don’t unlock recipes like you do in a traditional game but instead the story in each level contextualizes a reason to cook a certain dish and the player has to consult the damaged recipe book to do so. The way we’ve approached cooking in this game is to encourage players to think about the actual processes involved in each dish. Since the player only has the partial recipe, they have to make informed guesses and try different things before they can get it right and successfully progress the story.¹⁰⁵

Undoubtfully, food is a form of language and communication and it is “a nonverbal means of sharing meanings with others.”¹⁰⁶ In this sense, cooking is not an empty activity, but is meant to create a dialogue between the characters—both those occupying one space like Venba and her son, and those separated by time and distance like she and her mother—as well as between Venba and the player. Having to figure out the correct recipe, the players need to make informed guesses and experiment before completing the recipe and progressing the story. In other words, the ludic structure requires players to encounter the foods with curiosity and respect. By the inclusion of the real-life Indian dishes, the players who might be unfamiliar with them get the opportunity to learn about them and understand them. Abhi explains this through the in-game preparation of a sugary syrup that serves as a base for Jangiri, a light-orange Indian sweet usually prepared in a circular flowery shape [Figure 2]. He explains that the consistency/viscosity of the syrup has to be perfect. If it’s too thick, the player should add a bit of water, if not they should let it cook and thicken up. Players are in a way forced to understand the recipe and why it is the way it is before they can solve it, and we hope this leaves a stronger impression and teaches them about Indian cooking itself.¹⁰⁷

Figure 2: Jangiri being prepared in Venba juxtaposed with a real-life Jangiri, photo courtesy of Cooking From Heart.

 Abhi, Twitter message, February 1, 2021.  Nevana Stajcic, “Understanding Culture: Food as a Means of Communication,” Hemispheres. Studies on Cultures and Societies, no. 28 (2013): 79.  Abhi, Twitter message, February 1, 2021.

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Venba is certainly a unique title due to the meaning it attaches to the process of cooking, framing it not only as a crucial source of cultural and personal memory but also as an activity that is important for both the characters and the players. By contextualizing the food players prepare, it engages the player in play on emotional levels which are rarely accessible to them through games that attempt to strip food from their meaning. The difference promised by Venba might, in fact, be emphasized by the description provided by the developers that establishes it as a “narrative cooking game,” differentiating it from those titles that privilege management and speed over emotional connection formed through careful, mindful chopping, stirring, and seasoning.

Chapter 3 Food Preferences and Food Choice in Veg*an Video Games The question of food choice and preference within video game food is an interesting one because it once again creates a direct link between the represented food and the ways that its consumption becomes a significant marker of one’s identity outside of the game. I believe that despite the importance of the question of how does one choose what to eat in the off-game life, it tends to be overlooked within the in-game context. Thus, this chapter investigates how the food preference shapes the gameplay and the game experience through the example of the vegan and vegetarian diets. Meatless diets in their many forms provide an interesting choice not only due to their popularity but also, once again, because of how closely they are intertwined with the preconceptions about gender. Thus, in the chapter I discuss the various types of meatless diets in the context of their feminist significance before embedding the video representation of vegan and vegetarian diets in the context of the discourses and reactions visible in the Western popular culture. The second half of the chapter features a typology of the vegan and vegetarian characters. Through these I engage in the discussion on how through video game food one can establish a link between the ingame and off-game identities, strengthening the player-game bond and creating meaningful narratives. The chapter complements and concludes the first section of the book in the sense that it shows how various types of food, while reflecting the real-world meaning attached to them, use and influence the gameplay. The choice of a diet or types of food can vary from a small, almost unimportant detail to the extremely important decision through which players can express themselves, thus fleshing out the gameworld and facilitating the attachment between the players and their characters. Finally, it is perhaps worth of note that this chapter proved to be one of the most challenging for me: not to write, but in terms of its placement within this book. I have been advised to remove it and turn it into an article as well as to keep it in; in various versions of the manuscript it changed places from the beginning to the end of the book to once again come to its first half. This indecision stems from the fact that, rather than focusing on the cozy aspect of the food, it rather describes the ludic changes within the game caused by the food choice.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110716603-005

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Veg*an Diets as the Sites of Feminist Resistance The concept of “food preferences” seems to point towards the personal and individual character of one’s choice of foods. However, the process behind one’s preferences is shaped by one’s sociocultural background and upbringing as well as politics that structure discourses around the given types of food, making the process a complex one. In their research on the most common sociocultural influences that shape these preferences, Tanis Furst and colleagues listed a number of factors from global to personal. Recognizing that the latter tends to be shaped by the former, they listed cultural and symbolic ideals informing one’s beliefs about what constitutes “a proper meal,” as well as a composition and dynamics of one’s social framework, food context which referred to a broad category of environmental, and social factors such as social climate of the choice setting, food sources, and availability of food including social, seasonal, or market factors. In this context, personal factors might include emotional associations with certain foods, both positive (especially tying to childhood traditions and treats) and aversive (e. g., caused by food poisoning).¹⁰⁸ Furthermore, food preferences tend to change over one’s lifetime depending on the socioeconomic context and availability of products. Finally, diets can become an important means of structuring one’s agency and conveying one’s beliefs. This is particularly visible in the case of diets that reject meat. In recent decades, there has been a steady decline in meat consumption in the Western countries. In 2020, the estimated worldwide numbers of people following various meatless diets reached 1.5 billion.¹⁰⁹ Due to the variety of the types of such diets and the nuanced differences in the motivations, beliefs, and restrictions applied by the people who practice them, I will be referring to them, after Matthew Cole, under a collective, umbrella term, “veg*an.” Although the term remains centered around the practices arose in the West, it also acknowledges different types of plant-based diets and the symbolic, religious, and cultural meaning behind them. However, considering that the majority of the games discussed in this book are embedded in the Western sociocultural context, the choice of the terminology reflects these sources. The differences between individual types of meatless and plant-based diets are more complex than just the one between vegetarians, who do not consume any meat, and vegans, who additionally reject animal products including  Tanis Furst et al., “Food Choice: A Conceptual Model of the Process,” Appetite 26 (1996): 252– 256.  John B. Nezlek and Catherine A Forestell, “Vegetarianism as a Social Identity,” Food Physics and Material Science 33 (2020): 45 – 51.

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dairy, eggs, honey, etc. John Nezlek and Catherine Forestell, for example, additionally mention lacto-vegetarians (those who do eat dairy products), ovo-vegetarians (those who do eat eggs), and pescatarians (those who eat fish, but not other meat). Another important division was made by Eimear Leahy, Seán Lyons, and Richard S. J. Tol between “vegetarians of necessity,” that is people who do not have constant access to food due to the socioeconomic or geopolitical context, and “vegetarians of choice” for whom denouncing meat is a decision based on health or ethical reasoning, with that second category being more often referenced in discourses on veg*an identities and practices. When discussing the reasons for the choices regarding meat consumption, one can follow Paul Rozin’s, Maureen Markwith’s, and Caryn Stoess’ discussion of “health vegetarians” and “ethical vegetarians,” who either avoid meat due to health benefits or through their diets express their beliefs regarding animal welfare or the influence of meat production on climate change. Additionally, the latter category can be connected with religious beliefs, including, among others, Halal and Kosher foods, the feasting practices in some Christian traditions that include meat-free days, and the complete or partial rejection of meat in Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Jainism, and other religions. The more recent research on veg*an diets understands them not only in categories of the impact on health but also as an important factor in the expression of one’s identity. This can mean that the “veg*an” can be used to express and manifest one’s political and philosophical opinions, but that it also transcends the eating practices as they change in time. Due to their sociopolitical connotations, diets in general and the veg*an ones in particular are considered self-constituting practices and are crucial to the reinforcement and transformation of one’s subjectivity which, according to Cressida Heyes, is an act of “corporeal normalization,”¹¹⁰ that is the induction of one’s “true self” on the body. She especially discussed feminine dietary practices, understanding that they often cause misery and are informed by patriarchal, institutional control. When ethical veg*an practices can be linked with the feminist and ecofeminist movements, they can be utilized “as strategies of resistance to classist, racist, heterosexist, and colonialist systems of power that often rely on the assumption of speciesism to ground these axes of oppression.”¹¹¹ As one of the perhaps most important theorists discussing human relationships with other animals, Carol J. Adams draws parallels between the oppression suffered by women. In the intro Cressida J. Heyes, Self-Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 121– 122.  Cathryn Bailey, “We Are What We Eat: Feminist Vegetarianism and the Reproduction of Racial Identity,” Hypatia 22, no. 2 (2007): 39.

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duction to Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations which she edited together with Josephine Donovan, it reads: [w]e believe that feminism is a transformative philosophy that embraces the amelioration of life on earth for all life-forms, for all natural entities. We believe that all oppressions are interconnected: no one creature will be free until all are free—from abuse, degradation, exploitation, pollution, and commercialization.¹¹²

This argument fits into a larger narrative of ecofeminism that emerged in the 1970s and was especially prominent until the late 1980s. The focus on the intersections between the feminist and environmental movements was a starting point for writers like Susan Griffin (Woman and Nature, 1978), Mary Daly (Gyn/ Ecology, 1978), Carolyn Merchant (The Death of Nature, 1980), Marjorie Spiegel (The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery, 1988), Andreé Collard and Joyce Contrucci (Rape of the Wild, 1989), and many others.¹¹³ The writers explored the similarities between the ways in which women, animals, and nature have been feminized and infantilized under the dominant male-centered culture. The most controversial and provocative were the arguments that linked these oppressions with racist and colonialist aggression with the special emphasis on the enslavement of the Black people in the United States and the genocide of Jews during the World War II. Despite the intersectional character of the writings of ecofeminists, the movement was accused for upholding an essentialist perception of women, almost entirely eradicating it from the mainstream feminist human-centered discourses. However, the ecofeminist arguments still are close to many discourses on the eating practices around rejection of meat. Often the veg*an identities are still targets of ridiculing and various attacks in media and popular culture, which Matthew Cole and Karen Morgan discuss in the context of “vegaphobia,” that is a set of prejudices towards vegan and vegetarian diets which can manifest in derogatory language and representations in popular and social media. They explain that: First, [vegaphobia] empirically misrepresents the experience of veganism, and thereby marginalizes vegans. Second, it perpetuates a moral injury to omnivorous readers who are not presented with the opportunity to understand veganism and the challenge to speciesism

 Carol J. Adams and Josephine Donovan, eds., Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 1995), 3.  A more detailed overview of the origins and development of ecofeminism can be found in Greta Gaard, “Ecofeminism Revisited: Rejecting Essentialism and Re-Placing Species in a Material Feminist Environmentalism,” Feminist Formations 23, no. 2 (2011): 26 – 53.

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that it contains. Third, and most seriously, it obscures and thereby reproduces exploitative and violent relations between human and nonhuman animals.¹¹⁴

Finally, the perception of veg*anism as feminine correlates with the same oppressive language used in describing it that is employed against the feminist identities. What becomes revealed in the slogans that construct veg*anism as a form of abstention and self-deprivation is the underlying assumption that eating meat is the “norm” and, thus, that by avoiding it, veg*ans subvert the normative food practices. The perception of meat-rich diet in Western societies as a symbol of strength, virility, and emotional stoicism—manifesting through a lack of remorse due to eating animal products—has additionally strong associations with masculinity and reveals the highly gendered nature of food along the line of meat-veg*an diets. Even though currently these stereotypes tend to be weakened as the veg*an diets become more and more visible and socially acceptable among men, they are still present.

Tofu and the Vegaphobia in Video Games The aforementioned attitudes and beliefs about meat are also present in the video game context, manifesting, among others, in privileging meat-based meals and dishes over veg*an ones in regards to how much health they restore and how otherwise effective they are in the ludic sense. Additionally, vegaphobic behaviors are present in some titles as the subject of derogatory humor. These remarks are directed either as the individual person or, more generally, at the food choices, showing how deeply rooted the preconceptions are about food in any given culture. Apart from the mocking attitude towards one’s choice of salad and vegetables, the food which seemed to have gained quite a substantial dose of hate is tofu. In digital games, tofu reappears regularly to satisfy the vegaphobic humor, not as much as an edible but as a surprising cameo or an influence of a character’s design. This can be illustrated well through the following story. A few years ago tofu became a scapegoat in an antagonism which arose between the developers of the acclaimed platformer titled Super Meat Boy (2010) and the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals organization (PETA), an animal rights group based in the United States. Known for its controversial social campaigns, PETA released a

 Matthew Cole and Karen Morgan, “Vegaphobia,” 134.

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series of parody digital games meant to raise awareness and stir discussion around the exploitation of animals through the use of popular digital game titles, revealing that they commonly portray hunting, animal exploitation, and meat-eating practices, thus adhering to the attitudes often leading and related to animal abuse. PETA’s parodies feature a number of titles which directly reference well-known franchises, from Super Mario Bros. (PETA’s 2009 version was titled New Super Chick Sisters) and Pokémon (Pokémon Black and Blue, 2012) to Cooking Mama (Cooking Mama: Mama Kills Animals, 2008). As PETA’s games point out to the use of meat and abuse of animals in the selected titles, encouraging the players to contact the creators and petition for them to create veg*an versions of the game, its purpose is to draw attention to the larger worldwide issues. One such parody—Super Tofu Boy (2010)—was based on Super Meat Boy, an extremely difficult platformer with the narrative referencing the classic storyline from Mario Bros. game in which a male protagonist—here, the eponymous Meat Boy—has to rescue his kidnapped girlfriend, Bandage Girl. In PETA’s parody, however, she rejects her meat-based boyfriend, instead choosing Tofu Boy and a vegan lifestyle. The game became more popular due to the endorsement by Team Meat, the studio responsible for the creation of Super Meat Boy, the members of which engaged with PETA on social media, ridiculing their project. In one of the interviews, Edmund McMillen, one of the three creators of the original game, commented: “see (as mentioned in countless interviews) Meat Boy isn’t made of animal meat, he’s simply a boy without skin whose name is Meat Boy.”¹¹⁵ This statement ran contrary to his previous social media activity hinting to the fact that Meat Boy is made of meat and, especially, cow meat. Furthermore, as an official response, the developers included Tofu Boy as a new playable character in game’s Steam release of Super Meat Boy. However, they changed his design: whereas in PETA’s version he is a strong and an attractive character, his version in Super Meat Boy is not only excruciatingly slow but also unable to perform high jumps required to complete the fast-paced levels. In the Twitter message introducing the character the developer team posted a short, aggressive-sounding message reading “ENJOY YOUR IRON DEFICIENCY!!!!” (original spelling). Despite the brutal directedness of PETA’s campaigns, the intensity of the reaction by the Meat Team seems almost inadequate. The attack on the character introduced by the company and then his redesign in such a way to emphasize

 Fred Dutton, “Team Meat Skewers PETA Spoof. Steaks Claim to Tofu Boy, Admits Spamming,” Eurogamer (blog), February 12, 2010.

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not only his lack of abilities and strength but also complete uselessness cannot be interpreted outside of the attitudes towards veg*an diets present in the mainstream American media. By ridiculing and humiliating Tofu Boy as a character and an idea, the team targeted not just PETA and the animal rights movements in general but all the people rejecting meat. The representation of veg*an food as the weaker, less potent and less effective in the strictly ludic sense, is not uncommon. Interestingly, it is one of the two contradictory patterns of ludic representation. Veg*an food seems to exist in two contradictory states: either it is used at the tutorial or introductory stages as lowlevel, easy to obtain food with low nutritious value (see Don’t Starve in which the player begins with carrots and berries) or is structured as a constraint that creates a more challenging experience: a hard-mode. Both of these reveal preconceptions towards the meatless diets, positioning them additionally as the Other—other option, other diet, other and often thus non-normative, choice.

Digital Veg*anism The formation of one’s food preferences is a complex issue that is at the same time social and extremely political, depending to a great degree on the context of one’s upbringing and current living conditions. On the global scale, the prevalence of certain flavors in different parts of the world can tell one a lot about the attitudes and beliefs towards the food and reveal whether and how (and to whom) is it accessible. In video games, however, more often the food choices are less a worldbuilding tool that helps to flesh out the characters and more often informs the mechanics and the gameplay. Nonetheless, by examining the portrayal of dietary options, with the special emphasis on the veg*anism due to its worldwide popularity, one can draw parallels between how are they portrayed in video games and in the discourses surrounding them in social media and popular culture. Although not many video games make consideration of different food preferences or food choices, the number of fan-created online lists of titles and character who could be considered veg*an points to their interest in expressing themselves in digital games. Subsequently, some realize this desire through the practice of the vegan runs, that is transgressive practices of roleplaying veg*an identities in games that allow it, while not necessarily enforcing nor expecting it. In the following section I identify three main types of veg*an characters encountered in digital games. In the discussion I focus only on the games that feature characters that possess the ability to eat or in which their food preferences are mentioned, ignoring games in which food is present but is not consumed like

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Candy Crush Saga or Fruit Ninja. Thus, in the following section I discuss the following types of a potentially veg*an character: 1) an explicit veg*an, 2) a veg*an by omission 3) a veg*an player.

An Explicit Veg*an The first category features characters who either explicitly refer to themselves as veg*an or who are directly described as such by other characters or in-game texts and narration. While such a definition encompasses a number of story-related instances, it also can relate to the way food preferences are incorporated on the ludic level. Doki Doki Literature Club! is an American horror visual novel drawing heavily from Japanese visual aesthetics developed by Team Salvato in 2017. The story follows a high school student who joins the school’s literature club and begins to develop relationships with its other four members. Despite the initial light-hearted character of the game, the game subverts the genre expectations when it turns out to be a metafictional psychological horror which mostly relies on breaking the fourth wall. This is done primarily through the character of Monica (or Monica.chr), the club’s president, who reveals herself to be a fiction-aware computer program who professes her love not to the game character but the player controlling him. She then begins to show obsessive behavior towards them, talking to them relentlessly until she is erased from the player’s computer’s game files. In one of these monologues, she identifies herself as a vegetarian and explains the reasoning behind it: Hey, did you know I’m vegetarian? Ah… I don’t mean that like I’m bragging or anything! I just thought you’d enjoy a fun fact about me. I decided to start a couple years ago after learning more about Earth’s climate… The carbon footprint of cultivating livestock is just unbelievable. Anyway, I decided it’s not much of a personal sacrifice to just stop contributing to that whole mess. What, is that so strange of a reason? Well, I guess a lot of people are more concerned about it being inhumane and all that… I don’t really care as much about that part. It’s weird, like we only care about killing the things that we personally relate to as a species. . . . I’m just saying, we’re a pretty biased species, if you think about it. Anyway, if you ever feel like making a small contribution to the planet, it doesn’t hurt to choose veggies once in a while!¹¹⁶

 Team Salvato, Doki Doki Literature Club! (Team Salvato, 2017).

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This introduction is of course interesting considering that it comes from an (evil) AI. Thus, the identification with the human race reads false and even threatening; on one hand the argumentation explains why veg*an choices are morally and ethically important, while on the other showing them as, once again, a non-normative trait subsequently serving to the character who is not human. Furthermore, the gender of Monica is not without significance. On the one hand it evokes the association between femininity and the AIs, especially those who, like Alexa and Siri, have been designed to serve humans, thus evoking the oppressive stereotypes of women as submissive and inferior. On the other hand, it emphasized the femininity of the being that has been created rather than born, through the use of another gendered stereotype that links veg*an identities with femininities. Whereas, this example shows the explicit veg*an character whose identity does not have ludic consequences, I want to also discuss games in which it can affect the gameplay through the example of State of Decay (Undead Labs 2013) and State of Decay 2 (Undead Labs 2018), two third-person action-adventure survival horror video games. At the beginning of the first game, the player controls Marcus Campbell, a store clerk who, upon a return from the fishing trip with his friend, discovers that his city, Trumbull Valley, as well as the rest of the world, has been overtaken by zombies. As they encounter other characters, they are introduced to the group of survivors hiding in the Church of Ascension. As the game progresses, the player becomes responsible for the group and to do so they not only have to ensure the safety of the non-player characters but also manage diminishing resources (including food) and balance morale and trust in the group. The player can choose the location and the way of reinforcing the base and can recruit other survivors encountered in the town. The first game includes 150 possible characters, each of whom is described by two to four traits generated from a pool of over a thousand available types. These personality traits, together with different attitudes and skills, have an impact on game events, making them important assets to the game. While the first State of Decay did not include a veg*an character, a vegan trait has been introduced to its first DLC, Lifeline, under the category “Hobby,” where it is characterized as a refusal to kill or exploit animals on moral grounds. Additionally, a vegan person becomes responsible for managing nutrition—presumably, in order to ensure the availability of veg*an products in the camp—and has two special enhancements: “Health Bonus” and “Cooking Expert” skills. Although these create a presumption that veg*an persons need to be also avid cooks, at the same time it acknowledges that for many people veg*anism is a part of their identity and community. Finally, due to its usefulness from the stra-

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tegic point of view, it is far from the mocking character of the previously discussed games. The vegan trait appears also in State of Decay 2 where once again the vegan trait is the most closely tied to the kitchen and distribution of food ratios. On one hand, it decreases the daily amount of food a character requires by 25 %, allowing the player to save resources, deeming it an extremely useful skill. On the other, vegan characters require an upgraded kitchen for the morale bonus, which might be considered a limitation on the otherwise worthy to have skill. In both instances veg*anism is of ethical nature. In the sequel the skills are described through a character remarking that “If I hadn’t been vegan before the outbreak, watching zombies feeding would have made me one.”¹¹⁷ This sentence points not only to the ethical reasoning behind the choices, but also brings it back to the aforementioned ecofeminist arguments which denounce the anthropocentric perception of the human’s place among other animals. The subversion of perspective is central to the zombie apocalypse narratives which move humans to the lower levels of the food chain.

Veg*an by Omission I use the phrase “veg*an by omission” to refer to the vast group of characters who can be considered veg*an due to the absence of the arguments to the contrary. This encompasses characters who are never showed or mentioned consuming meat, but who also never explicitly identify as veg*an. This can both refer to veg*ans of necessity whose diets are shaped by the scarcity and unavailability of meat products of their worlds and the characters who are only portrayed eating a veg*an meal, without commentary on the reason behind it. Admittedly, due to the vagueness of this description, it creates a rather large category. An example of character whose dietary choices are most likely informed by their sociopolitical situation is Jade from Ubisoft’s Beyond Good & Evil, a game that, while not considered a commercial success upon release, has since developed a large fanbase. The 2003 science fiction action-adventure game follows Jade, a photojournalist who becomes recruited by the underground resistance movement called the IRIS network to find proof of the military’s involvement with the abductions happenings on the planet Hillys. During her investigations she discovers a human trafficking operation orchestrated by the military group

 Undead Labs, State of Decay 2 (Microsoft Studios, 2018).

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under the name Alpha Sections working with the planet’s dictator and the DomZ aliens who colonized the planet several years prior. While the protagonist of the game, Jade, appears human, at the end of the game she is revealed to be a manufactured vessel for an energy source stolen from the DomZ during their invasion. For the majority of the game, her appearance is neither questioned nor commented upon, although it makes her stand out from the other encountered inhabitants of the planet, many of whom are either robotic members of Alpha Sections or human-animal hybrids. The latter include Jade’s uncle and guardian, Pey’j, who is a humanoid boar, as well as many of the children orphaned by DomZ’s attacks currently under Jade’s and Pey’j’s protection. Despite the game’s strong political focus, it also constructs the environment as the important part of the gameworld, constantly drawing the player’s attention to it. While a lot of gameplay requires Jade to sneak and fight her way through the infiltrated bases, at the same time she continues to freelance as a photojournalist for the conservation organization preoccupied with the possible extinction of species native to the planet. This means that each new species of flora and fauna can be photographed and catalogued by Jade. Thus, on one hand the game aims at emphasizing the importance of environmental awareness, but on the other it literally places Jade in the position of the passive observer hidden on the other side of the camera. While her identity makes her uniquely suited for the work at the resistance, she remains the Other, both due to her human appearances that distinguish her from her friends and foster family, but also because her interactions with the nature are mediated by her camera. Considering the above, it is surprising that food does not play a larger role in the game. The player encounters only two types of synthetic food which function as restoratives: Starkos, a synthetic bread roll that restores one heart of energy, and boxes of K-bups, pink balls similar to round bubble gum which fully restore energy. According to the in-game commercials, Starkos can be served with guacamole, which is however never consumed by Jade nor seen on-screen. Although the “synthetic” nature of this food is never explained, none of these products seem to contain meat and, thus, can be considered vegetarian. Furthermore, the themes and the setting of the game allow for the ecofeminist reading: as the majority of the population consists of animal-human hybrid, the humans are demoted from their special position. While this reading can be potentially threatened by the choice of the human-presenting protagonist, her reveal as a synthetic manufactured vessel counterpoints it. In the world in which the status of humans is equated with that of other animals, the renouncement of meat seems like a natural choice. However, Jade’s food preferences are not directly referenced which means it is impossible to assess whether Jade’s veg*anism is one of necessity (due to the shortage of food

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due to the recent war), of moral and ethical reasons (due to the prevalence of the animal hybrids around her), or if her diet only appears vegan and in this world there are other types of food including some form of meat. The veg*an omission encompasses all these possibilities.

A Veg*an Player The last category, the veg*an player, refers to the situations in which the player structures their play in such a way not to consume meat, animal products, and/ or kill animals, provided that a specific title does not require neither for the progression of the game. Writing on violence against animals in games, Erik van Ooijen (2019) noticed that the relationship between the implementation of hunger mechanics in games like Don’t Starve and Minecraft (Mojang Studios 2009) afford new motivations for killing animals, tying closely together the mechanics of hunger, hunting, and crafting. In many games, including various recent AAA action-adventure and roleplaying games, the practice of hunting is their core gameplay, which often means that one cannot complete a game without harming or consuming digital animals. In other situations, the veg*an play requires one to give up on achieving full completion or abandon specific side quests and tasks. The practices of playing through games in accordance with one’s veg*an diet are sometimes referred to as “vegan runs” and are discussed on forums in which fans discuss the best strategies and playing styles in such games as Stardew Valley, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, The Sims, Sid Meier’s Civilization VI (Firaxis Games 2016), or Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Michelle Westerlaken discussed the practice in the context of that last title and its communities in the context of the feminist reading of the Foucauldian concept of self-fashioning. According to the French philosopher, concepts like power can be negotiated, allowing one to continuously shape themselves and the performance of their identities. For Westerlaken, vegan runs are a particular example of such practices: [v]eganism is understood here as a general and interpretable ideology, not a strict set of rules. So instead of a predefined set-out challenge (such as “don’t kill anyone” (in the case of pacifist-runs) or “complete the game as fast as possible” (in the case of speedruns) the game is approached according to values that can be negotiated with. . . . it re-

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quires a constant exploration and willingness to reinvent what it means to be vegan within the specific game-world that is presented to the player.¹¹⁸

Thus, despite the lack of focus on food in games such as Assassin’s Creed III (Ubisoft Montreal 2012), the implementation of the hunting mechanic in the early parts of the game makes it impossible to complete these vegan runs, the rules of which prohibit players from killing animals and not just consuming their products and meat. On the other hand, despite the presence of meatbased food in Dishonored games, such as rat skewers or canned whale fat, the very lack of importance assigned to food which was discussed in the previous chapter allows players to go through the game without consuming it. Moreover, Westerlaken stresses the importance of the out-of-game communities connected to the playthrough in the shaping of one’s veg*an experience, arguing that “this is a crucial part in vegan-feminist practice of expansive gameplay that connects the individual experience of players to the larger sociocultural dimensions of vegan ideologies in our society.”¹¹⁹ As the players discuss their self-imposed requirements and rules, they can compare their practices with others. Unsurprisingly, the author notes how sharing accounts of one’s playthrough also can be met with vegaphobic remarks which relate to the gendered nature of stereotypes of veg*an diets.

Conclusions This chapter concludes the first and a shorter of two sections of this book that investigates how food influences the ludic structure and gameplay while embedding video game food in the context of the feminist readings and critical food studies. The majority of this book, and especially the following chapters, is written with the focus on the narrative: the way that characters interact with food, how their choice of meals shapes their relationships with each other, and how the visual representation of food adds to the creation of the safe space. However, considering that this book is the first volume that discusses food in general, it had to devote some space to food’s ludic placement and significance. After the overview of the game genres that most often are associated with food and the discussion of the way that the collection of ingredients, food preparation,

 Michelle Westerlaken, “Self-Fashioning in Action: Zelda’s Breath of the Wild Vegan Run,” Philosophy of Games Conference (Kraków, 2017): 5.  Michelle Westerlaken, “Self-Fashioning,” 9.

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and consumption are operationalized within the gameplay, this chapter has discussed the food preferences within the games, pointing towards the ways in which the games afford players the food choice within them and how the players can respond to the limitations on that choice by creating their own playthroughs and rules for the games, as it is in the case of vegan runs. In this book, I focus on how food is represented by the game creators in single-player games rather than how the players can utilize them to express themselves, but this aspect is immensely crucial too. Veg*an diets, due to their significance for the representation of gender roles and stereotypes, proves a very interesting area for players’ selfexpression.

Part 2: Cozy Cooking: Abundance, Safety, and the Aesthetic

Chapter 4 Three Tenets of Cozy Cooking Between March and September of 2020 Animal Crossing: New Horizons sold over 14.3 million copies, quickly becoming Nintendo’s bestselling title. At the time, these numbers were not surprising with March of that year marking the beginning of the global Covid-19 pandemic, causing abrupt change to the structure of everyday life and obliviating the boundaries between the public and the private spheres. The national lockdowns and new regulations caused people to selfisolate, quarantine, and, if possible, work and study from their homes. Unable to engage in many outdoor pastimes, many people who have not considered themselves gamers or whose game time has been limited due to work and other obligations and leisure options returned to games, while others started to play them for the first time. Animal Crossing’s slow pace, low difficulty levels, and the lack of threats and consequences for failure for many proved a satisfactory counterbalance to the increased stress and the overwhelming sense of lack of control over their lives and the outside circumstances. Animal Crossing series and other games characterized by deliberate slowness have been drawing the attention of game scholars and game journalists for many years now, creating an abundance of possible names proposed for this growing and broad genre. Their popularity is mirrored by the increasing number of channels and groups devoted to gathering and showcasing them, such as the Twitter account Wholesome Games which on May 26, 2020 hosted the first Wholesome Direct livestream on YouTube. It featured over 50 recently released and upcoming games falling under broadly understood category of “wholesome games.” The hosts, Jenny Windom and Josh Boykin, explained that “[a] lot of people think wholesome games are just cute and colorful, but they’re so much more than that! Wholesome games let players express love and compassion. Sometimes they’re lighthearted, but make no mistake: wholesome games can tackle even the heaviest subjects.”¹²⁰ Whereas some refer to them as “wholesome games” or “cozy games,”¹²¹ some of their characteristics have been discussed in the research concerning what has been called “ambient games,”¹²² “friendship games,”¹²³ “personal  Wholesome Games, “Wholesome direct—Indie game showcase 5. 26. 2020,” YouTube, May 26, 2020, accessed May 28, 2020.  Daniel Cook, “Cozy Games,” Lost Garden, January 24, 2018.  Larissa Hjorth and Ingrid Richardson, Ambient Play (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2020). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110716603-006

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games,”¹²⁴ “zen games,”¹²⁵ or “slow games.”¹²⁶ Since all these refer to the similar group of games, the lines between them are often difficult to establish and the preference for them is arbitrary and highly personal. Such is my own choice to lean towards the concept of “cozy games.” I use this term specifically in the sense introduced in the report published after the The Twelfth Annual Game Design Think Tank held on November 2– 5, 2017 in Texas as a part of the Project Horseshoe, an annual game developers conference. During the workshop, the participants joined efforts to offer an in-depth definition of digital game coziness resulting in a sterling report which outlines three main qualities of coziness as safety, abundance, and softness. Safety, which is a crucial feature of cozy games, refers to the absence of danger on the ludic level as well as the sense of emotional safety provided by the game’s story and characters. These games, from farming and life simulators like Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing to mobile games such as Neko Atsume: Kitty Collector (Hit Point Co. Ltd 2014) which, as the title suggests, relies entirely on collecting various cats, do not have impeding threat nor high stakes. To the contrary, the gameplay tends to be slow and repetitive and, depending on the personal play style, lacking in game-imposed time constraints not penalties for exceeding them. The second category, abundance, refers to the satisfaction of needs by ensuring that the player always possesses enough resources and that they are easy to obtain. This means that if the game requires one to collect resources, from plants and foods to crafting ingredients, they are easy to find and are quickly replenished. This is an interesting requirement considering how many genres, from survival strategy to first-person shooters, creates the sense of urgency through the scarcity of ammunition and medicine. Abundance implies that the gameworld is a safe one, offering enough items and ingredients to eliminate the stress and frustration of searching, replacing it instead with a pleasure of collecting and gathering. Finally, softness is the trait that is most closely tied to the game’s aesthetic, describing ways in which they use “strong aesthetic signals that tell players they

 Johnathan Harrington, “On Buddhist Frogs and Flower Arrangements: Out-of-Game’s Spatial Production in Friendship Games” (Kopenhagen, 2018).  Felan Parker, “Indie Game Studies Year Eleven,” in Proceedings of DiGRA 2013: Defragging Game Studies, 2013.  Navarro-Remesal, Víctor. “Meditaciones. Modos Zen, contemplación y lentitud en el videojuego.” Pensar el juego 25 (2020): 132– 139.  Tim Marsh, “Slow Serious Games, Interactions and Play: Designing for Positive and Serious Experience and Reflection,” Entertainment Computing 14 (May 1, 2016): 45 – 53.

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are in [a] low stress environment full of abundance and safety. These are gentle and comforting stimulus, where players have a lower state of arousal but can still be highly engaged and present.”¹²⁷ Thus, “softness” is used here to describe art style and design, including a warm and gentle colour palette without high contrasts; smooth transitions between gradients and colours; and environments without sharp, sudden or flashing colours and lights. Furthermore, among other visual techniques one can find the use of natural materials (e. g., wood, cotton, water, and organic materials and objects such as plants and mushrooms), which are meant to emphasize and strengthen the sense of safety by evoking the association with welcoming nature as opposed to the sterile and uncomfortable technology. Softness, then, can also be applied to sound through the incorporation of unobtrusive, ambient, and natural tones with a clear diegetic source to eliminate the potential sources of anxiety. According to Merriam-Webster dictionary, “cozy” can describe objects and spaces that are “marked by or providing contentment or comfort,” “[are] marked by the intimacy of the family or a close group,” “[are] marked by or suggesting close association or connivance,” and, thus, can describe situations (“cozy dinner with the whole family”) or, more often, enclosed spaces and architecture (especially houses, cabins and rooms). The idea of coziness tends to be more often explored in such fields as architecture or urban planning. Moreover, one can find more extensive discussions done by the researchers coming from the Scandinavian, especially Norwegian and Dutch, backgrounds where, according to Jappe Trolle Linnet who analyzed the constitutions of cozy interiorities and public spaces, the semantic field around the noun hygge and the adjective hyggelig “includes but goes far beyond the meaning of homeyness. [It] is more often used by subjects to describe their experience of a place, rather than the place as such.”¹²⁸ Furthermore, Linnet specified that in the Danish language, such understood coziness can relate not only to the design of the spaces, but also to the quality of interaction with people there, thus emphasizing the social aspect. Recognizing the connotations of the word in the spoken language and other humanities fields, I believe that coziness aptly describes the practice of creating game spaces that fulfil the need of safety and allow for a more reflexive and mindful approach. Furthermore, between the connotation of the safety of one’s home and the affirmation of the importance of nature in human life, these games place themselves in the already long tradition of games evoking  Daniel Cook, “Cozy Games,” Lost Garden, January 24, 2018.  Jeppe Trolle Linnet, “Cozy Interiority. The Interplay of Materiality and Sociality in the Constitution of Cozy 3rd Place Atmosphere,” Ambiances Environnement Sensible, Architecture et Espace Urbain (2015), 3.

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the feeling of nostalgia, and at the same time responding to the anxieties related to the climate and worldwide political changes. The current popularity and variety of independent video games exploring the themes of safety, abundance, and softness is neither sudden nor surprising. Rather, it is a result of ideas and needs that have been emerging on the Japanese market since the 1990s and the early 2000s with such titles as Harvest Moon (Amccus 1996), Boku no Natsuyasumi (Millennium Kitchen 2000), and Animal Crossing (Nintendo EAD 2001), which arguably has been accelerated by the shifts in both Asian and Western game industries resulting in what Jesper Juul referred to as the “casual revolution” in 2010. Despite the tendency to discuss video games as a homogenous group, it is important to acknowledge the difference between the development of Japanese and western games. This article follows predominantly the changes in the western game industry and the way they reflect the political and social changes occurring, especially in North America and Europe. Although Japanese games such as the aforementioned Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing are mentioned because of their crucial influence on the cozy genre, the majority of the games that are subjects of the closer analysis were developed by Western creators. As this implies, coziness is not a stable quality, but rather refers to a number of various aspects. By acknowledging the separateness of the aforementioned qualities, coziness can be understood as a gradient that is applicable, to a varying degree, in different titles and genres. While some games realize coziness in all its aspects offering short, wholesome, meditative game experiences, others might introduce coziness as the quality of a singular moment, a short interval between otherwise chaotic and fast-paced gameplay. Such “situational coziness”¹²⁹ can be spotted, for example, between Nathan and Elena in the actionadventure, mainstream Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End (Naughty Dog 2016) as they share an intimate dinner followed by a game session in front of a PlayStation. In the action-adventure game notorious for the dissonance between the likeable, pacifistic protagonist and the waves of the enemies he kills during the playercontrolled sequences, the scene allows for a significant change of pace and shows the more personal, matured character of the last main installment of the series. It is not surprising that this moment of warmth and safety begins around the dinner table, drawing from the emotional meaning of food and the association between the home-made meal and domestic intimacy.

 Agata Waszkiewicz and Martyna Bakun, “Towards the Aesthetics of Cozy Video Games,” Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds 12, no. 3 (2021): 235.

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Considering the emotional weight of food, it is not surprising how often cozy games feature it as part of their most defining mechanics. Food preparation from planting and harvesting to cooking and baking lies at the core of mainstream and independent farming simulators games such as FarmVille and Stardew Valley, many of which introduce a character who, previously having lived in a larger city, moves to an abandoned farmhouse. There, their task is to repair the house and create a new life for themselves while bringing the farm to its previous glory in the process. Despite these similarities in the setting, Stardew Valley has a stronger focus on a story than FarmVille and affords more gameplay possibilities to the players. These differences are also visible in regards to food: where in Farmville the majority of the food is prepared with the intention of selling them, in Stardew Valley it has more diversified functions from a main restorative required to progress through certain parts of the game (for example, it is necessary to progress far through mines where one can harvest necessary resources) to its role in building the relationships with other villagers. Many of the games discussed in this book can be described by one or more of the cozy aspects even despite not belonging to a cozy genre. The careful art of food preparation and the emotional impact of shared food often results in significant overlaps between slow and meditative play and the appearance and importance of food to the narrative. Of course, not all digital game food is cozy. Some of it is disgusting and rotten, some strives for realism with its artistic style corresponding with the overall aesthetic of the game. However, I believe that in the last decade one can speak of a certain “cozy turn,” especially in regards to games focused on food. As the lines between independent and mainstream games become more and more blurred, coziness can be seen in the latter as well. Parting from the way certain Western action-adventure titles attempt to strip food from its emotional value by considering it in strictly pragmatic terms (see chapter three), some big-budget titles approach food and cooking with cozy tenderness. In the following sections of this chapter, I discuss the three main elements of cozy food by juxtaposing a mainstream, big-budget game developed in Japan, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, with the independent, Western Spiritfarer (Thunder Lotus Games 2020), in order to identify similarities in their approach to food.

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Food Abundance in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild When The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was released in 2017, it seemed to have delivered on the developers’ promise to innovate the genre of open-world games. Indeed, its release as the defining game of the brand new Nintendo Switch console marked both a departure from the previous installments of the franchise (which currently includes 19 games) and a significant development of the open world genre. The player controls Link who, having awoken from a hundred-year long slumber with no memories, is a famous knight and a protector of powerful and beloved Princess Zelda of Hyrule kingdom. After a failed attempt to fight Calamity Ganon, a monstrous creature of darkness, Zelda sealed her hero in a stasis to save his life and grant the kingdom one more chance against the evil. While waiting for Link’s return, she stayed in the castle to stop Ganon from destroying the kingdom and the world. Thus, the story follows a seemingly simple, if not cliché, format: the amnestic hero explores the land to gather weapons, skills, and allies that will allow him to defeat the villain and rescue the princess. However, it is not the story that distinguishes the game from others, but the freedom it grants the players as well as its focus, despite the epic scope of the adventure, on the many small and intimate moments of almost meditative peace found throughout the long journey. Many researchers and critics repeatedly praised the developers for remaining true to their promise of delivering what they referred to as a brand new type of an “open air adventure.” The game offers almost unrestricted experience, allowing players to choose how they want to engage with the world, whether they prefer to challenge encountered enemies or sneak past them, or even whether they want to take time to explore the world or head straight to the Hyrule Castle to challenge Ganon. Both Link’s stamina and durability of his weapons are crucial statistics in the game, introducing elements of strategy into the combat and increasing its difficulty. It is not unusual to use several weapons during a single monster encounter: the weapons break after limited number of hits and it is possible to have them knocked out of the character’s hands after taking a hit. Similarly, while Link can climb any surface he approaches, he needs to rest before his stamina bar completely depletes—otherwise, his arms give in and he falls down, sometimes with fatal consequences. It is true that Legend of Zelda games are notorious for their high difficulty and rather unforgiving gameplay—in Breath of the Wild this manifests particularly strongly in the context of combat. However, it has been recognized by researchers, game critics, and players alike for the way it emphasizes slowness and freedom of exploration and how it uses its rhythm and elements such as food and cooking in construction of player-game intimacy.

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The same freedom applies to Link’s diet. As was already mentioned in other chapters, although food plays an important role as restoratives and enhancements and is thus crucial for progression, it is possible to both avoid eating meat and killing animals for it. Many food items can be either consumed raw in which situation they restore small portions of Link’s life, or as a part of a cooked meal, when they release their additional enhancing qualities such as stealth, stamina, speed, or attack boost. Some other foods, like spicy peppers, after being added to a dish, offer Link temporary cold resistance, allowing him to enter snow-covered portions of the map even when he wears nothing but his weapons and underwear. Despite its combat-oriented gameplay, Breath of the Wild features several cozy elements from an accessible and safe play space (paradoxically, despite its fairly difficult combat system) to the warm colors with soft shadows and soothing music. Unlike survival games in which food is scarce and is a constant source of stress, food should be in abundance. Although Link needs the enhancement and restorative power of his meals, he does not suffer hunger. This has a crucial impact on the pace of the exploration which can remain calm and relaxed while attentively observant. I believe this can be understood further through the context of the hierarchy of needs as developed by Abraham Maslow. Described in the 1943 paper “A theory of Human Motivation,” the theory organizes human needs into five categories represented typically as a pyramid to represent the way the human motivation tends to progress. For Maslow, the needs progress from basic (physiological and safety), through psychological (belonging and esteem) to self-actualization or self-fulfillment needs. This means that unless the “lower” needs are satisfied, one cannot seek to fulfil the “higher ones.” Although the model was immediately criticized and Maslow himself admitted that it lacks scientific evidence, it remains a popular way of describing the progression of human motivation. For example, Don’t Starve, like other survival games, creates its tension by depriving the player character of these resources: when Winston appears in the wilderness the only things in his possessions are his clothes and from the very first moment his death seems inevitable as it is a question of how long he can survive rather than if. Depending on the randomly generated map, the initial area can be rich in fruit and vegetables but this is not guaranteed and hunger is a constant threat. The food in Breath of the Wild, to the contrary, creates a safe environment through its abundance. While Kaelan Doyle-Myerscough recognizes that Breath of the Wild can create a sense of overwhelmedness due to the number of threats and the unforgiving statistics and combat difficulty, they acknowledge how the game uses such small moments, both of safety and peril, as tools of creating intimate affect

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which they understand in terms of “a precarious, synchronous orientation in the present, made pleasurable and terrifying by the sensation of nakedness or revealing of oneself.”¹³⁰ As Doyle-Myerscough argue, the game constructs this intimacy by directing players’ attention towards the nature and encouraging a mindful and attentive mode of play. The game continuously encourages the player to slow down and focus on the encountered wildlife—this is done, for example, through the implementation of the in-game camera which is introduced within a story quest. As Link is asked to search for the locations from the unlocked photographs (tied to his lost memory from a hundred years ago), the player is given the ability to photograph and catalogue encountered animals, plants, and even objects. The incorporation of the camera as a device mediating the interaction with the world changed the way one experiences the world, mimicking the closeness to nature which facilitates a more peaceful—even if not entirely pacifistic—playthrough, with many small relaxing moments of coziness between the quests. A very similar carefulness is applied to the process of cooking. Although Link always needs to prepare for his adventures, preferably with a couple of snacks and a lunch ready in his inventory at any moment, the first thing that a player notices is how rich in resources the world of Hyrule is despite the darkness permanently looming over the horizon. Due to its open-world setting, it is not surprising that Breath of the Wild is one of those titles in which both the preparation and cooking are crucial. The player is thus responsible for both gathering ingredients and cooking them into various dishes. In the most part, food is found in the wilderness. This includes apples which can be picked directly both from the wild trees and those within villages and farms and wild-growing mushrooms in forests and at the mountain sides. Additionally, animals are creatures that can be hunted for meat—in the third chapter I discuss in more detail the affordances of the game for the play that respects the meatless diets of its players. Hence, gathering of the ingredients constitutes the most difficult and lengthy part of the process. At the same time, the process often is characterized by randomness as the players would pick up food that they encounter, hoarding it in case it proves useful in the future. On the other hand, cooking itself is fairly simple as it does not require the player’s input beyond the choice of which ingredients should be mixed together. After being thrown into the crockpot, a short animation plays during which both the player and Link pause, watching together the foods joyfully bounce around the stone pan to a happy rhythm. When that short dance is finished, the dish is presented in

 Kaelan Doyle-Myerscough, “The Path That Lies…,” 3.

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a separate pop-up window including a detailed delicious-looking illustration of the ready meal, its name, and its description including perks. Although this animation is triggered each time, many players—myself included—find it reassuring and pleasant rather than frustrating and boring. As Doyle-Myerscough points out in her analysis, it is one of the many brief moments of tenderness that brings Link closer to the player. When Link is cooking, the player temporarily has to give up the control over him, restricted to the role of a witness—for a brief moment, the player is observing Link as he watches the food being made. What is more, Doyle-Myerscough notices how in this moment the player’s gaze is equated with the camera and how the ability to move it around and point it towards his face and the food structures the closeness with the character: “Link’s movements and expressions become similarly calming, and I find myself angling the camera slightly differently with each dish, testing out different shots and perspectives on Link’s face, the food, and the area around us.”¹³¹ The coziness that manifests in Breath of the Wild can be surprising. Characterized by high difficulty levels and the non-accessible control systems, together with the requirements of high precision and skill in order to progress, the franchise seems to be anything but cozy. However, through the aforementioned focus on meditative being-in-the-world, the slow paces and the potential for the unrestricted exploration as well the cozy aesthetics discussed in the last part of this chapter, the game does embody many of the crucial aspects of coziness. As stressed above, food is particularly important in establishing this quality: through its abundance especially in the initial part of the game it creates a sense of safety and through the way it encourages players to witness the cooking together with Link, it strengthens the bond between them and the character. That is not to say that the player is never placed in the situations in which they are lacking resources and in which, if they planned poorly and find themselves without dishes with specific enhancing abilities, will not find specific areas difficult or even impossible to cross. However, the cozy elements are present in many moments of the game. What is more, the aspect of creating intimacy through food is another important aspect, characteristic not only to this particular titles but other big-budget triple-A titles belonging to the immensely popular Japanese series such as Monster Hunter franchise—most notably Monster Hunter: World (Capcom 2018)—and

 Kaelan Doyle-Myerscough, “The Path That Lies Ahead: Intimacy and Overwhelmedness in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild,” in Proceedings of the 2019 DiGRA International Conference: Game, Play and the Emerging Ludo Mix (Kyoto, 2019), 10.

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Final Fantasy series—with the emphasis on Final Fantasy XV (Square Enix 2016) which is discussed in detail in the sixth chapter. In all these games food is beautiful and cooking, as Barthes would have it, transforms itself into a situation. In all these series cooking is used to flesh out the gameworld but it also is always a social situation, closely tied to emotions. It is important to once again embed these games in the context of Japanese food studies and the sociocultural importance attached to food in Japan as well as many other Asian countries. Although, arguably, food in all three games could be considered cozy, it is especially true in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild due to how it fits other devices that structure intimacy and meditative mindfulness within it.

Emotional Safety of Gendered Food Labor in Spiritfarer One of the games showcased during the Wholesome Direct was Spiritfarer, an independent game developed by Thunder Lotus Games and released in 2020. Described on its Steam page as a “cozy management game about dying,” its gameplay combines elements of management and life simulator games with a puzzle platformer. As the game features several of the already discussed features of coziness such as abundance of food and the accessibility of the cooking minigames, food serves here primarily as the means of strengthening bonds with others. In the following section I discuss how the approach to cooking in Spiritfarer establishes the world as cozy, placing it in the broader context of cozy games. The story follows Stella, a newly appointed Spiritfarer, a supernatural being whose task it is to guide souls of recently departed creatures on their way to the afterlife. The task, bestowed upon Stella and her cat Daffodil, is not an easy one: the spirits cannot move on without help, often bound to this world by unfinished tasks and desires. When encountered by Stella, they reveal their true form and stay as guests on the ferry. Some share personal bonds with the protagonist, knowing her from the previous life and quickly make themselves comfortable at home in the new situation. They provide help and advice which allows the players to discover new parts of the map and unlock new skills and upgrades. As the game progresses, Stella’s ship grows and evolves, with new levels of building sprouting on the upper deck, creating elaborate towers connected by the maze of ladders that seem to be held together only by the Spiritfarer’s magic. Days in the afterlife are short and are filled with the numerous tasks one needs to fill to ensure that the guests remain content. Despite their ghostly nature, they maintain earthly needs: they sleep, they become lonely or sad (but can be cheered up with a hug), and suffer hunger. What is more, they have strong preferences, dislikes, and even quirks in regards to their choice of food. For ex-

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ample Summer, a nature-loving snake, is a strict vegan and will not eat any living creature while Gwen, an anthropomorphic deer and a first spirit met by Stella, refuses to eat the same dish twice but has a fondness of comfort food and adores coffee. Thus, the main function of food is that of sustenance since the characters experience progressing hunger which visibly affects their mood and overall well-being. However, unlike food that Link cooks, here it is only the non-player character guests who can consume it, while neither Stella nor Daffodil seem to experience the same needs—for them, even sleep is optional as it can be used as means of speeding up time rather than a necessity. The difference between the player character as the sole food provider as opposed to the guests as the sole consumers is an interesting one. Although characters eat because of what they experience as the physiological need—even though, as spirits, it might as well be a psychological manifestation of their reluctance to move on—its primary role is to strengthen the emotional bonds between the characters. Without a doubt, as Sarah Seats would have it, food can be seen here as a language and eating—an exchange. This is especially visible considering that rather than hunger, food seems to affect the mood and well-being giving food-sharing a similar status in relationship forming as physical closeness and hugs. Breath of the Wild is characterized by openness and freedom of exploration; on the micro-scale it comprises of the series of repetitive, smaller activities from horse-riding, puzzle solving, and, of course, cooking. Spiritfarer, a game created on a much smaller scale, also treats cooking as one of many such smaller activities that flesh out the world and create bonds between characters. The main character engages in a number of mundane activities, many of which revolve around the production and preparation of food, even if the part of the process taking place in the kitchen is fairly straightforward. Similarly to such games as Farmville or Stardew Valley, most ingredients used for food are produced by the protagonist: fields and vegetable garden are among the first additions to the ship, while the vast ocean offers a steady supply of fish, squid, and shellfish (scraped directly from the ship’s side). Once having gathered all the ingredients, it is possible to experiment with them in the kitchen in order to obtain one of almost a hundred possible dishes. These are additionally categorized according to category (e. g., plain, comfort food, acquired taste, healthy, dessert, salad, or breakfast) and size (snack, small, regular, or large). Different dishes vary depending on the time they need to spend in the oven, but do not require any additional activities from the player who can decide to leave the kitchen whatsoever for the required period of time to attend to other needs (as long as they come back on time to prevent burning the food).

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Thus, cooking in both Breath of the Wild and Spiritfarer bears significant similarities as they rely on gathering the ingredients more than their actual mixing, and, once the process has started, enforce the players to wait. In the case of the former, its purpose is to ensure the meditative reflection and possibly decrease the distance between the player and the character but in Spiritfarer cooking can be considered an ambient activity in the sense that it continues without requirement of the player’s immediate attention. It is difficult to look at this difference without considering the gender of both protagonists. While Stella’s responsibilities include both those that are considered stereotypically feminine, like waving fabrics and cooking, and masculine, like sewing wood and taking care of the ship maintenance and upgrades, she does not escape the stereotypes of her gender. This is not to say that Spiritfarer is not an inclusive and diverse game. To the contrary, like many wholesome and cozy games it ensures diversity of the characters’ stories without privileging any of them. Considering the main theme of the game, it is not surprising that many of the characters have difficult stories to share and Stella is not unique amongst them, having passed away young due to cancer. When her past is gradually revealed, it turns out that both her life after and before death revolve around caring for others as she used to be a nurse who worked with terminally ill patients. Thus, in her afterlife she continues the role of the caretaker by putting others’ needs ahead of her own. Stella does not have to remain in the kitchen, let alone keep looking on the stove while the cooking is taking place; instead, it is encouraged for her to use the time to fish, check up on other guests, or tend to a garden. Hence, the gameplay consists of a number of activities that can be completed one by one or parallelly. This multitasking is of course characteristic to several genres, including timemanagement or farming simulators, tying closely with the discussion from chapter two regarding cooking genres and the analysis of the way the casual games acknowledged the fragmented time of many women whose domestic labor still often remains unrecognized. In the sense, many cozy games uphold the construction that allows for short moments of interrupted play. The game fits this structure by offering a number of short activities with the possibility to save and quit the game at almost any moment, making it a perfect title to be played in-between other tasks. This seems true also for Stella whose entire existence revolves around helping her guests. In the first chapter I have discussed the concept of playbour, evoked especially in the context of farming simulators which romanticize the physical labor. On the other hand, researchers such as Aubrey Anable, Ian Bogost, Jesper Juul, and Shira Chess to name a few, wrote about the ways mobile and independent games challenge the notions of boredom as an undesirable

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and unproductive state. Currently, with the popularity of games such as FarmVille, Stardew Valley, or Animal Crossing, the attractiveness of the gameplay based on fulfilling repetitive, mundane, and even boring tasks no longer tends to be questioned. Boredom in such games can be associated both with the repetitiveness of the tasks and the low rhythm of the game. Thus, both games discussed in this chapter entertain the intersections between food and boredom in regards to food in different ways. Where for Breath of the Wild, the lack of time constraints and regulations towards the ways food is to be prepared can point towards the boredom as part of mindful, meditative way of being-in-the-(game)world, in Spiritfarer the tasks are repetitive but because of their number and the quick changes within the day and night cycle, the player is encouraged to multitask. Cooking, however, can also be boring because it can take a long time during which the player is not allowed to intervene—opening the oven before the time is up results in the cancellation of the process. Whereas Breath of the Wild does encourage players to embrace boredom, Spiritfarer structures boredom as something to be avoided. Rather than stay and watch food become ready in the oven, one is expected to leave the kitchen and tend to a garden, fish, talk to the guests, or take part in one of many other activities. The difference between the two seem impossible to understand without the consideration of gendered context of women’s continuous labor.

Cozy Aesthetics of Food The last category that is crucial to this understanding of cozy as a distinctive genre focuses on the art. Since the aesthetics of food are a subject of the sixth chapter, I want to briefly draw attention to the way the two aforementioned games validate food through their visual presentation. Despite the discussed difference, both games share a similar approach to cooking, especially in the ludic context. The main focus in the cooking gameplay is placed on collecting ingredients which need to be combined in a specially designated space in more or less random order. While the food items are processed and made into a ready dish, they do not require a direct input from the player who in both cases has to wait until the dish is ready, with the main difference laying in the conceptualization of this waiting and the lack of permission for the positive boredom in the case of Spiritfarer. When the process is completed, the dishes are shown as a 2D illustration imagining them on a plate (the use of which is not hinted upon during the ludic part of the process) with an appropriate description. All of the meals look luscious and scrump-

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tious, with breath-taking detail that every time makes me stop for a moment to just admire it [Figure 3].

Figure 3: Screenshots presenting Stella taking out dishes from the oven (left) and its representation in the inventory (right).

In Breath of the Wild, the dish is announced in a pop-up screen and is later accessible from the inventory and its presentation features an illustration, a name, visual representation of the function of food (e. g., the number of hearts representing the efficiency of the health restoration), and a brief description which, while mostly concentrating on functionality, also emphasize their taste and aesthetic qualities. Let’s consider for a moment Energizing Mushroom Skewer, a fairly simple dish prepared from easy to find Stamella Shrooms. The picture presents five mushrooms (the maximum number of ingredients that can be used for one meal) held together by a wooden skewer—the same picture is used in few other mushroom-based dishes so it is the description that makes it unique: “Instantly restores some of your Stamina. A simple roasted skewer packed with delicious mushrooms. Its colorful presentation heightens the appeal.”¹³² Thus, the majority of the text is devoted to the visual aspect of the food, emphasizing that is not only nutritious but also beautiful and artful. Similarly, Sneaky Steamed Fish, a slightly more complex dish requiring two different ingredients (Hyrule Bass and Blue Nightshade flower), comes with the following description: “Increases your ability to sneak. A refined dish made by wrapping a fresh fish in fragrant wild grass and cooking it.”¹³³ As these two examples show, the descriptions are not long but yet they structure the perception of the dishes as sophisticated or “elaborate.” Despite the relative simplicity of the process—considering, for example, that some of the most beautiful and useful dishes can be created from one or two ingredients—the image and description present it as more sophisticated cuisine thus validating the process and constructing Link as an apt cook.

 Nintendo, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Nintendo, 2017).  The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

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This process and the use of visuals is almost completely mirrored in Spiritfarer. Where the process itself is simple enough, ready dishes are just as stunning and luscious as the dishes from Legend of Zelda. Painted with rich colors and a stunning attention to detail and light they stand out from the character and location designs which, while also gorgeous, tend to have less elaborate shadows. The information provided with the food in the menu is shorter and varies between dishes but in a similar way often draws attention to the refined character of the dishes, proving that Stella is not an amateur cook. Heat-Treated Crab, a one-ingredient meal of regular size that belongs to the “fine dining” type, is described as “a delicious fine snow crab cooked with the simplest culinary treatment” while Steamed Shellfish, another meal prepared from just one, easily obtainable ingredient, is “a simple yet delicious shellfish meal, for the finest palates.”¹³⁴ However, many of the dishes in Spiritfarer represent simple dishes from cereal bowls, popcorn, or hot milk to various cakes, pancakes, and pizza. Here, the descriptions are sometimes more humorous (e. g., “I don’t think it counts as fruit anymore…”¹³⁵ for Fruit Candy) and some emphasize the pleasure of eating comfort food (“Eat by the bucket” or “Just. One. More.”¹³⁶). While even the simplest dishes look stunning enough to be served in the best restaurants, these diverse descriptions maintain the feeling of a home-cooked meal. This is further emphasized by the descriptions written in the form of cooking book recipes: for example, plain Omlette features this text: “You can put literally anything you want in this. But this one contains none of it.”¹³⁷ These more personalized remarks structure all of the recipes as personal notes created by Stella as she works, increasing the scope of the narrative cooking process to outside of the player’s contributions. Although the softness described at the beginning of the chapter as the tenet of coziness entails pastel colors and soft lights without strong contrasts, as both these games show, it does not have to denote simplicity. The images are artistic, and their softness seems to be granted by the painting-like quality. The visual lushness of these dishes makes up for the lack of the smell and taste, ensuring that each and every meal is unforgettable.

   

Thunder Lotus Games, Spiritfarer (Thunder Lotus Games, 2020). Spiritfarer. Spiritfarer. Spiritfarer.

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Conclusions The chapter introduced the concept of coziness in the context of games that reject the notion that in order to be enjoyable, games need to be fast, difficult, and pose constant challenges to the players. Instead, the quality of coziness ensures the safety of play, the abundance of resources, and the satisfaction of the lower needs of the characters (and, by extension, the player’s), as well as the softness of the colors, shadows, and shapes. I aimed to show how all these qualities can be emphasized and manifested through the in-game portrayal of food and cooking. Although quite often considered the quality of independent, shorter titles, cozy food can also be encountered in the mainstream and big-budget productions, especially of Japanese origin—this is not surprising considering the sociocultural significance of food and the focus on its visual aesthetics. Through the rest of the book I make continuous use of the methodology presented here, using the coziness as the most crucial theory that I use to link the video game worldbuilding with representation of food in media. I do not claim that it is the only way in which the two can be made, nor do I insist on the fact that this terminology has to replace others that are already used by game scholars. I appreciate the concept of coziness, because I personally find it both interesting, fitting, and defined in enough detail that allows its analysis within gameplay, visuals, and narrative. The following chapters discuss how coziness manifests through food within the video game world and relationships, from the ways in which specific locations become associated with it to how it is evoked through the interpersonal rituals, and, finally, through how food is portrayed.

Chapter 5 Coffeehouses as the Spaces of Safety There is a sense of urgency in Sebastian Castellanos’ movements as he pushes against the heavy door with a gun still firmly positioned in his hand. He is exhausted and possibly wounded, having made his way through the waves of monsters populating the nightmare reality. It feels like there is no end to the fight, but he knows that his daughter is still alive, trapped somewhere out there. He will not stop before he finds her, no matter how many monsters he has to face. The door squeaks and he steps into the room, readying himself for a fight. But the room has a certain quietness around it to which Sebastian is not accustomed to. There are no monsters inside and despite the shabby interior, the place feels… safe. For a moment it is difficult to place his finger on this feeling until he catches the unmistakable smell, a delicious, delicious smell of a freshly brewed coffee. He reached the Safe House. Just this one moment, he is safe. One would think that this instant coffee is not remarkable in the slightest, brewed in the cheap pot that one can find in every police station and every office around. But it is hot and, as the steam raises from the mug, he can already taste the rich flavor and the strength of caffeine. He takes a moment to savor it and he sighs, as the hot beverage slowly brings warmth to his bones. He immediately feels better: his health is restored. The above scene describes one of several moments from The Evil Within 2 (Tango Gameworks 2017), a third-person survival horror video game. In the game, Safe Houses are accessible areas in which the player can take a break from combat, save the game, upgrade weapons and craft items, or restore their health by brewing and drinking coffee. Each time Sebastian finds and uses the coffee maker, a short animation plays, showing him enjoying the beverage. Through the visual representation of the coffee’s taste, the game affords it a narrative significance beyond a purely ludic function as a restorative, affording a peaceful moment in the otherwise fast-paced and intense gameplay. This example is notable because it associates coffee and, even more importantly, spaces in which it can be drank, with both physical and emotional safety. Whereas in The Evil Within 2, it is the coffee machine itself that arguably changes the emotional meaning of the space around it, this chapter discusses the ways coffeehouses specifically can be coded as liminal spaces that ensure safety against the dangers of the outside world. In the Project Horseshoe report on coziness, quite a substantial portion of discussion is dedicated to cozy locations, which “are centered on leisure, practihttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110716603-007

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cality, ritual, history, and familiarity.”¹³⁸ What is more, coziness can relate to such places as: [s]helters from storms, roofs from rain or harsh sun, or even a garden inside a bustling city make a place of everyday self-care. || Sociable yet private, discrete 3rd spaces separate from responsibility or ‘work’: bars, cafes, retreats, libraries, cabins, gardens. || Transition spaces without danger or obligation: trains, backseat of a car, slow-moving spacecraft || . . . Places that fill basic needs, including food, rest, warmth, and opt-in sociability. They should include visible places to comfortably sit, eat, drink, and view beauty. || . . . Spaces can become cozy once danger is no longer present: an arena where a boss fight used to be can become a cozy playground for celebration and bonding, or a cozy environment can be a goal for exploring part of a map.¹³⁹

Although, as the above quotation suggests, the spaces of coziness can vary, it is interesting how persistently images of places related to food and drinking emerge. Cafés and coffee shops, together with teahouses or bookstores, are what are considered in urban planning as “third spaces,” that is social surroundings separated from the domestic (e. g., houses) and public (e. g., workplaces) environments. As such, they are important structures in the process of community building and are often used by marginalized groups—including immigrants, refugees, people of oppressed races and ethnicities as well as genders and sexualities—to find their communities and create a sense of the belonging in the larger cityscape. As I have already discussed in the previous chapter, coziness is not a stable, uniform quality. It does not need to be a quality of the entire game title and can be realized by any of the game’s elements, including gameplay (when it denotes lack of dangerous encounters and threats), story (through inclusive and supportive characters), or aesthetic (through the implementation of soft colors and the lack of surprising and sudden sounds). In Evil Within 2, coziness is instead a quality of individual situations and specific places: safe havens which provide refuge and escape, contrasting with the discomfort and danger provided of the main gameplay. The use of the hot beverage to create a space of warmth and safety amidst the intense fighting sequences can be both surprising and considered appropriate, relying on the meaning ascribed to the ritual-like practices of drinking coffee in Western cultures. Coffee has undoubtedly gained itself a recognition in popular culture both due to its rich flavors and its impact on one’s energy levels. Unsurprisingly, Sebastian drinks it for this second purpose. However, at the same time, the softness  Daniel Cook, “Cozy Games.”  Daniel Cook, “Cozy Games.”

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in his movements and the pause he allows himself to smell and taste the beverage signalize that it is more than just a stimulant: it connects him to the mundane and safe life before being pulled into the nightmare dimension, and anchors him in the present, allowing a moment of almost meditative peace before he has to continue the fight. Interestingly, this association between coffeehouses and tea places and safety and coziness has been visible in several games in the aforementioned Wholesome Direct which, unsurprisingly considering its focus on independent games, featured several management games. Games like Pekoe (Kitten Cup Studio 2022), advertised as “cat-filled tea-making simulator about taking the time for self-care and connecting with what makes you happy,” or Teacup (Smarto Club 2021), in which a frog searches for ingredients for her tea party, direct the focus to the social and cultural value ascribed to drinking these beverages. Drinks and drinking in games are without doubt less common than solid food and eating. Thus, it is interesting to note the prevalence of the former in the context of cozy worldbuilding. Since at the time of writing this book Pekoe is still in production, I decided to focus on in-game coffeehouses as places of safety by tracing the origin of such associations in culture and asking why specific foods become synonymous with coziness and safety.

In a Pursuit of Authenticity, One Coffee Bean at the Time Writing about the changing coffee culture in the United States, Jonathan Gold, a Pulitzer winning food critic, wrote about its “three waves:” [t]he first wave of American coffee culture was probably the 19th-century surge that put Folgers on every table, and the second was the proliferation, starting in the 1960s at Peet’s and moving smartly through the Starbucks grande decaf latte, of espresso drinks and regionally labeled coffee. We are now in the third wave of coffee connoisseurship, where beans are sourced from farms instead of countries, roasting is about bringing out rather than incinerating the unique characteristics of each bean, and the flavor is clean and hard and pure.¹⁴⁰

This “third wave,” which according to Gold began around the year 2002, was characterized by the creation of and rise in popularity of the independent coffeehouses opposite the big chains like Starbucks or Costa Coffee. These independ-

 Jonathan Gold, “La Mill: The Latest Buzz,” LA Weekly (blog), March 12, 2008, accessed July 24, 2020.

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ent cafés emphasize the intimate atmosphere that includes the personal relationship between the customer and the barista, prioritizing the experience of drinking coffee (its taste, smell, and texture) over the impersonal character of the chain restaurants. In the analysis of these third wave coffeehouses, Manzo additionally notices that “the coffee subculture puts great stock in one’s status as expert, artisan and connoisseur… at the level of the grower, the roaster, the barista, the home hobbyist, and even the customer, and thus the third wave comprises an energetic cadre of members amenable to telling their stories.”¹⁴¹ This last element is of special significance in the context of the narrative game experiences that choose coffeehouses for their setting. The accessibility of the sophisticated, high-quality coffee has allowed for the creation of the connoisseur customers and acknowledged the skill required for preparing coffee and the artistic abilities that can manifest in the creation of latte art featuring designs on drinks with foamed milk. Thus, the significance of choosing the right coffee (one that is high-quality and visually aesthetic) becomes crucial in the search for “authenticity,” a term which in the recent years has been as popular as problematic. As Juul remarks at the very beginning of Handmade Pixels. Independent Video Games and the Quest for Authenticity, despite a seeming understanding of what one means when referring to the “independent games,” the concept is rarely specified. Instead, he recognizes at least three dimensions in which games can be considered independent: financial (when the game is financed by the developer themselves rather than a bigger company), aesthetic (pointing to the use of a specific style and design that sets the game apart from mainstream games, often pixel art, low-poly 3D art, or 2D art), or cultural (especially in the context of games with the focus on the representation of the experiences of marginalized groups, offering critique of cultural, political, and social patterns). He interprets these games as antimodern, after T. J. Jackson Lears understanding this concept as “a feeling that the modern world has gone wrong (…), that the soul of something has been lost, that things have gone too far; that the world has become too anonymous, too large in scale, too rational, and lost much of its meaning.”¹⁴² The pursuit of authenticity manifest in many layers of the production of the independent games from longing for the old production methods and styles business model to the accuracy with which they follow mainstream conventions  John Manzo, “‘Third-Wave’ Coffeehouses as Venues for Sociality: On Encounters between Employees and Customers – ProQuest,” The Qualitative Report 20, no. 6 (2015): 749.  Jesper Juul, Handmade Pixels: Independent Video Games and the Quest for Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2019), 8.

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and subvert them. Often, they are referred to in the context of visuals—for example, pixel art is often considered as a carrier of nostalgic value for the games from the 1990s. However, this pursue of authenticity, which is created and obtained by careful strategizing and a process of mimicry, can lead to what Julia Straub calls “paradox of authenticity,” posing the question of whether it is possible to manufacture the feeling of authenticity and whether the exploitation of nostalgia for the vague and unspecified “better times” does not include, by default, a certain degree of fakeness and forcefulness. At the very beginning of her book Paradoxes of Authenticity: Studies on a Critical Concept, Straub uses the example of the gold bowl from the novel of the same title by Henry James in which a pair marvels at it but decides against buying it because of the expected flaws it might possess. She then offers this delightful description: [i]f authenticity had to be conceived of as material object, it would be a Jamesian golden bowl. It would attract passers-by, luring them back for second or third looks, perhaps even tempting them to enter the shop. Eventually, they would refrain from buying the bowl since a closer inspection would reveal that it is split. A fragile object, though pleasing to the beholder, this bowl is a risky purchase. Similarly, authenticity is a concept that lost its innocence long time ago; by mentioning it, one automatically feels compelled to issue a caveat or two.¹⁴³

While the recognition of such paradoxical nature of authenticity is important for the broader discussion and for drawing comparisons between the medium of independent digital games and the aesthetic and character of many of the independently owned coffeehouses, the very strife for authenticity is why these spaces create the sense of safety and, by extension, coziness.

Let’s Talk about Coffee One brief look at the lists of coffee-themed games on Steam or Nintendo Store already lets one divide these titles according to the two quite contradictory associations with coffee prevalent in the popular culture: one which frames it through its qualities as a stimulant and the other which recognizes its associations with mood improvements and relaxation. Whereas the former focuses on the behavioral change caused by coffee and, thus, tends to emphasize qualities

 Julia Straub, ed., Paradoxes of Authenticity: Studies on a Critical Concept (Bielefeld: Transcritpt Verlag, 2012), 10.

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that are not consistent with the concept of coziness such as high alertness, high energy, and sometimes even physical activity and violence (e. g., beat ’em up Coffee Crisis developed by Mega Cat Studios in 2018 in which baristas use the power of coffee and heavy metal to fight against an alien invasion) the latter emphasizes the emotional associations with coffee due to its social role. That second case, investigated in more detail in this chapter, is hardly limited to digital games and has been coded as inherently American in such sitcoms as Friends, which popularized coffeehouses as places of meeting with friends. What is worth noticing is that in this sense a similar role often is performed by bars and pubs, as alcohol also plays a dual role as a behavior-altering substance and as a tool use to strengthen social bonds.¹⁴⁴ The function of the coffeehouse as the space of safety is a theme appearing in various digital game genres. In the critically acclaimed Persona 5 (P-Studio 2016), Café Leblanc serves not only as the main hub where the characters can meet and regroup while not battling demons but it also allows the player characters to try their own skills as baristas and brew their own coffee, gaining skill points in the process, offering them a slow-paced and safe mini-game different from the many other parts of the gameplay. Additionally, coffeehouses and taverns alike are crucial places throughout several of Assassin’s Creed games, with Café Theatre in Paris deserving of special mention as not only a safe location but also one where Arno, the protagonist of Assassin’s Creed Unity (Ubisoft Montreal 2014), can train and gain new skills and exchange information with other members of Brotherhood. In other games, like the previously discussed Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator, it plays an important role as a location that facilitates the development of the emotional relationships between the characters. Shortly after arriving to the new house, Dad and Amanda decide to explore the neighborhood and almost immediately turn their steps towards an independent, cozy coffee shop run by Mat Sella, one of the dateable single fathers. The Coffee Spoon, described as “a cute little place on the corner,”¹⁴⁵ can be considered independent in several

 It would seem that a very similar status of a safe haven is often granted to bars and other spaces providing alcohol. Some of the mechanics and storytelling devices discussed in this chapter can be found also in such independent games as The Red Strings Club (Deconstructeam 2018), as well as the two games that, due to their accidental similarity, have been put in the same universe by their respective creators: VA-11 HALL-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action (Sukeban Games 2016) and 2064: Read Only Memories (MidBoss 2015). Because of the space constraints and the difference in sociocultural contexts of the practices relating to drinking alcohol, I have decided to omit them from the discussion within this chapter.  Dream Daddy.

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meanings of the word, from the independent ownership to the emphasis on the contact with the customers. Although in the game the player has a limited control over visited locations or the consumed beverages and food, it seems not without meaning that Coffee Spoon is featured this early in the game, allowing both Dad and the player to familiarize themselves with the neighborhood and the game. This example falls closer with the way coffeehouse features in Coffee Talk, a first-person visual novel developed by Toge Productions and published in 2020. Unlike the previously discussed titles, the player embodies an owner of the eponymous Coffee Talk in the futuristic, alternative version of Seattle populated by many fantasy races including elves, orcs, succubi, mermaids, and others. Coffee Talk is a peculiar place in the game world and its uniqueness is established in the introductory narration which reads: [a] time when the great war between races is but a footnote in history. A time when anyone can dream of being whatever they want to be… But still, it is a place and time where anything can happen. It is when the elves have left the forest to build their startups. When the draws have emerged from their caves to start their automotive empires…When the orcs have put down their axes and started using computers to improve their lives… And when humans live among them, as driven as ever. It is a city that holds the many dreams and stories of its people. Most of these stories are left untold. But some few find solace in the embrace of bricks and wood and glass. They are told over drinks, then take up residence in some strangers’ memories. In one corner of the city stands a coffee shop. A place that is only open when the sun is sleeping. A place where people share their stories.¹⁴⁶

Thus, the introduction not only establishes the gameworld as one populated with diverse characters—and throughout the game many of the problems which the patrons bring to the café are caused by the racial tensions and prejudices, which this world is by no means without—but also emphasizes the uniqueness of Coffee Talk. Because of its opening hours, it distinguishes itself from other cafes and due to the lack of alcoholic beverages on the menu, it distances itself from bars and pubs which are more often open at this time. By positioning itself firmly as the Other space, the café is presented as a safe harbor, a place where one can stay when they have nowhere to go. The patrons who come in vary in terms of the needs. While some desire only a hot cup of beverage to drink quietly in the corner away from everyone else, others bring in their stories like Baileys and Lua, an interracial couple of an elf and a succubus struggling with disapproval from their families, unable to ignore their cultural differences. As they always choose the spot next to the bar, the barista—  Toge Productions, Coffee Talk (Toge Productions, 2020).

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and, thus, the player—witnesses the intimate discussions between them, learning additional information with every next visit. However, it is not the player’s role to solve these problems and although they customers tend to engage with them, the player is given little choice. Instead, the gameplay is restricted to the preparation of beverages, each of which consists of three ingredients (base and two additional), including five types of chocolate, 11 types of coffee, 12 types of tea, and six types of milk with additions unlocked during the play such as ginger, cinnamon, mint, lemon, and honey [Figure 4]. After the characters place their orders, the player can mix the ingredients and, sometimes, add latte art before serving it. Often, the customers do not know specifically what they want to drink but rather will give a vague descriptor relating to the temperature (warm or cool) or taste (sweet or bitter). There are several achievements that are awarded for making (including “First Brew”), decorating (“It’s a masterpiece!” for creating latte art for the first time and “Art Takes Time” for spending over an hour on making it) or disposing of a drink the player is not satisfied with (including “Let Me Start Over” for the first time and “Stop It!” for disposing of 25 drinks), and a “Master Brewer” achievement for unlocking all available drinks. In particular, the process of latte art emphasizes the understanding of the process in terms of the skill, at the same time blurring the lines between the abilities of the fictional barista and the real-life player who controls them. As the game lacks a tutorial part nor does it offer assistance, the quality of the created foam art fully relies on the players’ abilities. Thus, brewing and serving of hot drinks is not only considered a skill, but one that is not easy to master.

Figure 4: The close-up on coffee with milk latte art.

The gameplay and the narrative undoubtedly are designed to evoke the sense of safety and belonging. Coffee Talk is a space of inclusivity, sheltering the customers from the outside world which, very much like its real counterpart, is plagued by racism and sexism. This does not only mean the acceptance towards members of different magical races, but also towards neurodiverse persons or those who struggle with adjusting to arbitrary societal rules and standards. Such is the

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character of Neil, a member of an alien hivemind species who tries to learn how to communicate with inhabitants of Earth but often struggles to do so. In their review of Coffee Talk, Palmer Rubin concentrated on the character of Neil and the way this character resonated with them: [t]hat the other patrons remain constantly patient with Neil, and work to meet them in the middle, and reassure them that they want them to be there, all of that felt therapeutic. I’m lucky enough to have friends now that treat me in a similar manner, even when the manner in which I speak can be confusing. That was not always the case, as it seems to be for Neil, who initially seems to be bracing for any kind of reprisal and sees the coffee shop as the only safe place with which they can interact with other.¹⁴⁷

Thus, the safety does not refer only to the mechanics that allow for a large margin of error and do not include any time constraints nor skill (since the quality of latte art does not affect the outcome of the game), but also to the inclusivity provided by the characters and the space they offer. What is more, Coffee Talk is popular among its customers because of its authentic character. The vague term is understood here both in terms of a place with unique character, which differentiates itself from chain restaurants due to being independently owned —as the only such place, it offers its customers careful, personalized service.

Coffeehouses and Bars as Liminal Spaces In many texts the role of the bartender is similar to the one of barista, as the outsider and a stranger who is there to listen or, at times, solve their customers’ problems with the right choice of a beverage. As the alcohol often tends to cause overt talkativeness, letting secrets slip, the bartender is often perceived as someone who is knowledgeable. Because of their intuition and almost (or, in some cases, explicitly stated as) supernatural knowledge, baristas and bartenders tend to be positioned as outsiders. The supernatural aspect, especially, is worth of note. In Necrobarista, a 3D visual novel developed by Route 59 in 2020, the player follows a group of characters running a back-alley coffeehouse in an alternative, futuristic Melbourne in the year 3053. Somewhat similarly to Coffee Talk, it seems to mostly operate at night, but what distinguishes it from many others is the fact that its employees are necromancers who use their magic to provide a safe space

 Palmer Rubin, COFFEE TALK: We Need to Talk About Neil, March 2, 2020, accessed November 25, 2020.

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where the recently deceased customers can spend their last 24 hours, making peace with their deaths. As a visual novel, Necrobarista does not afford players much control, letting them instead follow the characters and accompany them as they make sense of their lives and struggle with accepting their mortality. Despite sarcastic, sometimes even harsh remarks by Maddy Xiāo, the main barista, the characters are likeable and caring, set on their mission to help their dead customers to pass on. The rules featured on the board in front of the café stress the importance of inclusivity with the first rule enforcing the equal treatment of both living and dead (“We welcome both Living & Dead. Patrons will be served in the order they arrived.”¹⁴⁸) and the sensitivity of interaction between them (“Don’t ask who’s alive. If someone wants you to know, they’ll tell you.”¹⁴⁹). Despite the serious themes revolving around death and grief, several aspects of coziness are present in Necrobarista. From the gameplay point of view, the visual novel format enforces slow, unthreatening gameplay that largely features pre-scripted, linear dialogue. Unlike Coffee Talk, players are not responsible for the creation of beverages and for the most part passively witness the plot. The only times when the player is afforded the freedom to explore Terminal, the coffeehouse run by Maddy, in first-person comes in-between scenes. However, these moments do not influence the story. The coziness is also emphasized through visuals, which combine the cellshaded 3D style. The colors change from stronger to warm, pastel palette with the soft light that brings to mind a late afternoon rather than a late night. Despite the repeated mentions of other customers, those both alive and dead, most of the time the coffeehouse is shown empty. Thanks to the angles from which it is shot, it appears both spacious and intimate. At some point, Maddy directly remarks about the Terminal’s personality, admitting that the magic used to create it influenced it to some degree: “To be honest, I’m not sure I could even properly explain a lot of what goes on in here. The building’s mildly sentient. Too much magic in the soil for it not to be, really.” “So the café’s… alive? “Not necessarily. Plenty of things have come to life here, but as far as we can tell, the building itself doesn’t really fall into that category. Also, it mostly tends to shift itself in ways that are helpful, instead of frustrating…”¹⁵⁰

 Route 59, Necrobarista (Route 59, 2020).  Necrobarista.  Necrobarista.

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The way in which the game combines the practices of dark magic and difficult themes with the reassuring, calm narrative is what makes the Terminal café such an intriguing place. However, at the same time, together with Coffee Talk, it can be interpreted both in terms of a third space and liminal space. In its original meaning introduced Van Gennep in 1960, liminality denoted the intermediate stage between adolescence and adulthood. For Robert Nisbet, for example, it is “a way of proceeding from the known to the unknown,”¹⁵¹ and as such it can refer to as the elusive, obscure spaces outside of the public-domestic divide. They can refer to sacred or magical places located outside of the immediate zones of danger, and they facilitate transformation and positive change, closely relating to the concept of hybrid space as one that combines and mixes contradictory identities. For Homi Bhabba, hybridity is “a fraught, anxious and ambivalent condition. It is about how you survive, how you try to produce a self of agency or identity in situations in which you are continually having to deal with the symbols of power and identity.”¹⁵² This is perhaps the best embodied by Kishan, who finds himself at Terminal at the beginning of the game and with whom the player learns about the rules of the world and befriends the characters, and Chai, the previous owner of the coffee house whose death at the end is perhaps the most emotional part of the narrative—for both the player and Maddie, who sees him through it and helps him to make his peace with the transition. The presence of food in games that focus on grief and dealing with death, although not as common as one might think, is hardly surprising considering the close relationship between the former and the rituals arose around mourning the dead in various cultures. Candi K. Cann argues that “[d]eath and food intersect here as an unspoken (and largely unexplored) discourse on power—both of the state over bodies that it nourishes, punishes, and then destroys, and of food, in its ability to evoke sense of comfort, familiarity, and presence.”¹⁵³ In neither Spiritfarer and Necrobarista food is not a symbolic offering to the departed, but rather serves to comfort those who are not ready to move on. Thus, food and drink signify the world of the living, and offer a very human comfort. Interestingly, in Necrobarista it is not coffee in itself that comforts but the place itself, offering a chance to breathe and relax, collect one’s thoughts and confront.

 Robert A. Nisbet, Social Change and History: Aspects of the Western Theory of Development (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 4.  Homi K. Bhabba, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 2019.  Candi K. Cann, “The Role of Food in Bereavement and Memorialization,” in Dying to Eat: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Food, Death, and the Afterlife, ed. Candi K. Cann (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2018), 3.

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The concepts of hybrid and liminal spaces can be applied to coffeehouses both in the two latter examples, where they serve as the spaces of transition and of safe harbors. This is manifested both through the story and in the ludic levels of the game. The former is explored through their spatial, but even more so temporal, placement that positions them between other cafés operating during the day and the nightclubs and pubs, as points of destination to those who are marginalized, oppressed, or who, like those who have died but were yet to transfer to the next stages of their lives, already occupying the spaces of liminality. On the other hand, in both Persona 5 and, symbolically, in Evil Within 2, coffeehouses (or just spaces allowing one to enjoy the coffee break in the latter example), function as the safe harbors in the ludic sense, letting the player rest. There is an interesting comparison to be made between the enclosed spaces offered by coffeehouses in these linear games and the openness of Breath of the Wild. Despite the vast difference in their scale, there is a similarity in how they use the food space to create a sense of safety. The world in The Legend of Zelda is large and threatening, but the reassurance and safety can be found once one slows down and focuses on the smallest in-game activities, such as the gathering of the ingredients and cooking. The intimacy discussed in the previous chapter is not a quality of the entire game, but rather a consequence of the attentiveness given to each of its separate moments. While both of the aforementioned games are much smaller in scope, letting players see only the inside of the individual building, it achieves a similar sense of intimacy and safety in its individual moments. Both Coffee Talk and Necrobarista juxtapose their respective coffeehouses as spaces of safety as opposed to the hostile and stressful outside world. However, unlike the moment of situational coziness which guarantees one safe harbor among the fight—often envisioned as campfires or the safe warehouses like in the abovementioned Evil Within 2—the player never sees the outside world, even though they are made aware of its perils, either through parallels to the current political situation in many parts of the world or through the familiarity of the existential fear of the unspecified and undefined threats. In both cases, the comfort is provided to the characters on the micro level through the trust that can be placed in the barista and the cup of coffee, or other hot beverage chosen specifically for them.

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Conclusions There is no doubt that certain places to a larger degree evoke the feeling of coziness, and that these spaces tend to relate to food, even if food is not necessarily present on-screen when the characters occupy such spaces. Often coziness is associated with places that become metaphors for the safety of one’s home such as kitchens and restaurants (which just as often relate to the nostalgic memories of one’s childhood, parents, and grandparents), but also campfires which allow one to warm themselves by fire, but also prepare warm food and drink warm beverages. The latter, however, is often omitted, due to its different functions from food: tea, coffee, or hot chocolate do not provide nutrition in the same form or sense as even simplest foodstuffs. Instead, they often signify something else, and convey feelings and emotions of the emotional safety rather than just physical. Building on the terminology introduced in the previous chapter, I continued the discussion of coziness in video games with the special emphasis on how it uses food to evoke feelings of safety. In the discourses around food and eating, hot beverages such as coffee, but also tea or hot chocolate, tend to be omitted. However, by focusing on the in-game use of coffeehouse in the role of places of safety, I am interested in the associations with warm beverages that allow the coding of these locations as safe from various dangers, whether story-based or present in gameplay. It is worth noting how the choice of the cozy, food or beverage-related space changes the expectations of the gameplay and the play experience.

Chapter 6 The Aesthetic of Video Game Food Until now, I predominantly considered how food can be implemented in gameplay to emphasize such qualities of the gameworld as its safety. Now I would like to briefly turn to another of the signaled tenets of cozy games, the visual aesthetic, to draw the reader’s attention to the fact that in many of the cozy games, food is not just often in abundance but it is also exceptionally beautiful. Admittedly, the question whether food is (or can be) art, which seemed to trouble scholars and philosophers for quite some time, is a much more ambitious inquiry (although, for me the answer is quite definitely a “yes”). While I intend to draw from this discussion, my goal is to present the intersections between the visual appeal of food and the intimacy between the characters who eat it or between the game and the player. It is difficult to discuss food without mentioning the way it looks, especially in the context of its audiovisual representation which, by default, is devoid of what is food’s most defining quality, that is its taste and its smell. It is not a controversial statement, then, that through the visual presentation these games emphasize the attributes they cannot show: tasty food is showed as beautiful, with vibrant colors, more artistic or more realistic than the rest of the world. It is surrounded by light or sparkles to illustrate the pleasure one would get from having these exquisite tastes melt on one’s tongue. I have already touched on the subject of how the food looks like, considering that the visual softness is an important port of the creation of coziness within games. I believe it might be beneficial to look at the beautiful food and discuss how it adds to the creation of a cozy and safe game world. The question laying at the bottom of the discourses around the visualities of food is simply: can food be art? Although nowadays the answer seems rather straightforward, through centuries philosophers struggled with this question, considering food as unworthy of the status of higher arts due to its material character and its potential for offering carnal pleasures. For many European philosophers, food, due to the way it engages smell and taste—that is two senses believed to be lesser because of their subjective and physical character—cannot be considered in terms of artistic beauty. This rejection of food reveals the elitist perception of culture (not surprising in the case of philosophers such as Immanuel Kant who, even in his day, was recognized for rigid and austere system of beliefs) as divided into “high” and “low.” Another crucial reason for which the idea of food as art was so perplexing to many stems from the presumption that an object can be considered a work of art https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110716603-008

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only when the artistic contemplation and the emotional and intellectual impact that accompanies it are the its sole functions and its sole purpose. As Marienne L. Quinet points out in the essay titled “Food as Art: The Problem of Function,” this creates a distinction between “fine arts” and “useful arts.” According to this understanding, the fact that food already has its own function, that is the nutritious value that humans and other animals require for survival, is not allowing it to be considered a form of art. Art, according to such arguments, cannot have additional reasons for existing other than its beauty: art is meant to be created and appreciated only because of its form. As Quinet argues, this conclusion is false at its core as the functionality of objects is not an objective manner: a sculpture, for example, can be used as a weapon or a hammer if necessary, even though this was not initial intention of its creator. What is more, the argument that it is the perishable character of food that distinguishes it from many paintings and sculptures seems unjust, considering that other forms of art like, for example, music or live performances are also temporal and, in a way, perishable while not denied their artistic value. At this point it is also crucial to once again emphasize the difference between the changes and the development of the Western—often in the sense of the continental European—thought and especially Eastern-Asian approaches to food. While this chapter only touches on the importance of the aesthetics of Japanese food, it is important to stress how vastly different the Asian discourses are from the white Western way of thinking about food and eating. Doreen Yen Hung Feng, for example, praised Chinese cuisine for the attention placed on its every aspect, from “its palatableness to its texture, and from its fragrance to its colourfulness; until, as in other works of art, proportion and balance are instilled in every dish,”¹⁵⁴ while Hea-Kyung Chung and others identified the artistic Korean dishes as “the symbol of Korean culture.”¹⁵⁵ As these quotes show, not only in Japan but also other Asian countries, food’s presentation and aesthetics are intrinsic parts of their cultures. Because of this, writing this book and this chapter in particular pose some challenge in regards to the choices of the theoretical frameworks. Considering the point made above, it is not surprising that many of the games that emphasize the aesthetics of their food are productions of Japanese studios. In the following analysis I discuss these representations from the Western perspective with the use of the work of mostly Western scholars writing

 Doreen Yen Hung Feng, The Joy of Chinese Cooking (London: Faber & Faber, 1966), 11.  Hae-Kyung Chung et al., “Aesthetics of Korean Foods: The Symbol of Korean Culture,” Journal of Ethnic Foods 3, no. 3 (September 1, 2016).

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about practices around the use of #foodporn hashtag on social media, at the same time remaining aware of the complex meanings of food for Japanese culture, creators, and players. The importance of visual pleasure, or the pleasure of looking, is an issue that has been discussed in-depth in media and feminist studies, where the act of looking or gazing can never be considered outside of its political context (see more in the next chapter). In the chapter, I focus on the third part of the food making process as defined in the first chapter, that is its presentation. By discussing two main game examples, that is Battle Chef Brigade and Final Fantasy XV, I discuss the ways in which food—beautiful, detailed and in a style that stands out from the style used through the rest of the games’ food—is presented and to whom. The former aspect is discussed by comparing the in-game food presentation with real-life practices of photographing food and sharing these images on social media under the hashtag #foodporn. Regarding the latter, I discuss the way the visual aesthetic of food becomes a means of fleshing out the world, but also how the way it is presented aims to create intimacy—not only between the characters but also, and sometimes especially, with the players.

Beautiful Pixels Can food be art? Judging by the sheer number of competition-based cooking shows in which the visual aspects of the presentation tend to be one of the most important aspects by which the dishes are scored, it is difficult at times to believe that for many philosophers and scholars for centuries this was a controversial question. The second season of Sugar Rush, an American baking reality streaming television series released on Netflix in 2018, opens with an episode in which the competitors need to recreate the most popular cupcake and cake trends featured at the time on social platforms with emphasis on Instagram. Thus, like in the majority of cooking shows, these pastries are not just judged by their taste, but by their presentation and aesthetic. While the popularity of such shows stems in a great part from their fast-paced, rivalry-based format, many viewers are drawn to the skill presented by the contestants. Whereas sometimes their food art seems rushed and unfinished (as the premise of the shows usually includes a strict time limit), there is no doubt about the talent possessed by the competitors. At the end of each episode, food is showcased for the benefit of the judges but, first and foremost, the viewers. Often there are close-ups and 360-degree shots additionally featured with slow-motion effects allowing the viewers to fully appreciate the result. The attention placed on the visual aspect

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of the food substitutes for the inability to taste and smell it—it can be argued then that the visual composition and aesthetics become metaphors of the taste, reversing the hierarchy suggested by some of the previously mentioned philosophers. The way food is presented in such shows, but also on the social media, and, as I will argue shortly, in video games, evokes the practice referred to often as “foodporn” or “gastroporn.” As defined by Erin Metz McDonnel, food porn refers to the: voyeuristic practice and the application of a pornographic visual aesthetic to food, as reproduced in still photography and popularized through the Internet network of food blogs. In its contemporary understanding, food porn is a set of visual aesthetics that emphasize the pleasurable, sensual dimensions of food, derived from (but not actually employed in) human sexuality.¹⁵⁶

Although neither “gastro-porn,” coined by Alexander Cockburn in 1977, nor “food porn,” used for the first time in print in 1979 by Michael Jacobson, are new terms, the latter gained significantly more popularity than the former. As Tisha Dejmanee explains, the term’s popularity and use since the 1990s can be linked to such changes in the food media landscape like “an exponential rise in food print media and advertising… and the increasing dominance of the Food Network¹⁵⁷ since its launch in 1993.”¹⁵⁸ Although the term “food porn” can be used to describe commercial photography, for many it invokes content produced and created by independent artists and bloggers (both professional and amateur) who create, capture, and share the photographs and videos of their own cooking and baking. This corresponds with the realization made by Yasmin Ibrahim who notes the significance of digital media in shaping of the current understanding of it, as the “term ‘food porn’ is increasingly used to describe the act of styling and capturing food on mobile gadgets, eliciting an invitation to gaze and vicariously consume, and to tag images of food through digital platforms.”¹⁵⁹

 Erin Metz McDonnell, “Food Porn: The Conspicuous Consumption of Food in the Age of Digital Reproduction,” in Food, Media and Contemporary Culture: The Edible Image, ed. Peri Bradley (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2016), 239.  Food Network is an American cable channel combined with a website, network, and magazine featuring food-related content such as cooking shows, recipes, and other.  Tisha Dejmanee, “‘Food Porn’ as Postfeminist Play: Digital Femininity and the Female Body on Food Blogs,” Television & New Media 17, no. 5 (2015): 3.  Yasmin Ibrahim, “Food Porn and the Invitation to Gaze: Ephemeral Consumption and the Digital Spectacle,” International Journal of E-Politics 6, no. 3 (2015): 2.

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For many scholars researching food porn it seems obvious that the ways in which these images construct food in terms of aesthetic of excess and fetishize them as objects of admiration is parallel to the ways women’s bodies historically were treated in advertisements, magazines, film, and other visual media. Noticing the prevalence of women food bloggers among the users of the #foodporn hashtag, Dejmanee argues that the food blogosphere “serves as an important site of feminized media production that engages with digital constructions of femininity and female body.”¹⁶⁰ By shifting their position from in front of a camera to behind it, people of marginalized genders dictate the ways in which their bodies are perceived, often being symbolically juxtaposed with food. Through food art, creators can resist the hegemonic and patriarchal means of controlling consumption practices which equate non-normative bodies with objects that can be purchased and consumed. Those, who “have long been understood as suppressing their own appetites to nurture those of their families… occupy the dual positions of producer and consumer”¹⁶¹ through the food production but, especially, artistic preparation of the photograph. Photographs tagged as #foodporn are not just any images of food. As the comparison with pornography signifies, the pictures are excessive and are meant to stimulate the observers, letting them fantasize about the food items. The comparison with pornography is particularly just in the context of food videography, which borrows from it framing and timing techniques, “the pacing of the video narrative structures attention, lingering most on the food object itself, interspersed with a minimal amount of narrative storyline, culminating in a drawn-out finale of tasting ecstasy.”¹⁶²

The Stillness of Digital Foodporn The photography shared on social media under the #foodporn and similar hashtags comes in various shapes and sizes. However, among its common features one can find the use of the “food filters” incorporated in many contemporary smartphones which, while focusing on food or its parts, blur the background in order to achieve the most artistic effect. Often, food photography features the extreme close-ups of food or its parts: this exaggerated closeness, equated by some to a pornographic “money shot,” which often means the moment of

 Tisha Dejmanee, “‘Food Porn’ as Postfeminist Play,” 2.  Tisha Dejmanee, “Food Porn’ as Postfeminist Play,” 6.  Erin Metz McDonnell, “Food Porn,” 242.

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ejaculation, restructures food as art rather than the source of nutrition. These photographs change the way one encounters specific dishes or food items, forcing the increased attention directed at details that are usually omitted when food is being consumed. By enforcing the more mindful awareness of food, the creators abstract food from its taste and its edibility. In such a way, the framing of food is shifted, stripping it of its usefulness as a source of nutrition, validating it as “high art.” Even in the case of food photography (rather than recorded footage in a gif or film form), the art of making and sharing beautiful dishes is not a passive activity. Food itself is also rarely completely still. For Dejmanee, this specifically relates to the fact that food porn tends to be characterized by oozing: [t]he demand for oozing can perhaps be attached to the need for food media audiences to consume food through external visual and auditory cues. The moment of anticipation before the chocolate lava cake or soft-boiled egg is split open is a now tired trope for dramatic tension on food competition shows; the presence or absence of a sufficiently gooey filling is a predominant feature used to judge the technical skill of the cook and success or failure of the dish. Moreover, successfully capturing food oozing demands planning, action, and urgency.¹⁶³

This way of describing food porn imagery is particularly interesting because it denotes fluidity and movement, bringing to mind the moment a cake is cut to show its soft insides flowing onto the plate, bringing the momentum to a still picture. Actually, this reveal of the inner layers and construction of food often concludes baking and cooking videos or is featured as a separate image that allows for juxtaposition of the images before and after it has been opened. That final cut is both destructive, breaking the carefully crafted exterior and disrupting the composition, signifying the way in which food is inevitably deconstructed in the process of eating. The second reason for cutting into the food, be it a cake, a stack of pancakes, a poached egg, or any other dish, is to help the viewers visualize the texture of the food in question. By visualizing them in detail, these images might allow one to imagine how they taste, considering the close interactions of different senses in the process of recognizing tastes, once again returning to the food its meaning as edible and perishable art. On the other hand, video game food art seems to lack this aspect of movement: instead, it is characterized by surprising stillness. Whereas in many games cooking engages the players in a number of activities, often characterized by speed (like in Overcooked), requiring skill and precision (like in Cooking Mama

 Tisha Dejmanee, “Food Porn,” 8 – 9.

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games), or taking time to prepare (like in FarmVille and Don’t Starve), the completed dish is presented to the players in a still image. The two stages of food preparation, cooking and presentation, differ then also in the way they position the players as active and passive, respectively. This points to the fact that often, even in the games that acknowledge food’s importance for the narrative, its functionality surpassed its visual aesthetics. There, the focus often remains on its production and the foods are consumed quickly, either off-screen or without visible movement on the character’s part. However, even in the titles which allow for the players’ and characters’ gaze to linger on the produced dishes, the players do not possess control over the presentation nor the length of time in which the food can be looked at. Often, this presentation feels much more non-diegetic than diegetic. This has been discussed in some detail through the example of Spiritfarer (see the fourth chapter), where the dish is shortly featured on screen after Stella takes it out of the oven, hovering over her head in the brilliant light halo. Although afterwards it can be viewed again in the inventory with an additional description and statistics, it is this short moment of triumphant presentation that makes the highest impact on the player. However, this game, similarly to several others including Breath of the Wild, shows the food only for a moment, allowing the players to later admire them only in the inventory space which, by its definition, is already a ludic space meaning in that it privileges its boosts and gameplay functionality over appearance. This difference between ludic and aesthetic significance means that there is no in-game need for showcasing the food longer or in more detail than this. The rare example in which the players control the presentation of food comes from the newest addition to Cooking Mama franchise, Cooking Mama: Cookstar ¹⁶⁴ (Cooking Mama Limited 2020). Unlike previous installments of the game, it was meant to introduce a new system of presenting food which would grant the players the control over the presentation of the finished dish. The available footage of the game shows that once the food minigames were completed, the player was given a moment not only to admire their product, but also to decide on how it would be presented to the world. This entailed choosing the background for the food (e. g., at picnic or on the restaurant table) and the final way in which the food is served (e. g., the sandwich that is uncut or served in two cuts) before taking that final photograph. Among all dis At the point of writing this, the game is not accessible to the public anymore. Only a few hours after its release, it has been taken down from Nintendo Switch eShop due to legal issues between the publisher and the owner of Cooking Mama IP. Because of this, the analysis is based on the trailers and the early-access content that can be still watched on YouTube at the moment of writing this.

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cussed game examples, this one brings the player the closest to the role of the food blogger and #foodporn art creator.

Competitive Haute Cuisine Unsurprisingly, the format of reality cooking shows is easily transferable into the video game context and Battle Chef Brigade (Trinket Studios 2017) is one of the examples that are the most interesting not only due to its cooking tournamentbased storyline but also the combination of game genres that are rarely mixed together. While created by Canadian studio, it has clear Japanese inspirations, combines two video game genres from which only one tends to be associated with “cooking games,” and, most importantly, showcases the love towards food through beautifully painted images that, just like the cakes prepared in the course of the Sugar Rush series, are presented to both the judges and the players. At the beginning of the game, the player controls Mina Han, an ambitious young chef who leaves her home at Windy Village to join the prestigious Battle Chef Proving Tournament, the single most important annual event in the Kingdom. Its winners are invited to join the elite Battle Chef Brigade, named such due to the fact that the royal guards double as warrior and skilled cooks. For this reason, winning is not an easy task and the participants must prove both their cooking and their fighting skills in a series of cooking battles. At each level of the competition, the participants have to prepare up to three dishes corresponding to the preferences of each of the juries. The additional difficulty stems from a fact that contestants have to first hunt and gather their ingredients and only then cook them, which from the ludic point of view offers a unique combination of fighting gameplay with match-three puzzles. The game’s uniqueness stems from a fact that it gives equal importance to all three parts of the food preparation process. Each of the three is important in the course of the tournament. First, gathering of the ingredients is structured through a series of fighting sequences during which the player-controlled character—Mina or one of the two other currently available characters unlocked after the completion of Mina’s story—has to fight various monsters to obtain their meat and other ingredients. The speed and accuracy of the performance during this part decides what ingredients they can use during cooking which is visualized as a timed match-three puzzle game [Figure 4]. Finally, the ready dish is presented to the jury and the player and although the latter does not have influence over this last part, it has similar significance to the presentation of the dishes on any cooking television show.

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The tournament itself consists of cooking duels between two contestants in which each needs to prepare from one to three meals. The tournament follows rules characteristic to many of the cooking shows: the dishes must include a theme ingredient announced at the beginning of the match (e. g., dragon meat), and correspond with the individual judge’s preferred flavor profile (Fire, Water, or Earth). The stakes and pressure are enhanced by the time limit, but lessened again on the non-diegetic level through the ability to repeat each duel until success. The judges expect excellency and critique the dishes adequately regarding whether the contestants followed the directions and their overall taste. After the time runs out, the player needs to deliver the dishes to the judges’ table. Just before the food is given the final score, each is briefly presented to the player. As the background is temporarily darkened, the image is presented in a close-up on a screen with a clearly displayed name: the same image is enlarged, and thanks to the contrast with the background it seems to be bathed in a bright, sparkling light. The players do not exactly have a choice over what dishes the characters prepare but each attempt can have different results depending of which ingredients they manage to obtain during the combat portion of the process and during the randomly generated tile matching puzzle. While the 2D art style already draws attention due the intrinsic, careful detailing and the soft but bright colors, it is in the moment of food presentation when the style peaks, showcasing breathtaking dishes. Between three main playable characters and their possible opponents, Battle Chef Brigade features over 150 unique dishes based on various cuisines and adjusted to the personalities and the origins of their respective cooks. While Mina’s dishes draw heavily from Chinese cuisines with steamed buns, dim sums, and noodle soups, Thrash, a kind orc who quickly becomes her friend and is the game’s second playable character, cooks mostly Mexican and Spanish dishes. Regardless of the inspirations, all the meals are artistically prepared and all can be considered in terms of haute cuisine. What is more, the match-three puzzle [Figure 5], which requires the players to arrange different types of orbs that correspond with the three main flavors in such way to gain the required taste and profile of the dish, represents the careful preparation, the point of which is to balance flavors and tastes. The visuals are undoubtedly important here on the story level, but in terms of gameplay they remain less crucial than the other parts of the process. Once again, it is corresponding with the structure of the television cooking shows in which often it is the taste that can decide about someone’s elimination or success. That said, the visual aspect is just as important an requirement, showing the prowess and the artistry of the cooks and bakers, with the latter being under a particularly prominent scrutiny considering a long tradition of cakes presented both as tasty and ornamental.

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Figure 5: The mini-game cooking as presented in the game.

One of desserts prepared by Mina is Taka Berry Jelly [Figure 6], the description of which informs the players that it is “topped with Sunhat Tomato and King Bean Melange.” The dessert, a triangular translucent jelly of a soft violent hue with daisies or daisy-like flowers embedded inside, is resting on a white plate with delicate floral ornaments. An additional, carefully placed flower rests on the side of the plate, completing the image and balancing out the composition. The cake is reminiscent of the raindrop cakes popularized first in Japan in 2014 which then became an international social media trend due to their perfectly round shape and transparent body allowing for the embedding of edible elements such as flowers [Figure 6].

Figure 6: The close-up of Taka Berry Jelly as presented in a game (left) and the close-up of a real-life raindrop cake, photographed in the way complying with the definition of #foodporn (right). Photograph courtesy of Lo Aster of @asters_kitchen on Instagram.

The Hyperrealism of Final Fantasy XV Food Not every game about cooking makes a point of exhibiting the dishes this way. Moreover, not every game that does showcase its art can be immediately considered an example of digital #foodporn. In order to further investigate the relations between the artistic in-game food, the practices of in-game and out-of-game pho-

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tography, and the player’s agency in their preparations, I want to take a closer look at Final Fantasy XV. The fifteenth main installment in the Final Fantasy series is an open-world action role-playing game that follows Noctis Lucis Caelum, a young prince on the way to meet his fiancée, and his three companions and friends. Although Noctis is the only playable character, the other three men are just as vital to the game, the main focus of which is their dynamics, growing friendship, and the many intimate, cozy moments they share on their way. Each has their own strengths and skills which can be cultivated and leveled up by the player. The party additionally includes the royal adviser Ignis Scientia who is passionate about food and is the group’s cook, the prince’s bodyguard Gladiolus Amicitia, and his friend Prompto Argentum with a passion for photography. Interestingly, although neither cooking nor taking photographs is an activity Noctis partakes in, they are important parts of his friends’ personalities and are indirectly influenced by the choices and decisions made by the player character. Thus, although this is up to Noctis to choose the destinations that might result in particularly heart-warming photoshoots and might facilitate collection of ingredients and recipes. Although not required by the story, the game encourages the characters to take a rest at the end of each day. As the characters gather around campfire, the given day’s achievements are summarized through the photographs and new recipes but, most importantly, it is a moment when the characters can share few tranquil moments under the stars. In the mornings, Ignis prepares breakfasts for the group, an activity which he deeply enjoys. He is on a constant lookout for new recipes and ingredients, allowing for the player to participate in their gathering. Once Ignis knows the recipes and possesses the required ingredients, he can prepare each of the types of dishes previously unlocked, with the additional meaning as restoratives and enhancements for different characters depending on their preferences. Although one can also purchase food at diners and restaurants, it is undoubtedly Ignis who is the game’s primary cook who often, upon seeing new dishes, is struck with inspiration to create his own versions of food, adding a heart-warming element of joy and creativity that is an intrinsic element of cooking for many. When the food is ready to be consumed, Ignis places it on the table and the animation plays in such a way that frames the food as the only visible items on the screen. At the same time, a small pop-up window appears in the bottom right corner stating the name and boosts it offers. Thus, unlike many other already mentioned games, it does not offer an additional description that elevates its aesthetic value. Another difference manifests in the ludic importance—or lack thereof. While the dishes offer small enhancements to various party members, it is not as crucial as in the case of Breath of the Wild where it is difficult to

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face enemies and endure harsh weather conditions of new areas without the protection of specific ingredients. In Final Fantasy XV, these perks are small enough that for many players they can prove insignificant enough to consider cookingrelated activities from ingredients and recipes collection to actual meal preparation optional. The function of food as a device facilitating the intimacy between the character is emphasized especially through the cooking side quest. Once, after Ignis and Noctis share a moment at campfire during late night hours, the former asks the prince to assist him in preparation of the breakfast the following day, giving him the opportunity to participate in cooking. The quest starts with the scene of the two friends talking after which Noctis (and, thus, the player) is asked to chop vegetables, a fairly simple task both from a story and ludic perspective as it only requires player to repeatedly, quickly tap an appropriate button. Throughout the process, the camera maintains the low-angle shot from a little below the table, granting the view of both characters but none of the food. Considering the attention to detail placed on the imagery of food, this omission clearly signifies that despite its aesthetic appeal, food is important not for its taste and appearance, but as a means of strengthening the bonds between friends. Food, as Barthes would have it, “has a constant tendency to transform itself into situation.”¹⁶⁵ What is more, this scene among other moments of shared intimacy between the men can perhaps point towards its reading in terms of the reading Jonatan Leer offered in the context of contemporary cooking shows in which men are “using food and cooking to “escape’ the constant negotiations of the post-traditional life and to create culinary counter-spaces. In these spaces, they bond with other men and play with forms of traditional masculinity in ways that might not be appropriate in the mainstream spaces of modern societies.¹⁶⁶ Food in Final Fantasy XV is still considered edible even though the act of eating itself happens off-screen: the imagery on-screen showcases only what is considered important is presentation of the meal for the players and the table informing of the ludic effect it had on the characters. However, it can be argued that the game is an example of a title in which food is a far more important narrative than ludic device. Since food is not as crucial for the characters’ abilities and survival as, for example in Breath of the Wild or Don’t Starve, one can afford to ignore it. Only those players who enjoy exploration and gathering collectible items will then decide to go out of their way to search for new  Roland Barthes, “Toward a psychosociology,” 29.  Jonatan Leer, “Homosocial Heterotopias and Masculine Escapism in TV-Cooking Shows,” in Food and Media: Practices, Distinctions and Heterotopias, ed. Jonatan Leer and Karen Klitgaard Povlsen (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 110.

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ingredients and recipes, making food preparation an optional task. At the same time, food’s importance remains heavily tied to its meaning-making function in the context of the relationship building and strengthening the bonds between the characters. Thus, food is from the start coded not as non-essential, but ornamental and, thus, artistic. There is something almost simple about the way the foods are placed on the table surface, with a soothing instrumental music playing in the background: unlike Battle Chef Brigade, it is not additionally illuminated nor is it specially decorated. While some dishes are associated with more elegant and difficult in preparation cuisine, from mouth-watering oysters on the half-shells to sweet curry with the steamed crab decorated with garnish, the great majority of dishes is associated with cheap diner menus, such as fried fish with side potatoes, grilled vegetables with rice, tomato, and egg stir-fries, or sandwiches—although, admittedly, calling the stacked ham sandwich with four pieces of bread and almost 20 layers of vegetables and ham “simple” is anything but fair. The adjective seems of particular poor choice here in either case: these dishes might not all belong to haute cuisine but there is no doubt they are prepared with skill and care. From glistening sauces to the crunchy skins on the baked potatoes, the realistic visuals make the dishes as appetizing as the well-prepared, artistic dishes presented at the cooking competitions. There is little doubt that the food presented by Ignis is beautiful but, arguably, its aesthetic value is important only as long as there is someone to admire it. The placement of the dish in front of the player and its framing in such way that it fills the entire screen points towards the interpretation that, in the moment of its presentation, food is showcased not to the other characters but to the player. There are at least two main reasons for it. On the one hand, it brings the player closer to the game-world, drawing from the familiarity of the presented dishes that affords the players a feeling of belonging to the fantasy world. On the other hand, it can be interpreted as a reward towards the player whose influence over the way food looks seems to always be limited. Ready, beautiful food, becomes a reward for a well-performed task, regardless of whether it is a wellperformed mini-game as in the case of Battle Chef Brigade or a successful completion of a larger section like in Final Fantasy XV where food is shared by the characters at the end of the longer sequences of combat and explorationheavy gameplay.

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Concluding Remarks: The Aesthetics of Intimacy in Japanese Food Art Although not all games I chose for the analyses are created in Japan, it is difficult to ignore the fact that the most prominent examples of titles that emphasize the food’s artistic and aesthetic value are either created in Japan or heavily influenced by Japanese culture and media. This is for example the case with Battle Chef Brigade, both in the sense of the anime-inspired art, the character types, and the construction of the storyline. In this context it is difficult not to mention the saturation of food-themed titles from the extremely popular television cooking shows and food-themed anime and manga comics, referred to as gurume (gourmet) or ryōri (cooking, cuisine) manga. In the analysis of Oishinbo, the most popular title in that genre written by Kariya Tetsu and illustrated by Hanasaki Akira, Lorie Brau notices the differences between the way food and people are represented by the creators: [r]endering the food illustrations in crosshatched, photographic detail often makes them more prominent. Portrayed in closeups, food becomes as large as or larger than the characters animating the surrounding panels. These drawings emphasize the difference between food as fact and the story as fiction. Like the manga’s many scientific explanations of why food tastes as it does, they bring the narrative to a halt with their graphic realism and temporarily stop the flow of fantasy.¹⁶⁷

Despite the differences in medium, it is difficult not to see similarities in the way food is treated in Oishinbo and Final Fantasy XV. The way dishes are presented at the end of the day by Ignis bears many similarities to the above description. As Ignis presents the food, for a moment it dominates the space and the close-ups fill the screen. Even though it is possible to skip this presentation, for a short moment food is given all the attention. This is mirrored in other Japanese games as well as some that are heavily inspired by Japanese texts, like Battle Chef Brigade with its clear references to anime aesthetics and tropes, from zen-like meditation over the preparation process in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild to the emphasis on food’s presentation in Cooking Mama games. These games celebrate food as beautiful, while also appreciating their simplicity—the simplest, most common dish served by Ignis is as beautiful as any gourmet, sophisticated meal.

 Lorie Brau, “Oishinbo’s Adventures in Eating: Food, Communication, and Culture in Japanese Comics,” Gastronomica 4, no. 4 (2004): 37.

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In the interview posted on the Eater website associated with a food and dining network of sites under the same name, Final Fantasy XV’s director Hajime Tabata commented on the motivations that guided the designing process of these dishes: [r]ecipes were just one element of the camping scenes, but the catalyst for our obsession was the high quality of the food graphics that the camp team was able to create in the pre-production phase. In Japan, we have a term called ’meshi-tero’ (an abbreviation of the Japanese-English combo phrase ’Meshi (food) Terror’ and similar to the English term ’food porn’), but that pretty much summed it up. We have to create truly delicious-looking food scenes similar to those that appear in movies and anime.¹⁶⁸

Tabata points here towards the food photography as the crucial inspiration for the realism of the in-game dishes. However, because for him “what beats even the best photography is the personal experience,”¹⁶⁹ cooking was an actual part of the design process. The personal aspect manifests in the teamwork between all the characters, both player-controlled and NPCs, and the intimate, cozy moments that often surround the process of making food. Interestingly, despite the precision and attention placed on the food presentation, regardless of whether it is judged in a competition-like setting or is emphasized only for the sake of the player, even in the games where both these activities are available to the player, cooking is not often linked with in-game photography. In Final Fantasy, the very moment food is placed on a table is emphasized via close up, the player does not have the ability to photograph the meal itself, which constitutes the most important difference between the real-world food porn photography. In Breath of the Wild on the other hand, photography is a vital element of gameplay as it allows the player to catalogue all the encountered animals, plants, and items. However, although the players have the ability to take photographs at any point of time, there is no possibility to commemorate dishes with the in-game camera. Regardless whether the game allows in-game photography or encourages the players to slow down and appreciate the meals and the dishes, many of the games display their food as art, continuously drawing attention of the players and characters alike towards it. Finally, it could be argued that through the presentation of meals as these beautiful, detailed artworks that

 Whitney Reynolds, “The Food in ‘Final Fantasy XV’ Is Insanely Realistic,” Eater, December 21, 2016.  Whitney Reynolds, “The Food in ‘Final Fantasy XV’.”

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can be then admired in the inventory, these games create a similar effect as taking pictures by themselves might have. However, it seems interesting that the aspect of photography is not often present in digital games.

Chapter 7 Lollipops and Popsicles: The Erotic Sensualities of Food The desire to eat and the desire of sexual pleasure belong to the two most inherent human instincts. Whereas the two differ in regards to their necessity for one’s survival, they are both shaped by strong desires that are strongly embedded in the sociocultural and political contexts. Both can be sources of carnal pleasures and, because of this, both have been subjected to strict scrutiny which results in various means of controlling and policing them, rejecting some of the activities around them as non-normative, deviant, taboo. It is not surprising then that this entanglement is often explored in literature, film, and manga. The previous chapters have already signaled that the food desire can become an important substitute for the sexual desire in video games as well. This can be seen, for example, when it becomes the most important element of flirting and foreplay as discussed in detail in the next chapter. However, it seems that the explicit sexual connections between food and sex are still less explored in video games than other media. The relationship between video games and sex has always been a complex one. As Brenda Brathwaite stressed in 2007, sex in digital games “has always been here, right from the beginning of the computer game industry, and even earlier if one counts the emergent sexual behavior of players in MUDs.”¹⁷⁰ Additionally, in the introduction to the 2015 book Rated M for Mature: Sex and Sexuality in Video Games, Matthew Wysocki and Evan Lauteria argue that in recent years the video game industry and game studies as a discipline have been “‘maturing’ in relation to the topics of sex and sexuality.”¹⁷¹ However, in her essay from 2012 titled “The Strange Case of the Misappearance of Sex in Videogames,” Tanya Krzywinska argues that “sex is rarely integral to game stories,”¹⁷² pointing instead to the fact that although sex is and has always been present in digital

 Brenda Brathwaite, Sex in Video Games (Boston: Thompson Learning, Inc., 2007), 40.  Matthew Wysocki and Evan W. Lauteria, “Introduction,” in Rated M for Mature: Sex and Sexuality in Video Games, ed. Matthew Wysocki and Evan W. Lauteria (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 2.  Tanya Krzywinska, “The Strange Case of the Misappearance of Sex in Videogames,” in Computer Games and New Media Cultures: A Handbook of Digital Games Studies, ed. Alexander Unger (Dordrecht: Springer, 2012), 108. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110716603-009

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games, it has always mostly been reinforcing the heteronormative power relations. Of course, this has been changing progressively in the span of the past decade thanks to the increasing popularity of independent games. What is more, if the hegemonic, heteronormative representation of sex has been repetitively challenged during the last two decades, it has been so due to the increasing presence of creators of marginalized identities whose games are often deeply rooted in the personal experiences and aim to challenge the heteronormative portrayal of sexuality in many games. However, as will show in the ninth chapter while discussing the “strange missapearance” of eating disorders, what is still vastly missing from video game narratives is the focus on the body from the portrayal of the struggle with body dysphoria and the lack of acceptance of the non-normative bodies to the body euphoria and its embodied pleasures. While games like dys4ia tackles the issue of one’s relationship to their body during the process of transition and Consume Me represents the lack of acceptance of one’s body fat which leads to excessive dieting and depression, these still remain isolated examples. This absence of the body is perhaps not surprising considering that historically, from the first-person shooters to dating simulators, video games as a medium have been carefully erasing the body of the protagonist in order to allow player’s insertion into the narrative. In this chapter I will discuss some titles that do explore these food/sex intersections, using food metaphors to challenge and subvert the expectations of sexualized video game bodies. What is more, I show that in games like a Japanese blockbuster action game Bayonetta (PlatinumGames 2009) and the few minutes long independent gay game Succulent (Yang 2015), food becomes a tool of subverting the stereotypes about sex and bodies but also a means of controlling the players’ gaze. In them, like in the case of the #foodporn photography discussed in the previous chapter, food becomes a substitute of body parts and eating—of sexual activities. Thanks to this, it allows the creators to take over control over the gaze which becomes particularly significant in the context of the games created by queer creators.

Eating Sex In Carnal Appetites: Foodsexindentities, Elspeth Probyn remarks that “[i]f much of cultural theory over the last decade has revolved around sex as that which secures identity, it seems to me that the sensual nature of eating now constitutes a privileged optic through which to consider how identities and the relations between sex, gender and power are being renegotiated. In eating, pleasure offers

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itself to be problematized.”¹⁷³ These intersections between food and sex have been making themselves present throughout this book. In fact, writing about food without acknowledging its sensualities and the intimate, erotic connotations it has in many cultures is close to impossible. Both eating and having sex are sensual and sensory, embodied experiences. Both mouth and the tongue are the tools with which one transgressed the boundaries between the bodies, absorbing them, learning their flavors and consistencies, discovering the Other by the most intimate activities of kissing, licking, and tasting. In many languages, food metaphors are present in the contexts of sex and sexuality. These can vary from the descriptions of desire in terms of appetites and hunger to more explicit metaphors that equate oral sex with eating—inspiring Probyn’s provocative question “if oral sex isn’t sex, is it eating?”¹⁷⁴—and genitals with specific foods from eggplants and peaches to lollipops, popsicles, and wiener sausages, with the differences in their idiomatic use depending on the affordances of the given language. This type of metaphor is far from the only possible way food intersects with sexual pleasure. Probyn, for example, notes food’s inherently sexual character as enforced by cookbooks, cooking-focused media, thus translating to the everyday food practices: [p]ractices of preparing and eating food are, of course, highly sensual and sometimes sexual. Think about stuffing zucchini flowers: with batons of cheese, rub alongside the full, bursting stamen, and enfold the flower’s organ, cheese with petals twisted. How to ignore that flash of power, that moment of confusion—when the cookbook instructs me to check whether the flowers are male or female, and not to use the latter.¹⁷⁵

As Loraine Gamman and Merja Makinen point out, the gendered character of food and food advertisements additionally influences these linguistic food/sex interactions. The women-targeted “[c]onfectionary adverts, for example, frequently indicate that the pleasure of eating sweets is in itself a sexual experience.”¹⁷⁶ This tends to be the most explicit in the advertisements of chocolate, which still often feature closeups of women’s mouths tasting and sucking on the chocolates in a way that not only fetishizes the food but also sexualizes the women, coding their bodies as the consumables. The imagery in these adverts openly brings the ideas of sexuality, flirting, foreplay, and sexual acts into the women’s relationship with the food, at the same time maintaining  Elspeth Probyn, Carnal Appetites, 7.  Elspeth Probyn, Carnal Appetites, 61.  Elspeth Probyn, Carnal Appetites, 61.  Lorraine Gamman and Merja Makinen, Female Fetishism: A New Look (London: Lawrence & Wishhart, 1994), 151.

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firm gendered roles by evoking the anxieties and the feelings of female guilt around body shape and eating (eating chocolates as “guilty pleasure”). What is more, since “thin erotic aesthetic is so central to the Western beauty ethos that for women, eating has become associated with sinning,”¹⁷⁷ reinforcing the oppressive system designed to control women’s behaviors and bodies. The bodies of women specifically tend to be coded as consumable with Black women, women of color, as well as queer, fat, or women whose bodies are otherwise coded as non-normative. Sexual metaphors of food are not absent from digital games. The meaning of food in the formation of sexual relationships and its pornographic-like aesthetic is discussed in more detail in the next chapter. In Dream Daddy: The Dad Dating Simulator, food stands for flirting, creating the contexts in which men meet and spend time, but also provides a metaphor of the attraction and desire between them. In the game that does not venture into the explicit imagery of sexual encounters at the end of a successful relationship, the mouth-watering, delicious food draws and captivates the player’s attention. However, the title does not shy away from more explicit use of food metaphors as well. If the player chooses correct combination of answers in the given dialogue, the romanceable character becomes visibly pleased. Their happiness, which is an important indicator of the ludic progression in their storyline, is visually represented both by the happy expression of the character and, in the best possible outcome, through an explosion of emojis suddenly erupting behind their back, including pink hearts, sweat droplets, and eggplants. The “sweat droplets” emoticon is used in variety of meanings on social media signifying anything from water to bodily fluids such as sweat, tears, saliva, and sperm. Although the use of emoticons, like use of any language, is fluid and changes depending on platforms, countries of origin of the users, and time, its sexual meaning becomes more unanimous when paired with an eggplant emoji, which due to its phallic shape often symbolizes a penis, creating a combined meaning pointing towards sexual arousal or ejaculation. Thus, the use of both these emoticons together changes the tone of the characters’ reaction from happiness to sexual arousal. This choice stands out from the game and avoids the explicit sexual content, for the most part framing the relationships between the characters in terms of emotional attachment rather than sexual desire and arousal. The use of suggestive emoticons then can be interpreted as a half-measure that encourages and permits the players to add a more explicit reading to the interactions they are witnessing. Like with the cooking that substitutes the physical act of flirting in the scenes between the protagonist and the

 Lorraine Gamman and Merja Makinen, Female Fetishism, 154.

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partners, the act of replacing the sexual content with the widely acknowledged and used, and thus tamer, imagery, is an act of taking control over the player’s gaze.

Gazing on Bodies, Gazing on Food When discussing the audiovisual representations of embodied pleasures in the erotic and sexual context, one needs to embed it in the context of the framework of gaze. Although in her original essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Lara Mulvey discussed the theory of gaze solely in the context of the cinema, her text became highly influential for feminist and queer scholars writing about not just film but also photography and other visual media such as video games. For Mulvey: [i]n a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. ¹⁷⁸

In the model, Mulvey identifies three main points of view from which women on film are objectified: the point of view of fictional male characters looking at the fictional female characters, the point of view of the camera, and the point of view of a male spectator. In the analysis, she draws from psychoanalysis to link masculinity with voyeurism and explain how women’s body becomes the object of fetishization in the visual media. Later, other scholars developed the concept of the gaze with an important critique coming from Black scholars who recognized that the if the bodies of women are structured by and according to the men’s gaze, it is the white man’s gaze which at the same time objectifies the feminine and refuses significance to People of Color. While white men are in the position of power that allows them to freely gaze upon others, Black men were historically “murdered/ lynched for looking at white womanhood [as] the black male gaze was always subject to control and/or punishment by the powerful white Other.”¹⁷⁹ Various theorists attempted to include the female spectator in Mulvey’s model, either  Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989), 19 (original emphasis).  bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” in The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, ed. Amelia Jones (New York: Routledge, 2003), 96.

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by recognizing the difference made by their active participation in the industry as directors, screenwriters, or camera operators or by examining their spectatorship in the context of heterosexual objectification of male bodies on screen. However, as acknowledged by queer theorists, juxtaposing the male or masculine gaze with the female one still often results in the reinforcement of the binary hegemonic power relations. bell hooks argues that Black women’s oppositional gaze has the power to challenge these norms because gaze “has always been political”¹⁸⁰ and that is also the belief shared by the queer theorists for whom it is the queer gaze that has the potential to destabilize the heteropatriarchal norms. As the previous chapter already discussed in more detail, the concept of female gaze has been applied to the analyses of the practices of making, photographing, and sharing food online. Giving the creative agency to the creators of marginalized genders and races, food photography allows them to subvert and reclaim the narratives of pleasure. These activities explore the subversive potential of looking when performed by those who have been traditionally refused the power of looking at others, being forced into the submissive roles or kept out of the equation whatsoever. Gaze is also significant in the way digital games intersect sex with food. Although the changes in the game industry in the recent years have been crucial for diverting the monotonously hypersexualized and stereotyped bodies of characters, it can be argued that video games as broadly understood media still lack the diverse and inclusive representation of non-normative body types and do not engage in the in-depth discussions about embodied experiences of the characters. More and more independent titles explore various types of pleasures that can be related to queer, kinky, and otherwise nonheteronormative sexual activities and one can only hope that this will remain the focus of many titles to come. Thus, it is not surprising that among the titles that blur the lines between sex and food is the previously discussed Shrinking Pains (see the ninth chapter), considering its rare for video games focus on the eating body. The game presents the contradictory desires of the protagonist to experience and “feel something” and, at the same time, to disappear; to anchor oneself in the body as the source of sensations and to separate oneself from it. The personal, often difficult to witness narrative shows the extreme anxiety causing the repulsion of food and of one’s body, which is perceived as an oppressive and unwanted vessel. In this short story, the protagonist’s relationships with others are as important as their relationship with food. After their partner realizes that they have

 bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze,” 94.

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been lied to about the extent of the protagonist’s self-harming behaviors, they break up with them, saying that “they cannot do this anymore.” Unable to open to their friends about what they are going through, the protagonist leaves the house—they escape the emotional pain as well as the physical hunger—and engage in a casual sexual relationship with a stranger, Vivienne or Hunter, again depending on the choice of the partners’ gender made at the beginning of the game. During this scene, the first-person narration reveals the protagonist’s thoughts in the moments leading to sex and just after it, emphasizing their conflicting desires of wanting to experience physical touch and to cease to exist in their body, to be seen and to become invisible. The fact that for them the encounter is not emotionally meaningful is emphasized by the framing of Vivienne/ Hunter as they lean towards the character: the shot focuses then on their breasts/chest and lips, blurring out the eyes. In that moment, the protagonist is objectifying their sexual partner, and the fixation on the mouth is significant in the context of the metaphorical understanding of sex through eating [Figure 7]. At the same time, through vivid, sensual description, the focus is placed on the senses, especially considering the roughness that allows for the blurring of the lines between pain and pleasure. The description varies depending on whether it is Vivienne or Hunter: in the former case it uses the metaphor of eating to mark the protagonist’s submissiveness, “you feel scared but excited as she bares your throat, your body and altar for her to feast from.”¹⁸¹ The other moment in which food and sex closely coexist happens during the dinner with Isabella/Tylor during which they realize that the protagonist has been hiding from them the scale of their problem and after which they end the relationship. While during the encounter with Vivienne, the protagonist describes themselves in the categories of the food that is consumed by the other, in this case they emphasize the distance between themselves and their partner

Figure 7: The encounter with Vivienne who is framed in such a way to draw attention from her eyes and towards her mouth.

 Shrinking Pains.

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as well as the food that the latter eats. The desire to eat connected with the disordered perception of food as disgusting is complicated by the fact that in this case the Other is a familiar person whom the protagonist loves. The narration shows the inner thoughts of the protagonist: You stare at Isabella’s plate, the quail carcass ripped apart, blood and butter coagulating beneath its bones. For a long moment you wish you could be that open. She saws a piece of breast indelicately and brings it to her mouth, meat and lips red with sauce and lipstick. You wish you were her, could lift fork to teeth and swallow down parts of an animal, parts of anything, feel it heavy in your belly, the weight of something inside you.¹⁸²

There are differences between the descriptions depending on the gender of the protagonist’s partner and in the case of Taylor, the same narration describes the sensation of “meat wet against his lips.”¹⁸³ The description of the process of eating in this case is undoubtedly erotic, with the detailed attention drawn to the food itself [Figure 8]. Additionally, the fixation on the mouth is not accidental either. In Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in 19th Century, Kyla Wazana Tompkins argues that the act of eating is always both erotic and violent, drawing the attention to the mouth as “a space with a cultural and erotic history of its own.”¹⁸⁴ At the same time understood as a site of vulnerability and aggression it ties closely the acts of sexual pleasure to the pleasures of eating. Thus, the mouth symbolizes not only eating, but the power relations determined by who is eating and who is preparing food, two issues that most closely relate to the issues of race and gender. As the race scholars emphasize, the mouth can be also a tool of aggression and oppression: “[t]here are the eaters, and then there are eaten; sim-

Figure 8: The comparison of the moment during the dinner between Isabella and Taylor.

 Shrinking Pains.  Shrinking Pains.  Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Racial Indigestion, 5.

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ilarly, there are the eaters, and then there are the hungry.”¹⁸⁵ In the mouth, finally, food can be a source of pleasure, but by being swallowed and chewed “it is magically transformed into the disgusting.”¹⁸⁶ This closeness between desire and disgust accurately describes the conflicting emotions experienced by the protagonist. Now without meaning is the fact that this close relationship between the two issues comes from a game that is not only personal, partially autobiographical narrative, but one that focuses on eating disorders.

Popsicles, Lollipops, and the Subversive Queer Gaze Although food sexual metaphors vary depending on the language and cultural context, quite often they relate to oral sex. In the section, I want to take a closer look at the ways popsicles and lollipops specifically substitute oral sex while disrupting the heteronormative gaze and queering the game discourse. The two titles I have in mind here are a Japanese big-budget title Bayonetta and Robert Yang’s Succulent which is described on the creator’s website as “a short interactive music video game thing.” At the first glance, these two games cannot be more different. Where one is a fast-paced triple A game, the other is a short, experimental experience that subverts the expectations of what a game should be. However, through the directedness of the used food metaphors they allow for an interesting comparison regarding how they challenge the heteronormative norms dictating the character representation and the methods of constructing narrative in their respective genres and styles. Developed by PlatinumGames and published by Sega, the Bayonetta game series so far comprises of two installments released in 2009 and 2014 with the third part still in development after its 2017 announcement. The first-person action game has received positive reviews and gained recognition for its original setting that heavily draws from Christian Heaven and Hell mythology, and the protagonist, the eponymous witch who uses shapeshifting powers to summon demons in her fight against Heaven and its angels. Bayonetta’s unapologetic sexiness for some is nothing but an example of the ways in which the industry objectifies and sexualizes female characters. This is not surprising: from unrealistic proportions emphasizing the slim body and long legs to the long magic hair which, tightly covering her body, transforms itself into the leather-like outfit, leaving her almost naked when in combat. However, as Amanda Phillips argues,

 Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Racial Indigestion, 8.  Ian William Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1998), 96.

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“Bayonetta’s weaponized sexuality falls into the category of what Micha Cárdenas calls ‘femme disturbance,’ the propensity of femininity to disrupt phallic power structures through its own excess. Femme disturbance, rather than wholly reclaiming a feminine figure for progressive ends, disrupts simplistic notions of agency and resistance to open the way for recognizing how systems might be assailed from within.”¹⁸⁷ In their analysis, Phillips points out that despite the appearance of the main character, Bayonetta continuously challenges the male gaze, either by ridiculing male characters in game or by inclusion of metaphorical and literal castration of masculine figures associated with Catholic-like church and religion. The sexual character of Bayonetta manifests also through the combat mechanics and her attacks which require a fast button mashing, culminating in the final boss battle in the “Climax” attack. Thus, “Bayonetta engages queer narratives and aesthetics just as much as she actively refuses heteronormative gestures in the game.”¹⁸⁸ In this context—which, although considered by some for its queer potential of subverting the industry’s heteronormativity, is by others deemed shallow and distasteful—it does not surprise when Bayonetta is repeatedly shown holding and eating lollipops, a candy that despite its ludic significance as a restorative and enhancement plays also an important part in creating the discussed image of the character. The candy, the shape of which differs depending on their colors (green, purple, rose, and yellow), type (herb, magic, bloody, and moon), and size (normal or mega) are consumable items that can be purchased in the store in Hell. Their ludic functions vary from restoratives (Green Herb Lollipop) to enhancements (the remaining three types). Whereas often ludic food is consumed off-screen or without an additional animation nor narrative meaning, this is not the case here. To the contrary, many cutscenes feature Bayonetta playing with the lollipop when facing the enemies, relying on the cultural associations between the type of candy and creation of the image of sexy temptress. While the carelessness with which she holds it in her mouth while confronting large, monstrous celestial beings can be read as a strategic move on her part, a way to taunt the enemies associated with formality of the heavenly hierarchy of archangel beings, it can also be understood in the context of toying with the player’s expectations towards female characters. The choice of a candy and a lollipop in particular draws from imagery popular in advertisements and visual media that fetishizes girlhood through equat Amanda Phillips, “Welcome to My Fantasy Zone: Bayonetta and Queer Femme Disturbance,” in Queer Game Studies, ed. Bonnie Ruberg and Adrienne Shaw (Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 2017), 111.  Amanda Phillips, “Welcome to My Fantasy Zone,” 115.

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ing feminine attractiveness with young age. Food is often an important element that creates a link between sexual attractiveness and presumed innocence in feminine characters. Moreover, the associations between femininity and sweettasting desserts are prolific in many languages, manifesting both through the metaphorical description of women as food and through the imagery that places them together, implying that women (and children) have affinity for sweets more often than men (who, according to the same stereotypes, should naturally only crave meat and beer). Thus, in the case of Bayonetta the lollipop has several meanings. The candy undoubtedly is an object of fetishization, sexualizing the character through focusing on her mouth and the oral pleasure of consumption. However, on the other hand, as Bayonetta continuously challenges the male gaze, the deliberateness of the act points towards the reading offered by Phillips. What is more, the particular subversiveness of the phallic and oral symbolism of the particular candy is used in a similar way in a different hack and slash with a goal of playing with the expectations and the stereotypes of the action genres, that is Lollipop Chainsaw (Grasshopper Manufacture 2012). Similarly to the previous case, the game’s protagonist, a blond cheerleader zombie hunter, Juliet Starling, is often seen with a lollipop which accentuates the revealing, hypersexual cheerleader outfit and the two ponytails with pink scrunchies, while also doubling as a ludic item of restorative powers. In both games, the overtly sexual character is introduced as a strong, unapologetic, self-sufficient action heroine who embraces her sexuality. These two titles can be juxtaposed with Yang’s Succulent. After Hurt Me Plenty (2014), an equally short spanking simulator, Succulent is a second installment in the ongoing series of short “gay sex games”¹⁸⁹ created by Roberg Yang. Featuring Yang’s trademark character in sunglasses known from other games in the series, Succulent combines sexual explicitness with humor. Unlike the elaborate gameplay of the previously discussed titles, in this case the player’s agency is limited to the control over the man’s arm in order to navigate an orange popsicle in, out, and inside his mouth. The website emphasizes the in-game addition of a “new stunning immersive ‘cheek physics’ technology”¹⁹⁰ which ensures that the character’s body reacts to the player’s actions, creating even more suggestive imagery in equating the popsicle with a penis. In interviews, Yang makes comparisons between the cheek physics and the dominant in-game trope of “breast

 Bonnie Ruberg, The Queer Games Avant-Garde: How LGBTQ Game Makers Are Reimagining the Medium of Video Games (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2020), 43.  Radiatoryyang.itch.io/succulent.

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physics,” which emphasize and exaggerate the shape of feminine body types. He further emphasizes its importance: “[v]ideo game physics are important in general because that’s what makes the body real inside the virtual space: the simulation of interaction and response.”¹⁹¹ Through this, he draws attention to the body and, once again, to the mouth as the space that connects sexual and eating pleasures. Despite or, maybe partially due to their shortness, Yang’s titles stand out among sex-themed games being “arguably the boldest in his direct, even pornographic representation of queer sex and other erotic exchanges.”¹⁹² In one of the interviews he states that: “I make games about sex. I have to make these games because I feel no one else will. By and large, even AAA games you might associate with gay sex aren’t really about gay sex. I firmly believe we can all do better”¹⁹³ In his game series, he challenges the industry’s approaches to representation of gay sex, not only by setting it as the most crucial element of the game and making it meaningful both in the sense of a story and as a vital part of the gameplay, but also through the meaningful approach to the representation of the included characters. Many of the games feature the same character model, commissioned specifically for the game. The reusing of the same model and it repetition within the game is another commentary on the similarity of the gay men represented in media, majority of whom are white and masculine. The focus on the (masculine and gay) body and the critique of the way it has been portrayed in many other titles is of great importance in Succulent. The game overtly draws attention to the body additionally by placing two clones of the man in sunglasses behind him: as the player manipulates a popsicle in and out of his mouth, his two copies in the back are touching themselves through the tight boxer briefs [Figure 9]. They continue to nod, but due to the sunglasses hiding their eyes, it is impossible to say whether their gaze is targeted at the third man or the player in charge of the movements, interestingly challenging the player’s voyeuristic gaze and placing them as its subject instead. The player can direct the popsicle with the movements of the mouse. The music stops whenever they decide to take it out completely of the man’s mouth and intensifies the deeper it is placed into it, with the additional lighting effects appearing in the latter case. The initial reading of the act as metaphor for

 Bonnie Ruberg, The Queer Games Avant-Garde, 48.  Bonnie Ruberg, Video Games Have Always Been Queer (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 220.  Mike Williams, “Robert Yang: ‘The Game Industry Needs to Get Laid,’” GamesIndustry.biz, March 18, 2016, https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2016-03-18-robert-yang-the-game-in dustry-needs-to-get-laid.

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Figure 9: The screenshot from the game Succulent.

fellatio is further enforced by the sounds of men’s moaning that accompany the movements of the popsicle. However, after just few moments, the colors and the movements of the models become distorted, adding the green and pink shadows to the previously soft beige hue of the game. The colors are not the only ones that create the uncanny glitch-alike effect, as the men in the background start to twitch in an unnatural way to the increasingly unsettling sounds. In the final moments, the main character’s face starts to distort and melt as his jaw drops down, creating a monstrous and unhuman creature that seems to swallow the player before the screen is covered in red before returning to a normal-looking title screen. The entire experience lasts around three minutes with a surprising ending that evokes the body horror themes. As such, it comes with interesting consequences. In that ending, two main things happen: the player is deprived of the control that they believed to have and the boundary between the eating and the eaten are challenged. The game challenges the voyeuristic player’s gaze from the very beginning. On his blog and in the numerous interviews, Yang identifies these issues as crucial inspirations behind the creation of the game: “There’s a few scenes in the film Inherent Vice where you watch a man eat a frozen banana. They were unusually entertaining and not at all arousing, which got me thinking – what if I made a game where you just watch a dude stick stuff in his mouth?”¹⁹⁴ By fixing camera to the man who is sucking the melting, dripping popsicle—the “oozing” and wetness of the food being one of its qualities that blurs the boundaries between the pleasures and sensualities of eating and sex—Yang immediately takes control away from the player by controlling the direction of their gaze. The player cannot take their eyes away from the scene unless they decide to stop the game which, importantly, changes its tone to incorporate the body horror-like

 Robert Yang, “‘Succulent’ as Hypnotizing Homo Hop Homage,” Radiator (blog), January 13, 2015, https://www.blog.radiator.debacle.us/2015/01/succulent-as-hypnotizing-homo-hop-homage. html.

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images of glitched models after they actively participated in the act. On the one hand, “the physicality of having his own arm do it, instead of a floating disembodied invisible player hand, was crucial to establish that he was doing it for himself and enjoying it.”¹⁹⁵ However, on the other, the limited control the player has over the movements invite the player into the sexual play. Finally, the last moments of the game in which the man’s mouth becomes monstrous and opens as if to devour the player, is a reminder that the abject is never far when discussing food and eating in the physical, carnal context, by taking control from the player and reversing the eater/eaten dichotomy. The surprising finale forces the player to question their own engagement, intentions, and emotions arose in the process. Whereas in the previous chapter, food was analyzed in comparison with pornographic photography, the above examples discuss the ways in which one’s play with food signifies the sexual activity. In both these contexts, because food is fetishized, it is coded as a substitute for genitals. Referencing interviews with men who played Bayonetta, Phillips points towards the fact that they rarely found the blatant, aggressive oversexualization of the character exciting. Thus, in these examples the directedness is not meant to arouse the players, rather encouraging them to approach the texts in the more critical way.

Orgasmic Food Pleasures On the one hand, there is no doubt that when Bayonetta is licking a lollipop moments before spurring into a battle during which her magic hair will most likely shift into a weapon, uncovering her naked body, she becomes a sexualized object. In the same way, the melting, drooping popsicle that pushes out the cheeks of the protagonist of Succulent leaves little doubt in the player’s mind as to what it is meant to signify. In these instances, foods explicitly represent genitals and are specifically chosen due to their shape (long and straight popsicle considered a phallic shape), consistency (the wet, sticky, melting food reminiscent of bodily fluids and sweat), and the sociocultural gendered connotations. All three characters are licking sugary treats, candy and ice-cream, both being types of food closely associated with femininity and often used to evoke the oppressive image of a woman as paradoxically both an innocent girl and sexual temptress. For Bayonetta and Juliet, the choice can be interpreted as an empowering sign that they are in control of their own bodies, but in the case of Succulent the

 Robert Yang, “Succulent.”

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choice becomes a queer subversion of the expectations of masculinity and femininity. While the examples discussed above evoke mostly the metaphorical qualities of food, the boundaries between food and sexual pleasures can be less defined and substantially more blurred. Food, apart its nutritious values, can be exquisite and scrumptious, melting in one’s mouth into an explosion of delicious flavors. This pleasure can culminate in the orgasmic experience which can either be recognized for the pleasure it brings in itself or, once again, as a substitute or metaphor of the sexual orgasm. Succulent explores this connection through the intensification of visual aspects such as the light surrounding the character increasing in size and intensity which, together with the changes to the music, seems to represent the increasing arousal. The fact that is culminated not in an orgasm but rather in grotesque bodily deformation, replacing pleasure with fear, is a comment on the way orgasm is expected to always be a part of the sexual encounter, or even a reward one is entitled to. A similar use of food as unbelievably delicious to the point where the sensation is almost too much to handle can be seen in the previously discussed I love you, Colonel Sanders! In the game, the food is used to emphasize Colonel’s attractiveness. The sexual desire and the desire for his “finger lickin’ good” cooking are interwoven so closely that it becomes impossible to separate them. The intensity of the feeling culminates in the earliest of the possible alternative endings, which takes place after the first interaction between the player’s character and the Colonel. There, a scene can be entered in which the player character finds themselves unable to withstand the orgasmic, mind-blowing taste of the chicken dish. As the narration is showcased on the bottom of the screen, the background shows a swirling black hole, symbolizing the fact that the character transcends the universe: Tasting Colonel Sanders’ food transports you to another dimension. Alone with your taste buds, gripping a drumstick in your hand, you float weightlessly. The flavors are so intense, you become wrapped up in them. Unable to resist, you reach toward the light. It grabs your hand and pulls you closer… closer… Until your fingertip connects with the end of everything. You are forever lost in the land of Tender Fried Chicken Bliss. Your mind dissolves. There is no [player character’s name], now. There is only herbs and spices.¹⁹⁶

The game is quite obviously a parody, meant to exaggerate tropes known from dating simulator genre and various anime and manga as well. However, the

 I Love You, Colonel Sanders!.

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above description is worth closer attention because of how on the one hand it structures the food pleasure as the utmost, otherworldly, but also sexual pleasure, and on the other how it queers the food-as-sex narrative of video games. The framing of the scene as the game’s “bed ending” can be seen as an act of mockery that can be understood as a manifestation of sex negativity. However, I propose the reading which understands it as rejection of heteronormative understanding of sex and sexual pleasure as culminating in orgasm, showing further how this discourse influences the portrayal of food/sex pleasures in digital games.

Conclusions The word “foodgasm” (a portmanteau of words “food” and “orgasm”), used sometimes as a hashtag similar to #foodporn, is an important element of gourmet manga and anime titles such as Food Wars! In the review of the anime, Jaya Saxena praised it for “not just conveying flavor, but conveying the emotion of experiencing flavor… There is a mental as well as physical response when eating something good, or weird, or disgusting. There is joy and confusion and curiosity, not just in your tastebuds, but everywhere.”¹⁹⁷ Although many video games explore the meaning of food with consideration of their sociocultural context, the food/sex pleasures still seem to be predominantly absent from the medium. In Taste as Experience: The Philosophy and Aesthetics of Food, Nicola Perullo remarks that “our first contact with food is modulated by pleasure, a deep pleasure with its roots in the biocultural sphere of primary human drives. One of our first aesthetic relationships with the external world is one where food is a source of both nourishment and enjoyment.”¹⁹⁸ For Probyn, “certain representations of food and sex belie the limits of sex as the sole optic through which to elaborate an ethics of existence … [and] thinking through food to sex may make us ‘infinitely more susceptible to pleasure.’”¹⁹⁹ In a possibly controversial claim, I want to argue that it is through the absence of the explicit food/sex pleasure overlaps that video games are revealed to still have a space to grow in terms of their portrayal of sex and their explora-

 Jaya Saxena, “The Anime Show Where People’s Clothes Fly Off When They Eat Delicious Food,” Eater, November 18, 2020, https://www.eater.com/21573306/food-wars-foodgasm-animeseries-review.  Nicola Perullo, Taste as Experience: The Philosophy and Aesthetics of Food (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 11– 12.  Elspeth Probyn, Beyond food/sex, 226. Emphasis original.

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tions of sexual pleasures. That is not to say that sex is entirely missing (or missapearing) from video games as it is obvious that it is not the case, but rather that the exploration of these pleasures and sensualities often happens far from the mainstream. Whereas creators like Anna Anthropy or Robert Yang gain their recognition, I hope that more and more games will tackle body and sex positivity, and that many of these will feature the eating and food pleasures.

Chapter 8 Non-Hegemonic Masculinities in Dating Simulators In the previous chapters, I have scrutinized the transformation of cooking and food-themed video games over the last few decades. Although at the beginning, such games have been marketed at women players, based on a stereotype that cooking is an necessarily and exclusively feminine activity, the recent incorporation of cooking mechanics in various mainstream genres points towards the changing role of food in video game narratives. While in the other chapters I mostly discuss the significance of food for the women characters, in this chapter I want to show how food can be used in dating simulator games to challenge the stereotypes of masculinities, especially in the context of facilitating the expression of non-hegemonic masculinities. The changes in video game industry— slower perhaps in regards to the mainstream than the independent creators— mean greater inclusivity and diversity, which in turn leads to the acknowledgement of masculinities and femininities and not homogenous categories. Understanding that the topic is a broad one, I had to limit myself here to only two titles belonging to the visual novel and dating simulator genres. I first analyze the parody advertisement game I Love You Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator (Psyop 2019), showing how food is used there to challenge the stereotypes of toxic masculinity without, however, succeeding at subverting what Michelle Szabo calls “traditional culinary masculinities.” Second, I compare it to Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator (Game Grumps 2017), a game which, while not having food at its primary focus, explores in detail various ways in which food is crucial to the performance of the characters’ queerness and sustaining their relationships with each other. Both of these games were chosen for the analysis due to several factors. On the one hand, they offer a quite interesting look into the ways food habits can intersect with the gender expressions, reflecting and/or subverting gender role stereotypes. Although arguably Dream Daddy has been a much more successful game, due to its comedic and parodic character, I Love you Colonel Sanders! has experienced a somewhat similar moment of popularity. Whereas their target groups and purpose (as a popular game vs a free advertisement game) differ, both offer a rare example of the focus on culinary masculinities.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110716603-010

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Defining the Dating Simulators Genre Many visual novels, dating simulators (used interchangeably with “dating sims”), and other romance-basing genres rely on the courtship mechanic in which the player needs to approach non-player characters: [t]he player works to woo over an NPC (usually female) so that she and the player are ‘dating.’ The successful courtship might be rewarded with satisfying romance, finding true love or sexual encounter, depending on the game subgenre (variations on dating games range from chaste to pornographic). Players try to improve their in-game personal qualities in order to attract their chosen one; meanwhile, they must choose the right things to say and do to court her and keep her love once she has admitted that she cares.²⁰⁰

While, originally, many dating sims involved heterosexual relationships between male player character and women non-player characters, the reversed scenario is just as popular in the form of what is known as otome dating simulators (sometimes abbreviated to otoge) from the Japanese word for “maiden.” In this version a protagonist is usually a young woman in a school or a university setting who can pursue a romantic and/or sexual relationship with one of many dashing men. In the West there is a tendency to equate “dating simulators” with “visual novels” as they share romantic themes and the dialogue-driven gameplay. However, where visuals novels are considered a type of choose-your-own-adventure games with a lesser degree of interactivity, dating simulators rely on statistics that reflects the choices, character development, and progress towards specific storylines. While the majority of the games belonging to both these genres are developed by Japanese creators and are not frequently localized, in recent years dating sims became more popular among Western independent creators. Their low interactivity which situates them at the “fringes of gaming”²⁰¹ and the “sub-indie combination of low barrier to creative entry and achievable assets makes the genre an ideal space for queer gameplay.”²⁰² However, dating simulators and visual novels often still uphold the hegemonic power dynamics, requir-

 Katherine Isbister, How Games Move Us: Emotion by Design (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2016), 25 – 26.  Mark Kretzschmar and Anastasia Salter, “Party Ghosts and Queer Teen Wolves: Monster Prom and Resisting Heteronormativity in Dating Simulators,” International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (Bugibba Malta: ACM, 2020): 1.  Anastasia Salter, Bridget Blodgett, and Anne Sullivan, “‘Just Because It’s Gay?’: Transgressive Design in Queer Coming of Age Visual Novels,” in Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, 1– 9 (FDG ’18. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, 2018): 4.

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ing players to embrace the normative gender roles in order to ensure the “good” ending. Furthermore, many of these games reinforce toxic heteronormativity, coding romantic relationships as something that needs to be won through the series of ritualized actions with the common implication that sex is a reward for correctly meeting the social requirements and something the protagonist (and the player) “deserves”—an attitude which raises another wide range of problematic implications. The heteronormativity can further manifest through the linearity of the gameplay meaning that certain choices might block the paths towards the interactions with some characters rather than others. This erasure of consensually non-monogamous relationships corresponds with the enforcement of the “compulsory sexuality” on characters who have to “experience themselves as desiring subjects, take up sexual identities, and engage in sexual activity.”²⁰³ Considering the manga and anime origins of visual novels and dating simulators, and especially the yuri/yaoi romance representation—the two Japanese genres focused on female and male homosexual relationships created predominantly for female audiences—the number of games featuring queer relationships is not surprising. However, as Mark Kretzschmar and Anastasia Salter argue, although these games subvert the expectations of the mainstream gameplay, the “introduction of queer romances into a framework built for heteronormativity does not itself subvert that heteronormativity. Instead, it might simply enforce the same transactional mechanics and assumptions on queer relationships.”²⁰⁴ Although the vast majority of titles in each of these genres is produced in Japan, in recent years the games became more and more popular among Western independent creators and it is the latter that is the subject of scrutiny in this chapter.

Chicken Ever So Tender: The Emotions of Comfort Food I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator is an entirely free dating sim commissioned as a part of a marketing campaign by the chain restaurant KFC and developed by New York-based studio Psyop in 2019. Heavily inspired by otome dating simulators and Japanese visual novels, it draws from them both in terms of gameplay and the visual style. As suggested by the

 Kristina Gupta, “Compulsory Sexuality: Evaluating an Emerging Concept,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41, no. 1 (2015): 132.  Mark Kretzschamer and Anastasia Salter, “Party Ghosts,” 3.

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title, the game does not take itself seriously and it is its humorous and parodic character that met with an overwhelmingly positive response from the players. Thus, it is certainly a unique title considering that its primary function is that of an advertisement, which in itself has few consequences for the narrative, including the focus on the meals available in U.S. branched of KFC restaurants and the limited gameplay. The latter manifests in the simplification of the dating simulator format which usually allows for the choice of one of the possible romantic partners. The game offers a linear experience and, thus, the only romantic partner the player can pursue is the eponymous Colonel Sanders himself. Food studies challenge the notion that food preferences are arbitrary and universal, presenting them instead as a product of sociocultural contexts. As Wenying Xu remarks in Eating Identities: Reading Food in Asian American Literature: “[m]ost of us are familiar with culinary myths that dictate our gendering activity. For instance, we regard sweet, pale, and delicate foods as feminine and most fit for women’s constitution”²⁰⁵ while men “are typically associated with red meat and large helpings of food.”²⁰⁶ The idea that certain foods can be tied with specific genders, usually understood in binary categories, is sometimes reflected in video games that place special focus on romantic relationships. However, the analysis of the in-game foods become more difficult in the advertisement game: the fact that Colonel prepares a bucket of fried chickens is less telling of his food preferences than it is of KFC’s branding. However, the narrative that glorifies KFC’s dishes due to their simplicity and the authentic taste that evokes nostalgia for home-cooked meals by simultaneously placing it in opposition to haute cuisine offers an interesting area of analysis in terms of how it structures Colonel Sanders’ character. In I Love You, Colonel Sanders! the player controls a character on their first day of the new term in the prestigious University of Cooking School where they attend classes together with the immensely talented and dashing Colonel Sanders, a skillful chef dreaming of using his family recipe to open a chain of restaurants. Like in the case of many dating simulators and visual novels, the protagonist’s name and appearance are never revealed in order to facilitate player’s identification—thus, a protagonist is a type of character referred to by Trena Lee and Alex Mitchell as a “shell” character whom “the player can only describe

 Wenying Xu, Eating Identities: Reading Food in Asian American Literature (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007), 5.  Deborah Lupton, Food, the Body and the Self (London: SAGE Publications Ltd, 1996), 104.

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in interpretative terms”²⁰⁷ due to the lack of or the contradictory nature of the information provided about the character. In practice, this denotes a character who is never visible on screen and whose name is customizable. Colonel Sanders stands out among other students of the University of Cooking School not only due to his impeccable cooking talents, but also due to the design. Due to the white hair, moustache, and goatee, heavy framed glasses, and trademark outfit consisting of a white shirt, black string tie, and a red apron, the character is easily recognizable as a mascot in KFC’s advertising and branding. However, at the same time the character differs from the one featured on the restaurants’ logos: he is younger, slimmer, and more muscular. Despite some exaggeration of proportions, which for example emphasize his arms and shoulders, Colonel’s design is the most realistic out of the other characters, some of whom are not human like Sprinkles, or Professor Dog, a corgi in a chef’s outfit who is the class’ teacher or a robot Clank, one of the students. However, more important than his physical appearance is his calm demeanor and a kind personality which can be seen as a way of rebranding and reinventing the image of KFC’s trademark Colonel Sanders. The charming Colonel is based on the real-life founder and long term CEO of the company, colonel Harland David Sanders. The game is another in the series of KFC’s attempts to separate themselves from the real-life man who, having sold the rights to the company in the 1970s, became engaged in a number of lawsuits with the company criticizing the quality of their food and was named in several sexual harassment accusations. Especially the latter provides a crucial context to the interpretation of how the game constructs the fictional Colonel as physically strong and ambitious but at the same time sensitive and caring. The game follows visual novel genres in that the players have very little agency over the narrative: while it is possible for them to choose the wrong dialogue options leading to one of the premature game endings, they do not have influence over the food they prepare. Although the gameplay does not feature the time-pressure and other requirements associated with the tournament format, one can find the elements of the cooking competition format in the story since after each class the students are required to create certain dishes to impress Professor Dog. After the first of such classes, students are asked to showcase their skills and many decide to create their trademark creations—for example, Miriam, the protagonist’s friend, amazes the class with her miniature,

 Trena Lee and Alex Mitchell, “Filling in the Gaps: ‘Shell’ Playable Characters,” in R. Rouse, H. Koenitz, and M. Haahr (eds.), Interactive Storytelling. ICIDS 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 11318 (2018): 246.

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thumb-sized foods. Colonel, paired for the exercise with the player character, stuns the class by deciding instead on what appears an extremely simple dish: mashed potatoes with gravy. The choice of the dish is important for two main reasons. On the one hand, it advertises a side dish that debuted in the American KFC restaurants around the time of the game’s release. On the other hand, it symbolizes all qualities important in the brand’s advertisement: the dish is simple and familiar because it evokes the nostalgia for domestic cooking. Like other dishes by Colonel, it has been inspired by the recipe passed down for generations from his great-great-grandmother. From the very beginning, Colonel is introduced as a prodigy and a rising star of the culinary industry because of which perhaps almost no one questions his affinity for fast food at the expense of haute cuisine which one might expect at such a prestigious cooking course. This becomes one of the main points which one of the game’s main antagonists, Van Van the Man Man, uses to mock Colonel (granted, with little to no effect). Dressed in a sleeveless white top and a leather jacket, with make-up and fabulous hairstyle, Van Van is flamboyant and expressive with the personality matching the over-the-top character of his dishes. Where Colonel’s attractiveness is a literal advertisement meant to advertise fast foods by making it seem more appealing than it is to some due to being heavy in fats and processed sugars, Van Van’s exaggerated character villainizes the elaborate and expensive dishes in a less direct way. Despite the obvious difference in the complexity of this food in comparison with some of the others prepared by the other students, Van Van is the only one who openly mocks it: “Mashed potatoes with gravy? PATHETIC! In just a few minutes, I’ve prepared a full meal! Gaze upon my specialty, braised tentacle of octopus in my silky saltwater sauce! Plated on a battle-ax blade forged by my supreme chef ancestors!”²⁰⁸ This quote says more about Colonel’s cooking than Van Van’s over-the-top presentation, making a statement consistent with KFC’s branding which poses their food as appealing and simply better than the elaborate dishes served at expensive restaurants not just because of its taste or presentation, but because it is simple and familiar. By evoking nostalgia for home-cooked meals and emphasizing the strong emotional reactions they cause in those who taste them, KFC chicken dishes fall quite closely into the definitions of “comfort food.” The concept, added to both Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster in 1997, can be defined as “food that comforts or affords solace; hence, any food (frequently with a high sugar or carbohydrate content) that is associated with childhood or with home cooking” and “food prepared in a traditional style having a usually

 Psyop, I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator (KFC, 2019).

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nostalgic or sentimental appeal” respectively.²⁰⁹ While food has always been strongly connected with emotions and had an ability to visibly impact it, the notion of its purposeful utilization in mood regulation is a sign of consumerist and postmodern society characterized with both an increased value placed on broadly understood consumption and the rise of use of objects, such as food, in the construction of one’s identities. The emotional entanglement and function of food have long been recognized as “food, eating, and experiences of the body all have emotional implications.”²¹⁰ The abovementioned definitions point to several different qualities that comfort food fulfils, from emotional to physiological. Although the latter, namely the release of endogenous opioids and the surge of dopamine resulting from eating food considered tasty, is undoubtedly an important factor in the food choice, it seems that the emotional connections made between specific dishes and relationships or memories have a greater influence on personal preference. What is more, food is rarely separated from the social context in which it was consumed and it is easy to form strong associations with dishes one found particularly tasty in childhood or which were prepared by a specific family member on special occasions. The nostalgia and the positive feelings evoked by eating at the KFC restaurants constitute the most important elements of the company’s marketing campaign to which the discussed game surely belongs. The tender chicken is repeatedly emphasized as not just tasty but out-of-this-world delicious. After the first time protagonist tries Colonel’s fried chicken served in a bucket, it is possible to trigger the premature Game Over screen in which the food proves too much to bear for the them. Brought to the orgasmic extasy, the protagonist transcends the known universe, “forever lost in the land of Tender Fried Chicken Bliss.”²¹¹ However, it seems that it is not its taste that is most important here but the fact that the recipe bridges the gap between present and the past, bringing back the childhood memories of grandmother’s cooking. Where the deliciousness is exaggerated in a humorous, light-hearted way, its emotional weight is never mocked or ridiculed.

 Julie L. Locher et al., “Comfort Foods: An Exploratory Journey Into The Social and Emotional Significance of Food,” Food and Foodways 13, no. 4 (2005): 274.  William Alex McIntosh, Sociologies of Food and Nutrition (New York: Springer Science & Business Media, 1996), 245.  Psyop, I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator (KFC, 2019).

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Culinary Masculinities of Colonel Sanders In the influential Doing Gender Candace West and Don Zimmerman conceptualize gender as “routine accomplishments embedded in everyday interaction.”²¹² The idea that gender identity is not fixed but is continuously negotiated through social relations was developed by Judith Butler in her groundbreaking Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity in which she argued that gender identity is not an ontologically stable quality residing in individual people, but is rather a cultural construct. Butler’s theory of gender as performance is crucial in both the development of queer theory which challenges the binary understanding of gender and expressions of sexual desire. Thus, the relation of gendered performances around food practices is intertwined with the class positioning, race, age, and geographical location of the persons in question, all of which influence how they can perform their identities. Furthermore, in discussion of one’s relationship to food it is crucial to recognizing the relativist perspectives which assume the plural understanding of gender, that is one that considers the existence of multiple femininities and masculinities. Rooted in constructionist approaches, it considers the existence of multiple modes in which femininities and masculinities can be performed. Non-hegemonic masculinities, for example, exist next to the dominant form which is “more socially central, or more associated with authority and social power, than others.”²¹³ Particular types of non-hegemonic or non-normative masculinities and femininities are often subjected to social scrutiny which results in prejudice and violence. Writing about challenging dichotomies around domestic cooking, Michelle Szabo links hegemonic masculinities with “traditional culinary masculinities,” explaining that “normative masculine display of non-femininity and heterosexual desire (…) can be seen in an approach to cooking as leisure (in contrast to the more feminine family obligation) or as seduction.”²¹⁴ While interviewing heterosexual men with significant cooking responsibilities at home, she noted that they often provided practical reasons for cooking and emphasized that it is considered an attractive quality and a means of seduction. The character of Colonel bridges the gap between the two stereotypes of food: the feminine, traditional homemade cooking done by a woman (preferably,  West and Zimmerman, “Doing Gender,” 125.  R. W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept,” Gender & Society 19, no. 6 (2005): 846.  Michelle Szabo, “Men Nurturing through Food: Challenging Gender Dichotomies around Domestic Cooking,” Journal of Gender Studies 23, no. 1 (2014): 22.

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a mother or a grandmother) and the modern, exciting, artistic cooking done by a man. Although recently Western studies began addressing the growing involvement of men in domestic food preparation, food still remains “tied to the traditional connection between food, care, and femininity, including a relationship of obligation and responsibility around food.”²¹⁵ Thus, masculinity is not only tied to different food items with the special emphasis on meat, but also is negotiated through negation of feminine foods (e. g., vegetables) and eating behaviors (e. g., dieting). However, it is crucial to acknowledge that despite the fact that through his cooking he does seem to perform a type of a softer masculinity, his status as a celebrity chef and the use of his cooking talent as signifier of attractiveness mean that he still can be read in terms of traditional culinary masculinity. Although Colonel is not actively pursuing romantic relationships, he is immediately recognized by the other characters as desirable—however, it is not his physical appearance but his cooking abilities that are considered his most attractive trait. Having recognized this, Ashleigh, the second main antagonists of the game, attempts to seduce him: “today I smelled something beautiful. I knew at that moment that only the hands of a true gentleman could fry chicken so tender.”²¹⁶ Her compliment is constructed around several of these stereotypes that positions men as capable, skillful, and adapted to perform culinary arts. Moreover, it also reinforces the idea that cooking in men is a unique, attractive quality which is more often glorified and praised than the same ability in women and nonbinary people. Finally, it is not without meaning that the game’s narrative follows the structure of a cooking competition. According to Ellen Herkes and Guy Redden, who analyzed portrayals of culinary professionals through the example of the MasterChef Australia program, despite the growing presence of female chefs on television who invert the binary and embody the postfeminist identities by combining the domestic with professional fulfillment, there is still a strong disparity between the representation and attitudes towards cooks and chefs of different genders. The devaluation of the women’s cooking and the consideration of the masculine cuisine as more sophisticated and of higher value tend to be paired with different ways in which the identities of celebrity chefs are constructed. The undeniable popularity of the cooking shows that promote the celebrity status of their chefs who “within his/her towering person [assimilate] the authority, charisma and responsibility of the journalist, the activist and the parent all rolled

 Helene Aarseth and Bente Marianne Olsen, “Food and Masculinity in Dual-Career Couples,” Journal of Gender Studies 17, no. 4 (2008): 282.  Psyop, I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator (KFC, 2019).

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into one”²¹⁷ becomes a fascinating object of study showcasing the striking double standard in the field that otherwise is perceived as dominated by women. While women often remain connected closer to the kitchen spaces, many of the male chefs are portrayed as active, travelling and campaigning outside of it, “continually reassert[ing] [their] masculinity by never being tied down by his apron strings, by never being stuck in the kitchen,” and assessing multitude of roles such as “revolutionary, reformer, preacher, politician and advocate of the disempowered.”²¹⁸ Furthermore, as scholars note, despite some reworking of traditional gender identities in dominant representation of foodie culture, studies conclude that these shifts do little to reorganize gendered social relations (…) With the rise of food celebrities, we see long-standing ways of doing gender reflected in instructional demonstrations by women in highly domestic settings, followed by exciting evening programs featuring men engaging with food outside of home.²¹⁹

Despite the school setting of the game, the short term is structured in a way that resembles a cooking competition rather than a course in which participants have to showcase both their skills and their personalities. In this sense, Colonel represents all of the aforementioned qualities as a charismatic reformer. The underlying assumption is that only Colonel—a white man—can perfect the recipe invented by a woman and highly inspired by soul food and the Afro-American cuisine, and use it to establish his own, extremely successful chain of restaurants. Additionally, the lack of commentary on how this romanticization of domestic cooking is carried out especially by women (e. g., Colonel’s gran-grandmother) reveals the sexist preconceptions about food culture criticized by Kim Hall in the Queer Crip Feminist Politics of Food (see the Introduction) and which Tracey Deutsch called out as a “problematic nostalgia” as it reinforces hegemonic food traditions that located women in the kitchen.²²⁰ While the presentation of Colonel as a kind, warm, and caring man who enjoys cooking as a way of reconnecting with family can be seen as subverting the stereotypical hegemonic culinary masculinity, it is still firmly embedded in heteronormative context.

 Lucy Scholes, “A Slave to the Stove? The TV Celebrity Chef Abandons the Kitchen: Lifestyle TV, Domesticity and Gender,” Critical Quarterly 53, no. 3 (2011): 45.  Lucy Scholes, “A Slave to the Stove?,” 56.  Kate Cairns, Josée Johnston, and Shyon Baumann, “Caring About Food: Doing Gender in the Foodie Kitchen,” Gender & Society 24, no. 5 (2010): 594.  Kim Q. Hall, “Toward a Queer Crip Feminist Politics of Food,” 180.

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Queer Fatherhood and the Emotions of Food In words of Julia Ehrhardt, “[a]s the nascent field of food studies takes shape, insights from queer studies have the potential to enrich our understandings of the interrelationships among food, gender, and sexuality. The project of queering food studies invites us to consider how food practices and beliefs reinforce and resist heterosexual gender ideologies.”²²¹ By investigating the role of cooking in non-normative households one can notice the departure from the stereotypical divisions and roles in many modern households, with more social permission given to men to perform the “feminine” food practices and to openly attach the same emotional meaning to food preparation which stereotypically is associated with women. In Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator, a dating simulator game developed by Game Grumps in 2017, the player controls a customizable single father of a teenage daughter, Amanda. After losing their spouse (whose gender depends on the player’s choice), the protagonist, whom I refer here to as the Dad, decides to move to the new house in Maple Bay. As the characters begin to explore the new neighborhood, they befriend seven other single fathers representing different personalities and interests, all of whom can be romanced: “Bad Dad” Robert Small, “Goth Dad” Damien Bloodmarch, “Fitness Dad” Craig Cahn, “Cool Youth Minister Dad” Joseph Christiansen, “Cool Dad” Mat Sella, “Teacher Dad” Hugo Vega, and “Rival Dad” Brian Harding. Upon its 2017 release, Dream Daddy immediately became a global success and one of the most talked-about games of that year. According to Braidon Schaufert, its popularity can be attributed to “the way it taps into, and makes accessible, trends of playing with male sexuality. Specifically, the game demonstrates the potential utopic world-building that results from unsettling assumed distinctions between normative fathers and subversive daddies.”²²² As Shaufert further notices, the game’s subversiveness is already established through the title which sets expectations for highly erotic or even pornographic content due to the sexual connotations with the word “daddy,” while the game focuses rather on the emotional relationships, the challenges, and the joys of fatherhood —the protagonist’s relationship with his daughter Amanda remains the most important one. However, by restricting the sexual freedom of the queer characters, the game often fails to challenge the heteronormative power structures and rela Julia C. Ehrhardt, “Towards Queering Food Studies: Foodways, Heteronormativity, and Hungry Women in Chicana Lesbian Writing,” Food and Foodways 14, no. 2 (2006): 91.  Braidon Schaufert, “Daddy’s Play: Subversion and Normativity in Dream Daddy’s Queer World,” Game Studies 18, no. 3 (2018), para. 16.

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tionships. While on the one hand Maple Bay is a queer utopia derived of homophobia, racism, fat shaming, and other forms of prejudice targeting non-hegemonic identities, the normative beliefs structure the ways in which the characters think about sex. By focusing on the creation of the world devoid of prejudice, the game developers sacrificed many elements of queer identity and experience. As Schaufert argues, the “game’s apolitical world, sex-negativity, and upper-middleclass values are examples of how it has disappointed queer players by upholding homonormativity.”²²³ Although the romanceable characters are queer and ready to fall for the protagonist, the majority of them previously were or still are married to women—in consequence, their fatherhood is still constructed in the heteronormative context and, thus, possibly reimburses stereotypes that relate to it. Although, unlike in I love you, Colonel Sanders!, food is not a main theme of the game, it undoubtedly plays an important role in establishing the main characters and relationships between them. Restaurants, cafés, and pubs are all places where the protagonist can meet other dads, but food preparation is also a part of their daily routines. Mat, a kind and shy musician, is first encountered in Coffee Spoon, a small cozy café which he owns. Food is present at many first meetings with the potential love interests: the rebellious, leather-wearing Robert, a character with whom the protagonist can have a one-night-stand, is first encountered in a bar over a couple of beers; Hugo, a high school teacher, invites the protagonist to “a quaint French diner”²²⁴ where the two can bond over their fondness (humorously bordering on obsession) of cheese. Food preferences are used to emphasize the personalities of some characters: Damien, the only transgender character, is vegan, while fitness and sports-oriented Craig is invested in healthy lifestyle and carefully watches his diet. Although the player character is not presented as neither a foodie nor a passionate cook, food is important in the construction of his relationship with his daughter Amanda, a cheeky, self-confident, smart teenager in her last year of high school. The relationship with her is the most important social relation for the protagonist, and it is without a doubt a special one: from the beginning they are shown as sharing a strong bond and a friendship full of inside jokes and friendly banters. This closeness means that she is just as involved in her father’s personal life as he is in hers, if not more, and it is due to her support that he decides to date again after the passing of his spouse. Food has an important place in establishing and maintaining the bond between them, from the shared meals and its constant presence in their discus-

 Braidon Schaufert, “Daddy’s Play,” para. 30.  Game Grumps, Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator (Game Grumps, 2017).

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sions to the function in the family rituals. For example, when the two quarrel, the protagonist offers in the narration information about making “some scrambled eggs for Amanda as peace offering.”²²⁵ Later, trying to connect with Amanda when noticing her bad mood, the protagonist bakes her a cake. He explains the significance of it to her: you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. But whatever it is just know that you have a Dad in your corner who wants you to be happy. Honey… you know I’m bad with words, so I was hoping I could speak a language we both understand.²²⁶

If the player choses all the right answers prior to that moment, this cake, inscribed “sorry you’re sad but I support you 100 %,” allows Amanda to open up about what has been troubling her. Despite the positive image of the game’s fathers, their appreciation of fast foods and use of processed food matches the stereotype of dominant culinary masculinity, perpetuating the idea that fathers differ from mothers in the way they cook and care for their children. The above quote reflects the stereotype of a man who is not and does not consider himself a capable cook (“I am a terrible cook if it doesn’t involve a grill”²²⁷), and whose quality of meals suffers after losing their partner, regardless of their gender—this is upheld regardless of the player’s choice made at the beginning of the game regarding the gender of the protagonist’s late spouse. At the same time, food is used to facilitate communication and convey love and care towards each other and the kitchen becomes a space of intimacy where there are serious discussions and reconciliations after possible fallouts. Food is more than just a meal for them as it bears emotional meaning and is important in the celebrations of important events—when the protagonist takes Amanda out for food after learning that she has been accepted to her dream college, she chooses to share with him burritos at the sea side, valuing the emotional significance of it over sophisticated cuisine: “Please Dad, you know I’m a simple gal. Just gimme a ’rito with a view.”²²⁸ The burrito, but especially the special cake, are also types of comfort foods. Although it is more often eaten in solitude since “when we feel socially isolated, consuming foods that conjure up images of meaningful social relationships helps us to combat those feelings,”²²⁹ here the primary function was to elevate

    

Dream Daddy. Dream Daddy. Dream Daddy. Dream Daddy. Locher et al., “Comfort Foods,” 290 – 291.

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the mood and mend the relationship. It is implied that this particular cake is Amanda’s favorite. Similarly to Colonel Sanders’ recipes, the emotional value of food relies on the nostalgia for the past, evoking the family members who are no longer with them. It could be argued that these two respective choices imply the subversion of the gender stereotypes between the two family members with Amanda choosing fast food over sophisticated meals and the Dad using the cake to express his emotions, since the sweets tend to be considered feminine. It is not the only time baking is meant to bring people closer together. The first time the protagonist meets with Joseph, a youth minister who is the only character still currently married, the two prepare brownies for a charity sale at the church. Joseph represents a type of a white suburban house-spouse whose charm and kindness are juxtaposed with the rude behavior of his spoilt and somewhat difficult children and his wife who is earlier shown as abusing alcohol and possibly cheating on her husband. Joseph’s storyline is one of the most tragic as it does not offer a happy ending for the player: while it is possible to pursue Joseph as a love interest, it is heavily implied that the relationship between the two is an act of infidelity towards the wife with whom he ultimately decides to stay, leaving the protagonist alone. The two share an intimate moment in the kitchen preparing brownies from the store-bought mix which they jokingly comment on: “Way to use those Dad skills. I bet you’ve baked a few box mixes in your time.”²³⁰ Although these are men who cook in the game—as opposed to the only woman, Mary, whose portrayal as negligent bordering on abusive is problematic considering she is the only adult woman in the game—their cooking skills are often discussed in the context of how their ex-wives or partners were cooking, always mindful of hegemonic expectations.

The Seductive Art of (Queer) Cooking As it was previously mentioned, in several especially Western countries there is a strong association between eating meat and a hegemonic masculinity (sometimes referred to as “tough” masculinity) Jeffrey Sobal explains that: “meat may be further masculinized by eating it ‘rare,’ with minimal cooking, or ‘straight,’ with fewer sauces, to avoid civilizing and feminizing such male

 Dream Daddy.

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fare.”²³¹ This last remark is particularly worthy of notice as it further signifies the differences between Western diets and Eastern or African ones that tend to use more spices and, thus, be described as more flavorful, pushing non-white masculinities outside of the hegemonic “norm.” Even though Colonel Sanders is subverting the stereotypes of tough masculinity and not all of the meals that he is preparing are meat-based, meat remains an important part of the KFC brand. However, by blurring the boundary between fast and gourmet food, he resists the aforementioned image by ensuring that his meat is far from rare of bland—to the contrary, between secret ingredients and the 11 different herbs and spices used in the KFC’s trademark original recipe he always finds “the right balance of flavors and textures.”²³² Even if not all his dishes are meat-based, such as coleslaw or mashed potatoes, they are “meant to pair with something spicy, or something crispy… both, perhaps?”²³³ In the final exam, staged as a competition between the students, the protagonist and Colonel join forces once again and present a bowl of mac and cheese combined with the pieces of fried chicken—a dish KFC added to its American menu shortly before the releasing of the game. Once again, where the majority of other contestants’ elaborate dishes were presented as too intricate, mac and cheese proved to be “delicious and perfectly balanced.”²³⁴ While meat dishes are present in Dream Daddy, they are neither glorified nor masculinized. After encountering all possible love interests for the first time, the Dad is invited to a neighborhood barbecue which reveals that all eight families live close to each other. After commenting on the smell of hotdogs, the narration avoids the direct mention of it, instead focusing on the vegetarian food items, from the store-bought veggie plates next to the grill to the description of the process of grilling itself: Joseph closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, and gets to work. With the greatest of ease he sets patties on the grill, flourishing as he flips his spatula in the air. It’s easily some of the best grill work I’ve ever seen. (…) He’s working faster now, effortlessly tossing cheese onto patties and perfectly grilling onions on the side. One after another, the Dads take notice and crowd around Joseph to admire his masterful technique.²³⁵

 Jeffery Sobal, “Men, Meat, and Marriage: Models of Masculinity,” Food and Foodways 13, no. 1– 2 (2005): 138.  Psyop, I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator (KFC, 2019).  I Love You, Colonel Sanders!  I Love You, Colonel Sanders!  Dream Daddy.

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This moment both affirms and subverts the meaning ascribed to meat (especially grilled) in the American culture. Joseph’s cooking skills are used to emphasize his masculinity. However, the gaze quickly turns from the meat to the man, and food, rather than central, becomes an appetizer, setting Joseph at the center of attention. A similar approach can be seen in one of the scenes between the protagonist and Craig, the Asian-American divorced father of three. Food habits are maybe the most reflective of this character’s identity and the change of his lifestyle from a college student (nicknamed “keg-stand Craig”) whose “entire Sophomore year diet consisted of microwaveable Mac and Cheese but not microwaved”²³⁶ to a person passionate about fitness. For Craig, food is strictly controlled by his work-out routine, but it is also a source of pleasure and a way to relax. The transformation of his character as signified by the evolution of his eating habits from the “stereotypical bachelor” to a settled down, responsible family man, opposes the stereotypes that position token Asian characters as either hypersexual or effeminate. Craig’s body, although admired for its physique, is not fetishized nor ridiculed and it impresses the player character because of the effort and self-discipline it denotes. While a lot of food that is mentioned by Craig seems to parody some of the more extreme fitness trends, from smoothie diet to almost obsessive calorie counting, the two characters share a relaxing and intimate moment while camping together in the woods, when the protagonist once again is observing the cook in action: Craig expertly sears two steaks in a pan he’s been heating up on the fire, cracking thyme and crushed ginger over it while basting them both in butter. Wow. I didn’t know he was actually good at cooking. The fanciest I ever saw him get in college was when he started sprinkling the seasoning packet onto dry ramen and eating it straight up. (…) Craig prepares a side salad for us in the meantime, sprinkling feta cheese onto freshly chopped greens. He plates it next to a generous pile of roasted potatoes covered in olive oil and rosemary.²³⁷

When Craig takes over the dinner preparation, explaining that it is the only activity that still lets him truly relax, he lets the player character and the player observe him in action and the food replaces the attractive male body as the object of gaze. The performance of preparation and, later, the taste of well-prepared meat become substitutes for carnal pleasures and the seduction proceeding it —while it could also be read through the queer practice of eroticizing food

 Dream Daddy.  Dream Daddy.

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that symbolizes the physical intimacy not shown on-screen, the argument could be made for the unfortunate use of the food metaphor to describe a man of color (reminiscent of the discussed racist remarks in the context of Black people). However, there is no doubt that the detailed, vivid description betrays almost an erotic desire and appreciation for the food, and thus the cook. For Schaufert Dream Daddy is a “disappointing game” in the sense borrowed from Bonnie Ruberg who uses this term to describe game experiences “that seem to promise excitement yet fail to live up to expectations”²³⁸ precisely because it “seems to promise erotic fantasies, only to make sex implicit and, in the case of Robert and Joseph, attach negative feelings to sex.”²³⁹ Even if not all romances can have a happy ending, one cannot argue that their flirting is completely bereft of soft eroticism.

Conclusions What I find interesting in both these titles is how they utilize food for both worldbuilding and relationship construction. Whereas in both, the primary focus is on the characters and the ways they express themselves through food, it always provides crucial information about the world they occupy. Food, once again, ensures safety: even in the highly competitive reality of the University of Cooking School, where students try to upstage each other through the dishes they prepare, food is the source of nostalgia and positive emotions. It can create a sense of belonging, connectedness, of familiarity and being a part of a family. The kitchen is the place in which one is capable and in control, and where bullies cannot harm them, and the family recipes ensure safety and happiness. In the same way, the Dad and Amanda fix their relationship, support each other, and show their love. Food does not bring stomach aches and it never disappoints, even when it is made from a ready store-bought mix. While in the majority of discusses cased, my analysis concentrates on the intersections between food and femininities and the gendered stereotypes and perceptions of the women’s approaches and responsibilities of food preparation and care, this chapter scrutinized the ways in which food is used in games to subvert the expectations of tough and toxic masculinities. Whereas in the third chapter I showed how the choice of food and the rejection of meat can become means of resisting the hegemonic oppression, here I connect the stereotypical beliefs

 Bonnie Ruberg, “No fun,” 118.  Braidon Schaufert, “Daddy’s Play,” para. 30.

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about meat as masculine food with the construction of non-hegemonic masculinities both in the context of potentially straight characters and those that are queer. Food practices and cooking especially, as typically considered to be feminine, can be presented in the case of celebrity chefs but become more significant when utilized by men as means of creating intimacy, emotional bonds between themselves and their family members and friends, and means of sexual flirting and foreplay.

Chapter 9 The Hunger that Devours: the Representation of the Disordered Eating At the moment of writing this book, Consume Me (q_dork 2018) is still under production and I consider myself lucky to have accidentally stumbled across it at Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt exhibition in V&A museum in London that ran from September 8, 2018 to February 24, 2019. The game was playable on the mobile phones hanging from the ceiling in the middle of the room, immediately distinguishable from the non-interactive artwork and videos presented in this part of the exhibition. From that very first interaction, I was struck with the blunt and honest way in which it focuses not only on the behaviors and the compulsive and intrusive thoughts accompanying eating disorders. The difficult themes were juxtaposed with bright colors, funny animations, and familiar gameplays. The mobile puzzle game with relatively simple, yet engaging and diverse mini-game-based gameplay is one of very few that directly tackle the subject of disordered eating. The protagonist, Jenny, is heavily based on Jenny Jiao Hsia (creating under the name q_dork), the game’s developer. The task of the game is to help Jenny find a balance between healthy, nutritious eating and to achieve her goal of losing enough weight to meet her strict self-imposed expectations. Drawing from such seemingly different titles as Cooking Mama and Anna Anthropy’s dys4ia (2012), the game is structured as a collection of mini-games representing different activities like waking up, exercising, and preparing daily meals. Each of the seemingly mundane tasks is affected by Jenny’s intrusive thoughts and is dominated by the obsessive focus on calorie intake and body weight. According to the game’s itch.io website, “Consume Me is about the cut-throat competitiveness of dieting where the opposing team is yourself” and it affords players a glimpse into a mind of a person living with eating disorders. This chapter differs in the choice of games and topic from the others because in both analyzed here games, Consume Me and Shrinking Pains (Bedtime Phobias 2018), food very clearly is not a source of pleasure, safety, and comfort. To the contrary, its very presence and abundance causes the two characters distress and pain, as they are drawn or repulsed by it, perceiving it as the enemy that needs to be defeated as well as the source of their failure to obtain the perfect body. I believe that they are still worth of analysis within this book for at least two reasons. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110716603-011

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The book discusses ways in which video game food complements worldbuilding, but it also acknowledges the importance of embedding any discussion on food representation within the real-world meanings ascribed to it. Thus, it would be impossible not to consider the experiences of disordered eating, even though but also precisely because they seem to be much less covered by game developers than in other media. This absence is surprising because, as I show further on, I consider the video game format exceptionally suited for dealing with that topic. Secondly, somewhat similarly to the third chapter in which I discussed the intersections between players’ and characters’ identities through the veg*an diets and the choice of digital food, through games focused on eating disorder a similar link can be established. In many other titles the coziness relates to the safety experienced by the characters and players at the same time, for example when they can rest at the campfire to prepare nourishing meals in peace. Both games create a distress in the player as well which, on a small scale, corresponds with the distress experienced by the characters. However, through the uses of cozy gameplay, for example by ensuring low-risk and the lack of possibility to fail the game as well as, especially in the case of Consume Me, bright and reassuring colors and graphics, they balance the emotions out, showing the players that in the end, they are safe and cared for.

Feminist Approaches to the Disordered Eating In the general sense, eating disorders can be understood as “those extreme forms of disorderly eating where an individual’s control, or lack of control, of their eating reaches a point that is deemed pathological and indeed the individual could suffer extreme health consequences, even death.”²⁴⁰ However, when discussing eating disorders, one needs to be aware that this term encompasses a range of psychological conditions characterized by various eating habits. Among two most recognizable in the Western context are anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa, followed by binge eating disorder and night eating syndrome. However, in the majority of cases, the research on eating disorders has vastly been focused on white, middle-class, and American and British girls with disregard for the experiences of Black people and the People of Color, as well as people of non-binary genders, ages, and from non-Western continents.

 Shirley Jordan and Judith Still, “Disorderly Eating in Contemporary Women’s Writing,” Journal of Romance Studies 20, no. 2 (2020): 194.

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Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine, and Ara Norenzayan notice that this bias is fundamental to the entirety of Western psychology: [b]ehavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world’s top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers—often implicitly—assume that either there is little variation across human population, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population.²⁴¹

This is, however, not the only problem in the context of the discourses surrounding eating disorders. In many cases, the disorders are approached from a heavily medicalized perspective which maintains and increases the stigma around them. The lack of intersectionality ignores the lived experiences which do not fall into clear medical categories, in consequence further marginalizing minorities and other oppressed groups. As feminist critical studies scholars point out, much of the definitions used to this day come from the first half of the twentieth century and, as such, perpetuate the hegemonic perceptions and beliefs about bodies and appetites. As Helen Malson notes, the mainstream perception of anorexia nervosa positions it often “as a clinical entity, as a legitimate and relatively unproblematic category of medical taxonomy of diseases and disorders [which] brings with it a number of (often unspoken) assumptions about the nature of women’s experiences and about the causes of women’s distress.”²⁴² In the book, Malson questions these practices that consider anorexia as individual pathology, pointing towards the broader sociocultural contexts that structure the understanding of separate disorders and define practices understood under the umbrella term “disordered eating.” The emphasis placed on the struggle for control allows one to place them in the broader sociocultural context as a response to the constant, unrealistic expectations regarding the normative body and normative eating. Outside of the medical discourses, feminist scholars have been drawing the attention to the sociocultural context of eating disorders at least since the 1980s, applying intersectional, (post‐)feminist, and critical lenses to the topic. Susie Orbach, Susan Bordo, and Sandra Bartky are some of the authors revealing the hegemonic and biased methodology used in the medical and psychological research, instead emphasizing the role of social construction of

 Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine, and Ara Norenzayan. “The Weirdest People in the World?” The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33, no. 2– 3 (June 2010): 83.  Helen Malson, The Thin Woman: Feminism, Post-Structuralism, and the Social Psychology of Anorexia Nervosa (London: Routledge, 1998), x.

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normative femininity and the “tyranny of slenderness”²⁴³ in creation of eating disorders. The attempts to police the appearance, shape, and weight of women’s and feminine bodies is a powerful tool of oppression—the omnipresent imagery that equates beauty with femininity, skinniness, and whiteness is closely correlated with the number of mental health issues, especially those linked to body image and eating patterns. In the introduction to Critical Feminist Approaches to Eating Dis/Orders, Helen Malson and Maree Burns comment on the substantial changes in the perception of the eating disorders, especially due to the influence of postmodern and post-structuralist theories on feminist studies and social sciences: [t]he seemingly categorical divide between the normal and the pathological is disrupted and shown to be illusory, such that within critical feminist perspectives ‘eating disorders’ are not so much viewed as individual pathological responses to patriarchal cultures. Rather, eating dis/orders are theorised here as (multiply) constituted within and by the always-gendered discursive contexts in which we live: (individual) ‘disorder’ is re-theorised as part and parcel of the (culturally normative) order of things.²⁴⁴

The authors emphasize the role of critical feminist analyses in deconstructing the medicalized discourses around the disordered eating. They have a significant role in challenging the ways in which diagnostic discourses use eating disorders to support normative notions of body and self which feminist poststructuralists identified in the problematic mind-body discourses pervading Western cultures. They create the binary opposition between feminine body-as-other constructed “as devalued and threatening the integrity of the idealized masculine mind-asself. The fundamental power imbalance between the idealized masculine self and its devalued feminine other is commonly disregarded and displaced, for example, by locating it within individual girls and women who are diagnosed with eating disorders.”²⁴⁵

 Kim Chemin, The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness (Harper: New York, 1981).  Helen Malson and Maree Burns, eds., Critical Feminist Approaches to Eating Dis/Orders (London; New York: Routledge, 2009), 2.  Renata Butryn, “Art Therapy and Eating Disorders: Integrating Feminist Poststructuralist Perspectives,” The Arts in Psychotherapy 41, no. 3 (2014): 280.

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Digital Games for Change Historically, the stigma surrounding mental illnesses and disorders influenced the negative representations of fictional characters as violent and evil or, on the other hand, lonely, helpless, and unable to find happiness unless saved and “cured.” The latter especially reflects the ableist perspective that positions all disabilities not only as undesirable, but as preventing people from experiencing full and happy lives. Founded in 2004, Games for Change is a non-profit organization focused on games and immersive experiences that have a potential of driving real-world impact. It is one of many initiatives which focus on and emphasize the titles with positive mental health representation. The unmistakable correlation between these titles and the aesthetics of coziness (see chapter four) manifests through the growing numbers of games focused on these topics featured in such festivals such as Games for Change Festival or Wholesome Games Direct. Although queer game developers and scholars such as Anna Anthropy, Mattie Brice, Merritt Kopas, Wendy Chun, or Bonnie Ruberg have been rejecting the use of the term “empathy games” especially in the context of queer digital games in which it is often use to promote “the appropriation and consumption of marginalized experiences,”²⁴⁶ the term has been often broadly used to signal the growing body of game titles focused on the experiences of people of marginalized identities. Liz Boltz, Danah Henriksen, and Punya Mishra emphasize that “well-designed empathy games can also encourage [players] to evaluate choices and consequences, and to question the system a game represents.”²⁴⁷ Moreover, Martijn J.L. Kors with colleagues further link “empathy-arousing” games with procedural rhetoric, using Ian Bogost’s definition of persuasive games, “interactive entertainment designed to shape how the player thinks and feels about reality.”²⁴⁸ Many of these titles that confront players with themes of dealing with difficult emotions and which show the experiences of those who live with mental illnesses and disorders utilize the cozy aesthetic in order to create safe, welcoming game environments. As many successful games have proven, this dissonance

 Bonnie Ruberg, “Empathy and Its Alternatives: Deconstructing the Rhetoric of ‘Empathy’ in Video Games,” Communication, Culture and Critique 13, no. 1 (2020): 55.  Liz Owens Boltz, Danah Henriksen, and Punya Mishra, “Rethinking Technology & Creativity in the 21st Century: Empathy through Gaming – Perspective Taking in a Complex World,” TechTrends 59, no. 6 (2015): 8.  Martijn J.L. Kors et al., “A Breathtaking Journey: On the Design of an Empathy-Arousing Mixed-Reality Game,” in Proceedings of the 2016 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play – CHI PLAY ’16 (Austin: ACM Press, 2016): 92.

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between joyful, carefree visuals, lack of ludic dangers with the emotionally difficult content can offer a perfect context for discussion about mental health and dealing with traumatic events. Not all cozy games focus on the mental health issues of course, but emotional and ludic safety are among their most important features. However, in many titles that focus on portraying difficult and traumatic experiences, the emotional and heavy messages are accompanied by cozy aesthetics, including a color palette that is either warm and pastel or lush and vibrant, soft shadows with low contrasts, and characters with simplified designs. The choice of gameplay without stress-inducing mechanics like strict time constraints or harsh punishments for failure allows players to explore the difficult and harsh themes without the additional stress. Moreover, not all disorders have gained the same amount of attention as others and among the most popular titles of the last decade several portrayed experiences of depression and anxiety. However despite the comorbidity of depressive states with disordered eating, eating disorders have been vastly absent from video game narratives. The search on itch.io reveals only a handful of titles all of which have in common a short length and the deeply personal, autobiographic character. Their personal character is reflected by the hand-drawn 2D art which they combine with limited gameplay: it does not allow failure of feature complex rules, often blurring the lines between video game, zines, interactive poetry, and autobiographical storytelling. In this chapter, I will argue that the video game medium is uniquely equipped to represent the realities of the eating disorders, destigmatizing them and demythologizing in the eyes of those who have never lived with them. Through the play with the design that is abusive, uncomfortable, surprising and transgressive, while at the same time making use of the cozy aesthetic and gameplay principle, it is possible to explore in depth the dissonance between the appetites and revulsions, the lack and desire for control. In the chapter, I discuss two games that differ in visual style and gameplay design, but share the focus on eating disorders and the lack of control over their hunger and their bodies as perceived by the protagonist. First, I scrutinize the chaotic, fragmented gameplay of the aforementioned Consume Me and then move on to Shrinking Pains (Bedtime Phobias 2018), a visual novel focusing on the loneliness and helplessness caused by anorexia nervosa.

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The Subversive Play of Consume Me Many researchers writing about eating disorders emphasize the importance of perceived lack of agency and control in people with anorexia nervosa. Marilyn Lawrence, an English psychoanalyst, refers to this as “the control paradox,”²⁴⁹ pointing out that the rigid dieting and fasting accomplished through a meticulous control over size and shape of food portions functions for people as means of regaining control over outside factors. This reading once again recognizes eating disorders as responses to the stress caused by the constant pressure placed by the society on the person, manifesting on the global scale via advertisements, media or popular culture to individual, through the feedback from friends and family members whose beliefs were shaped by the same systems. While in many interviews, women suffering from anorexia speak about the sense of control over their bodies gained through the refusal to eat, it is important to recognize how differently the Western societies structure the discourse around eating behaviors of different genders: where boys are praised for their appetite, girls are shamed for it from an early age. This never-ending struggle for control over one’s life, body, shape, hunger, or appetite is essential to Consume Me. Drawing from personal experience with dieting and disordered eating, the game is framed by the protagonist’s daily journals in which she describes her feelings towards her body and her disappointment at the inability to restrain from eating. One of these entries reads as follows: I’m ashamed and really disappointed at myself. I binged one chocolate during the French exam. I ate two mini twix bars and 3 rolos. FUCK. It was just pure self-indulgence. God, I hate myself. What’s worse it that I can’t even go running since it’s raining outside. I’m just getting fatter by the second… that’s why I punished myself by not eating dinner. Technically, dinner isn’t even a physical necessity. It’s just all mental and all emotional. I need to learn. Plus, I don’t really have much of an appetite to eat right now. I don’t know how to control and I don’t know how to resist temptation.²⁵⁰

The main character of the game is struggling against her appetites and hunger but discovers that starving herself leads to binge eating episodes in which she once again loses control over eating. The correlation between the two is not as clear to her as she perceives the matter of control in binary terms: she either pos-

 Marilyn Lawrence, “Anorexia Nervosa—The Control Paradox,” Women’s Studies International Quarterly 2, no. 1 (1979): 93.  q_dork, Consume Me (q_dork, 2018).

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sesses it in which case she can manifest it by restraining from eating, or loses it when she gives in to the cravings. This fight against oneself and the inevitable inability to control the environment are represented through the mechanics. The player is meant to experience this struggle themselves by not being in full control over the character’s behavior and thoughts. What is more, Jenny seems to be fighting the player on every step, refusing the healthy and balanced diet or food at all. In the mini-game in which the goal is to feed her, she is physically avoiding the food by jiggling her entire body out of the player’s way. One of the other mini-games requires the player to arrange the protagonist’s limbs around to replicate the yoga position provided on the other side of the screen: the process is difficult as the body resists the player’s will, making for awkward, almost frustrating gameplay [Figure 10]. By placing the player in the opposition to the character they control, it is ensured that the player constantly challenges the misconceptions about Jenny’s selfimage while confronting them with their own beliefs about healthy diet and lifestyle.

Figure 10: Screenshots presenting mini-games from Consume Me.

The chaotic controls employed by the game can be seen as fundamentally transgressive, opposing the dominant patterns and conventions of the mainstream games. While the majority of the mainstream games still strives towards realistic aesthetics and mechanics in the attempt to create an unmediated, realistic experience, some game designers instead experiment with the narration and the gameplay to push the boundaries of the genres and the medium. While such experimental titles can be found among the mainstream creators, especially Japanese, in the Western games such subversions are the most commonly found in independent games, the creators of which have the freedom to play with the ex-

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pectations of what the game mechanics should be. Free to play with the rules of what constitutes a “good game” or even “playable game,” creators such as the already mentioned and discussed more below Anna Anthropy, play with controls that are uncomfortable or awkward—in these situations, the mechanics are not meant to just facilitate the experience of the story, but challenge the players and share the experiences of the characters. The ability and the knowledge of how to play which gamers are able to transport from one game experience to another constitutes a type of “embodied literacy.” It means that by playing games, one learns their specific language, forming expectations towards the new titles based on the previous experiences: as one plays, they become familiar with the genres and consoles, instinctively placing one’s fingers in the right position on the keyboard and knowing that the X button on PlayStation DualShock controller probably will cause the protagonist of this year’s newest action-adventure to jump. Brendan Keogh explains that it is through a learned literacy of the fingers at the input device that the videogame becomes textually legible to players. Just as one must learn how to read before reading a novel, one must first become literate in the spatial movements of fingers on the gamepad or at the keyboard and mouse before the most conventional and widely played videogames will reveal their pleasures.²⁵¹

Although this embodied literacy certainly is advantageous, it can prove an obstacle in the case of games that purposefully subvert the mainstream trends and draw attention to game’s controls, gameplay, code, or in other words, its materiality or “gameness.” Such experiments might include a number of examples, from the purposefully difficult and unforgiving “masocore games” (a portmanteau of the words “masochist” and “hardcore”) which demand absolute accuracy and endless repetitions to the games that provide uncomfortable narrative experiences. By subverting the expectations of the players, the game achieves a state of defamiliarization which is similar to estrangement or alienation effect (German Verfremdungseffect, otherwise referred to as V-effect) introduced by Bertolt Brecht. In his analysis he considered such methods of breaking the immersion necessary for the audiences to be able to engage with the text (play or, in this case, a game) critically and meaningfully. Evoking similar ideas, Kristine Jørgensen writes about positive negative experiences, “that is, experiences that are dis-

 Brendan Keogh, A Play of Bodies: How We Perceive Videogames (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2018), 91.

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tressing but also gratifying because they create new insight.”²⁵² Drawing from psychological theories on non-hedonic entertainment, she discusses the ways in which discomfort can feel meaningful when it is personal, engaging the players and making them complicit in the difficult choice, and when it evokes reflection. She differentiates between positive discomfort, which encourages players to continue the experience, and negative discomfort, which can cause frustration and disinterest. Thus, it is difficult not to draw parallels between the way Consume Me uses its gameplay to confront the players with the difficult experiences of mental health problems and the tactics used by Anna Anthropy in her influential, autobiographical dys4ia (2012). Both games are constructed as a collection of minigames through which the creator allows the players to experience trauma and struggle. Anthropy’s short, minimalistic title portrays her experiences of gender dysphoria and transphobia encountered during her hormone replacement therapy. The gameplay is seemingly fairly simple, based on the use of four directional keys requiring players to move from point A to B or avoiding certain objects. The game progresses regardless of the player’s outcome, accepting failure as part of the journey rather than forcing the players to repeat the task until succession, based on the repetition to show changes in the author’s/protagonist’s emotional wellbeing, mindset, as well as the physical and physiological consequences of the therapy like the breast and nipple tenderness envisioned through the repeated mini-game in which players need to move the set of breasts through the field of harmful objects. Juxtaposing the initial level in which the breasts were easily harmed upon contact with the second, in which they easily shake off any obstacles, allows players to share the satisfaction and relief. The positive negative experience or uncomfortable design involve restriction of the player’s control and agency by preventing them from winning or, in some cases, from making the “right” decision. On the game’s Tumblr page, Hsia directly explains the relationship between the struggle for control over one’s body through excessive dieting and the restrictions provided by the ruleset defining a game experience: Consume Me draws from my attempts at dieting when I was in high school. During the most intense part of this experience, I wrote down a bunch of very rigorous rules for myself to follow. Consume Me is inspired by this set of rules: I would also like to explore this disso-

 Kristine Jørgensen, “When Is It Enough? Uncomfortable Game Content and the Transgression of Player Taste,” in Transgression in Games and Play, ed. Kristine Jørgensen and Faltin Karlsen (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2019), 153.

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nance between knowing what you need to do in your mind-with rules clearly laid out before you-and your actual ability to follow these rules.²⁵³

Consumed by Hunger in Shrinking Pains While offering a vastly different experience, Shrinking Pains also employs the game mechanic to replicate the feeling of helplessness and lack of control. The short visual novel was created during 2018 Global Game Jam by Gabriella Lowgren and her team, and, similarly to Consume Me, it features the story basing on her own experiences of surviving anorexia. However, the two games share more differences than similarities. Where Consume Me is bright and colorful, Shrinking Pains is its exact opposite with its pencil-like, almost unfinished lines and the vastness of white, blank spaces. Where the former is chaotic, the latter is solemn and quiet. Rather than throwing the player into the action, Shrinking Pains almost completely restricts their freedom. The only meaningful choice can be made before the beginning of the story concerning the gender of the sexual partners, but its players can never change the protagonist’s solemn will not to eat. In the game “the player is forced to make increasingly difficult and narrow choices through the game to reflect the mental state of a person with an eating disorder.”²⁵⁴ The narrowness mentioned in the description refers to the increasingly claustrophobic feeling constructed by the gameplay that makes the player complicit in the protagonist’s self-starvation by taking away their choices—a device that aims to mirror the growing helplessness experienced by the protagonist who in the story progressively loses the battle against the hunger and the compulsive thoughts. This lack of ability to choose is reflected immediately at the beginning, after the protagonist wakes up and their partner—Taylor or Isabella—offers the coffee, but “then immediately starts to make you one, leaving you little choice.”²⁵⁵ The narration continues: You’ve learnt not to say no. It only makes him/her suspicious, you don’t want him/her to worry. (…) You wrap your hands around the cup to appease him/her. (…) You want to

 Jenny Jiao Hsia, Tumblr, “About Consume Me,” https://cconsume.tumblr.com/about.  Kaiju, “Digital Diversity: Shrinking Pains,” EnbyKaiju (blog), October 9, 2018, para 3, https://enbykaiju.com/2018/10/09/digital-diversity-shrinking-pains/.  Bedtime Phobias, Shrinking Pains (Bedtime Phobias, 2018).

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drink it, but part of you cowers at the smell, the warmth, the idea of it being inside you. When you’re sure Taylor/Isabella won’t come back you pour it down the sink.²⁵⁶

Through the short game the player witnesses the main character starve themselves without any ability to help or influence their decision. However, by offering the player the false choice, the game refuses to absolve the player from responsibility but rather engages and engrosses them into the narrative. There are three such situations: one during an anniversary outing during which the player can choose between spaghetti, salad, and vegetables; and two times in the kitchen as the protagonist begins to be weakened by their hunger, with the choice between lettuce, water, and nothing. While each time the player can make a choice, it is quickly revealed that they have no influence on the story: the protagonist will restrain from eating, starving themselves to the point of losing consciousness and hospitalization. While the first time neither food is being consumed by the character, it is the other two that are the most striking. At this point the protagonist is already showing signs of exhaustion caused by lack of nutrition. However, should the player attempt to choose “lettuce,” the option vanishes as soon as it is selected, leaving only water. The last time the character looks into the fridge, their vision is already blurry; this physical weakness is reflected through the visual representation of the speech bubbles containing the choice. Out of the two, only “eat nothing” is sharp and clearly visible while the other option, presumably urging the protagonist to eat anything, is concealed under the scribbles [Figure 11]. Furthermore, the attempts to choose the latter cause the bubble to shrink until they are pixel-size and as it is no longer possible to interact with it, the “eat nothing” option has to be chosen for the game to progress.

Figure 11: The obscured choices presented to the players in Shrinking Pains.

 Shrinking Pains.

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Both Shrinking Pains and Consume Me tease player’s agency only to take it away from them in order to emulate the feelings of helplessness experienced by sufferers of eating disorders. In both cases the developers utilize gameplay to share with the players their own anxieties, revealing the many levels of fear that contribute to the creation of these disorders, including fear of gaining weight and fear of being controlled by one’s appetite and hunger. Finally, Shrinking Pains portrays the extremes of the dissociation from one’s body and the fear of food transgressing the boundary between “me” and “the Other.” The idea of consuming and swallowing food to let it inside of oneself is what the protagonist finds revolting and what deters them from eating even more than the potential weight gain. The coffee made by their partner in the first scene is being rejected because “part of you cowers at the smell, the warmth, the idea of it being inside you,” revealing the abject-like reaction to the Otherness represented by food. The explicit focus on hunger as the devastating, overpowering force differentiates both games and Shrinking Pains in particular from many other food-related games discussed in this book. On one hand, hunger is the body’s interpretation of the information carried to the brain by the hormones: ghrelin, which causes the contraction of the stomach muscles interpreted as a growling stomach, or leptin, produced by fat cells. However, in the critical approaches to the problem the subjective experiences of hunger are far more important. In her book Hunger: An Unnatural History Sharman Apt Russell describes hunger as an innately intimate experience, exploring how it intertwines and tends to be dominated by appetite and aversion. Appetite, she explains, “is desire, born of biology, molded by experience and culture.”²⁵⁷ It is possible to experience physical hunger while not craving any specific food and to have an appetite for a specific food without feeling particularly hungry. Similarly, aversion to food, one for example caused by food poisoning, can win over immediate hunger and influence the decision not to eat immediately but withhold the rumbling stomach until a more pleasing option appears. The relationship between these three feelings is a nuisance and a deeply personal matter, with sensitivity to the influence of either differing from person to person. In the first chapter, I briefly discussed various meanings of hunger in the ludic context. In these cases, when hunger is a secondary statistic next to health, its meaning is entirely ludic. Thus, hunger is divorced from the psychophysiological drive and desire: it structures play, deciding what actions the players need to prioritize over others in order to succeed in a game but does not necessarily add to the character development. Although it is both present and it serves as an im-

 Sharman Apt. Russell, Hunger: An Unnatural History (London: Hachette UK, 2005), 24.

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portant motivator to the characters in both action-adventure titles and many survival titles there are substantial differences between its portrayal there and in Shrinking Pains. Even when presented as a powerful and devastating force, hunger remains disembodied, affecting the characters but never becoming part of them. The comparison between Don’t Starve (discussed in the most detail in the first chapter) and Shrinking Pains can help illustrate this difference. Arguably, in the former, hunger is not just another statistic but is the single most important driving force behind the protagonist’s actions. Unlike many other games which differentiate between health and hunger statistics (i. e., feature separate “hunger bar”), the visualization of its changes over time through the image of twisting, shriveling stomach embeds and embodies the experience. Through this, hunger is connected with the physical, unpleasant, and even painful feeling. However, at the same time it remains separated from Wilson—the stomach, extracted to the top right corner of the screen together with a brain and heart, represents the feeling that is familiar to the players, increasing the sympathy towards the character and thus further motivating them to keep their characters from starvation. Although the stomach and the other organs are visibly suffering the consequences of a lack of food, Wilson himself for the most part does not seem fazed by it apart from an occasional comment. In Shrinking Pains, on the other hand, hunger is not only the main driving force of both the character and the story, but is also the very defining element of both. Throughout the game, the body remains at the center of attention, showing anorexia and other eating disorders as necessarily embodied experiences: for the protagonist, it is their body that is the source of suffering and the lack of eating is a means of controlling the weight, the emotions related to it. Shrinking Pains, despite its short length, shows that all these bodily experiences are always connected. The game does not have a happy ending with the protagonist admitted to the hospital, driven to the brink of death by the illness. There and then, the player discovers that they never were in control in the first place, and the story could have not ended any other way. It should not come as a surprise, hinted at by the fake choices, each one more obvious than the last in its deceit. The illusory character of the choices places Shrinking Pains on the other side of the spectrum from the aforementioned titles in which the sole function of hunger was one of a gameplay mechanic.

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Conclusions Eating disorders is a particularly important part of the discussion around the way meaning is ascribed to various eating practices. Not only because of how closely the discourse is influenced by the gendered stereotypes aimed especially at women, but also because of its focus on the body. Whereas the non-normative body types are less often represented in games, especially in the context that ties them to the identity to the characters and offers a commentary on fatphobia and other prejudices, by focusing on eating disorders the two discussed games are also drawing the players’ attention towards the embodied experiences of the protagonists. In the chapter I argued that despite this absence of the representations of eating disorders from digital games, they are uniquely equipped to engage with this topic. Both games that are the subject of analysis in various ways engage with the issues of agency and lack thereof, pushing the affordances of the video game medium to convey the feelings of helplessness experienced by many people living with mental disorders, illnesses, and other disabilities. Despite differences in their approaches and in the visual styles, both play with the premise of player’s freedom of choice in order to take that choice away from them. Furthermore, what should be noted is that both of these games play with the presence and absence of the food within the world as a factor allowing to flesh out the character’s relationship with food. The colors, style, and the type of gameplay (hectic vs. slow) additionally allow to emphasize that difference between the abundance of food in Consume Me and its absence illustrated by the lack of color and details in Shrinking Pains. Both of the games deal with difficult emotions and showcase the toxic relationship one can have with food, using the cozy elements to counterbalance it and ease the player’s experience. Whereas Consume Me offers cozy aesthetic and pleasant colors, it shields the player from the distress of failure and their involvement in the protagonist’s negative thoughts and food habits by ensuring that the player does not fail on the gameplay level. The lack of “game over” screens and the requirement to repeat any sections of the game in case of failure separates the ludic failure from the perceived failure to maintain the character’s strict and punishing diet, distancing the player from her. The food, however, remains the crucial element that connects the player and the game, the real world with the fictional one.

Concluding Thoughts There is so much one can say about video game food or food in general, really. My goal within this book was to introduce the exciting world of critical studies to game studies, recognizing the abundance of games that choose food as their primary topic and focus. I discussed several ways in which food appears in games and how it influences the gameplay. I discussed food in the context of cozy games, showing that food can often be both a worldbuilding tool and a means of emphasizing and constructing a relationship between the characters and their players. Food is never just something to eat, but rather it is deeply entangled with the social, cultural, and political structures of meaning. It is a form of communication, “the nonverbal means of sharing meaning with others,”²⁵⁸ the way of understanding of others and of oneself. This understanding of food as communication is present through this book, marking perhaps the most important point of overlap between food and game studies. This communication occurs on various levels of meaning as the player shakes their Wii controller to imitate the on-screen movements of chopping, slicing, and mixing during the playthrough of Cooking Mama. Food allows Venba to connect with the country she left behind many years ago and which her son does not know, but it also brings the player closer to her, ensuring that the food they cook together is always meaningful. For the four friends travelling together through a kingdom in Final Fantasy XV, food becomes means of escaping and bonding, ensuring that they do not lose the sight of what is most important to them amidst countless battles, but through its realistic visuals it also connects to the player, pulling them into the fictional world which through the familiar dishes becomes easily recognizable despite its strangeness. Eating can, finally, become a way of resistance when the food is recognized for the sexually charged metaphors attached to it, and used to subvert the expectations of how one is supposed to look, behave, and what and how are they supposed to eat. Although I have chosen to focus solely on the in-game representation of food without the consideration for out-of-game fan practices, I want to argue that video game food serves predominantly communication: between the characters, between them and the player, and between the developers and the player. Ingame food can shape the way players interact with each other during the chaotic couch co-op play of Overcooked, and becomes a powerful tool in the hands of

 Nervana Stajcic, “Understanding Culture,” 7. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110716603-012

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those creators who choose to share their experiences of living with eating disorders. The contents of the book are by no means exhaustive. To the contrary, this exploration is meant to open various potential avenues for future research. By focusing mostly on the cozy aspect of the food, I have not touched on the horror games and the meaning of abject in them. By choosing to focus mostly on singleplayer game experiences, I left out the various ways people in online games structure their interactions through sharing food and meeting in food-related spaces such as restaurants and cafés. Similarly, I have not even touched upon the rich and exciting world of fan studies which examines the ways in which fans use food to “connect to their favorite stories through the taste and wonder of the signature dishes, thereby immersing themselves into the world fully.”²⁵⁹ Considering how embodied both eating and cooking are, there is also further space and possibility for the research focusing on the food practices on the intersections of digital and real-life cooking. This seems particularly promising in the context of the use of virtual reality and augmented reality technologies, but also the many other gamified apps and mobile games venturing into the territory of the branch of human-computer interactions (HCI) that is sometimes otherwise referred to as “human-food interactions.”²⁶⁰ Food has always been present in digital games but its representation is changing to reflect the diverse, global meanings and perspectives. I firmly believe that video game food needs to be continued to be talked about—after all, it is never just about food, but about the communication, relationships, culture, and the embodied politics of power.

 Nicolle Lamerichs, “The Promise of Cake: Food Fandom, Tourism, and Baking Practices Inspired by Portal,” in Eating Fandom: Intersections Between Fans and Food Cultures, ed. CarrieLynn D. Reinhard, Julia E. Largent, and Bertha Chin (Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2020), 120.  Deborah Lupton, ed., Digital Food Cultures (London; New York: Routledge, 2020), 5.

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Ludography 1st Playable Productions. Cooking Mama: Cookstar. JP, Square Enix, 2020. Amccus. Harvest Moon. Pack-In-Video/Nintendo, 1996. Anna Anthropy. Dys4ia. Newgrounds, 2012. Arkane Studios. Dishonored. Bethesda Softworks, 2012. Bedtime Phobias. Shrinking Pains. Bedtime Phobias, 2018. Bethesda Game Studios. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Bethesda Softworks, 2011. Black lantern Studios. Iron Chef America: Supreme Cuisine. Destineer, 2008. Blizzard Entertainment. (2004‐). World of Warcraft. Blizzard Entertainment, 2004–. Capcom. Monster Hunter: World. Capcom, 2018. ConcernedApe. Stardew Valley. ConcernedApe, 2016. Cooking Mama Limited. Cooking Mama. Majestico Entertainment, 2006. Cooking Mama Limited. Crafting Gardening. Taito, 2009. Cooking Mama Limited. Crafting Mama: Cookstar. JP, Square Enix, 2010. Data East. BurgerTime. Data East, 1982. Deconstructeam. The Red Strings Club. Devolver Digital, 2018. Ensamble Studios. Age of Empires. Xbox Game Studios, 1997 – 2021. Firaxis Games. Sid Meier’s Civilization VI. 2K Games, 2016. Game Freak. Pokémon Sword/ Pokémon Shield. Nintendo, 2019. Game Grumps. Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator. Game Grumps, 2017. Gamelab. Diner Dash. PlayFirst, 2003. Ghost Town Games. Overcooked. Team 17 Digital Ltd., 2016. Ghost Town Games. Overcooked 2. Team 17 Digital Ltd., 2018. Grasshopper Manufacture. Lollipop Chainsaw. Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, 2012. Halfbrick Studios. Fruit Ninja. Halfbrick Studios, 2010. Hit Point Co. Ltd. Neko Atsume: Kitty Collector. Hit Point Co. Ltd., 2014. keen games GmbH & Co. KG. What’s Cooking? with Jamie Oliver. Atari, 2008. King. Candy Crush Saga. King, 2012. Kitten Cup Studio. Pekoe. Kitten Cup Studio, 2022. Klei Entertainment. Don’t Starve. Klei Entertainment, 2013. Layton Hawkes. Campfire Cooking. Layton Hawkes, 2017. Liquid Entertainment. Desperate Housewives: The Game. Buena Vista Games, 2006. Ludia. Hell’s Kitchen: The Game. Ubisoft, 2008. Namco. Pac-Man. Midway, 1980. Maxis. The Sims. Electronic Arts, 2000. Maxis. The Sims 2. Electronic Arts, 2004. Maxis. The Sims 3. Electronic Arts, 2009. Maxis. The Sims 4. Electronic Arts, 2014. Mega Cat Studios. Coffee Crisis. Mega Cat Studios, 2018. MidBoss. 2064: Read Only Memories. MidBoxx, 2015. Millennium Kitchen. Boku no Natsuyasumi. Sony Computer Entertainment, 2000. Mojang Studios. Minecraft. Mojang, 2011. Namco. Katamari Damacy. Namco, 2004. Naughty Dog. Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End. Sony Computer Entertainment, 2016. Nintendo EAD. Animal Crossing. Nintendo, 2001. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110716603-014

Ludography

Nintendo EDP. Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Nintendo, 2017. Nintendo EDP. Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Nintendo, 2021. Peta. Cooking Mama: Mama Kills Animals. Peta, 2008. Peta. New Super Chick Sisters. Peta, 2009. Peta. Super Tofu Boy. Peta, 2010. Peta. Pokémon Black and Blue. Peta, 2012. PlatinumGames. Bayonetta. Nintendo, 2009. PlatinumGames. Bayonetta 2. Nintendo, 2014. PopCap Games. Plants vs Zombies. Electronic Arts, 2009. P-Studio. Persona 5. Atlus, Atlus USA, 2016. Psyop. I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator. KFC, 2019. q_dork. Consume Me. q_dork, 2018. Rachel Li, Qin Yin. Hot Pot For One. Rachel Li, Qin Yin, 2021. Raven Software. Quake 4. Activision, 2004. Robert Yang. Succulent. Robert Yang, 2015. Robert Yang. Hurt Me Plenty. Robert Yang, 2015. Route 59. Necrobarista. Route 59 Coconut Island Games, 2020. Smarto Club. Teacup. Whitethorn Digital, 2021. Software 2000. Fast Food Tycoon. Activision Value, 2000. Sukeban Games. VA-11 HALL-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action. Ysbryd Games, 2016. Square Enix. Final Fantasy XV. Square Enix, 2016. Tango Gameworks. The Evil Within 2. Bethesda Softworks, 2017. TapBlaze. Good Pizza, Great Pizza. TapBlaze, 2018. Team Meat. Super Meat Boy. Team Meat, 2010. Team Salvato. Doki Doki Literature Club! Team Salvato, 2017. Terrifying Jellyfish. Nour: Play with Your Food. Panic Inc., 2021. Thunder Lotus Games. Spiritfarer. Thunder Lotus Games, 2020. Toge Productions. Coffee Talk. Toge Productions, 2020. Touchdown Entertainment. America’s Test Kitchen: Let’s Get Cooking. Nintendo, 2010. Trinket Studios. Battle Chef Brigade. Adult Swim Games, 2017. Ubisoft Montreal. Assassin’s Creed III. Ubisoft, 2012. Ubisoft Montreal. Assassin’s Creed Unity. Ubisoft, 2014. Ubisoft Pictures. Beyond Good & Evil. Ubisoft, 2003. Undead Labs. State of Decay. Xbox Game Studios, 2013. Undead Labs. State of Decay 2. Xbox Game Studios, 2018. Visai Studio. Venba. Visai Games, 2021. Zynga. FarmVille. Zynga, 2009. Zynga. FarmVill1e. Zynga, 2012.

179

Index 2064: Read Only Memories 92 AAA games 66, 127 abundance 10, 17, 45, 71 – 74, 76 – 80, 80, 86, 100, 151, 165 Adams, Carol J. 1, 13 – 14, 57 – 58 Aesthetics 1, 5, 22, 33, 37, 47 – 48, 52, 62, 72, 74, 75, 79, 83, 84, 88, 90 – 91, 100, 101 – 104, 106, 110 – 113, 119, 131, 155 – 156, 158, 165 alcohol 92, 93, 95, 146 Animal Crossing 71 – 72, 74, 83 Anthropy, Anna 132, 151, 155, 159, 160 – 161 Assassin’s Creed 67, 92, Bakun, Martyna XIII, 74 Barthes, Roland 2 – 3, 80, 111 Battle Chef Brigade 33, 102, 107 – 109 112 – 113 Bayonetta 117, 124 – 126, 129, Beyond Good & Evil 64 – 66 Bhabba, Homi 97 Black, Blackness 4, 7, 8, 15, 16, 50, 58, 119, 120, 121, 149, 152 Bogost, Ian 82, 155 Brathwaite, Brenda 116 brewing (see also coffee) 87, 94 Burns, Maree (see also Malson, Helen) 154 Butler, Judith X, 140 Cassell, Justine 49 Caillois, Roger 30 Chang, Alenda Y. 31 – 32 chef 43, 44, 49, 107, 136, 137, 138, 141 – 142, 150 Chess, Shira 45 – 50, 82 Chung, Hae-Kyung 101 Cockburn, Alexander 103 coffee, coffeehouse (see also brewing) 15, 87 – 99, 161, 163 Coffee Talk 93 – 98 Cole, Matthew 56, 58 – 59

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110716603-015

Consume Me 117, 151 – 152, 156 – 161, 163, 165 Cook, Daniel 71, 73, 88 cook (n.) 37 – 38, 40, 43, 46, 53, 63, 84, 105, 107 – 108, 110, 141, 144 – 146, 148, 149 cookbook 40, 52, 118 cooking IX, XIII, 1, 5, 6, 8 – 10, 22 – 24,28 – 29, 33 – 35, 37 – 54, 75 – 77, 78 – 86, 98, 102, 103, 105, 107 – 114, 130, 133, 136 – 143, 146 – 150, 166, 167 cooking game XII, 1, 22, 32, 34, 38 – 41, 40 – 54, 107 – 114 cooking-show 40, 45, 102 – 103, 107, 108, 110, 113, 141Cooking Mama XI, 33 – 35, 41, 45 – 47, 60, 105, 106, 113, 151, 166 coziness X f., 1, 17, 71 – 89, 91 – 92, 96, 98 – 100, 152, 155 cozy game 1, 49, 71 – 73, 75, 80, 82, 88, 100, 152, 156, 166 crafting 16, 21, 23, 28 – 33, 38, 46, 66, 72 dating simulator 117, 130, 133 – 136, 143 Dejmanee, Tisha 103 – 105 Deutsch, Tracey 142 Diner Dash 45, 47, 52, Doki Doki Literature Club! 62 Don’t Starve 21 – 22, 25, 27 – 28, 38, 40, 44, 61, 66, 77, 106, 111, 164 Doyle-Myerscough, Kaelan 77 – 79 Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator 92, 119, 133, 143 – 150 eating disorder 12, 117, 124, 151 – 154, 156 – 157, 161, 163 – 165, 167 ecofeminism (see also feminism) 58 Ehrhardt, Julia 143 empathy 155 Ensslin, Astrid 23 – 24, 43 FarmVille 29 – 32, 48, 75, 81, 83, 106 femininity X, 42, 63, 103 – 104, 125 – 126, 129 – 130, 140 – 141, 154

181

Index

feminism, feminist IX–X, 1, 6 – 16, 41, 42, 48, 49, 55, 56 – 59, 64 – 67, 102, 103, 104, 120, 140, 141, 152 – 154 Feng, Doreen Yen Hung 101 Final Fantasy XV XII, XIII, 36, 80, 102, 109 – 115, 166 food – food as art 100 – 105, 114 – food as enhancement 2, 24, 26, 34, 35, 63, 77, 110, 125 – food as resource 1, 22, 24, 26 – 27, 28, 32, 63, – food as restorative 24 – 26, 34, 65, 75, 77, 87, 110, 125, 126 – food as a means of seduction 143 – 148 – food as sustenance 2, 24 – 25, 28, 32, 81 foodgasm 131 food porn, #foodporn 102 – 107 109, 114, 117, 131 foodstuff 3, 17, 24, 29, 99 foodwork 42, 44 Games for Change 155 – 156 Gamman, Loraine (see also Makinen, Merja) 118 – 119 gaze – male gaze 120, 121, 125 – 126 – player’s gaze, players’ gaze 79, 106, 117, 120, 127, 128, 148 – queer gaze 121, 124, 148 gender, gendered X, XI, 2, 3, 7, 10 f., 11, 13, 14, 16, 23, 29, 39, 42 – 44, 45, 48 – 49, 55, 59, 63, 67, 68, 80, 82, 82, 88, 104, 117, 118, 119,121 – 123, 129, 133, 135 f., 136,140 – 143, 145 – 146, 152, 154, 157, 160 – 161, 165, – cisgender 6, 13 – transgender 11, 144 gendered space 41 – 44, 142 Gold, Jonathan 89 Good Pizza, Great Pizza 51 – 52 Hall, Kim Q. 9 – 11, 142 Harvest Moon 74 haute cuisine 2, 51, 107 f., 108, 112, 136, 138 Heyes, Cressida 57

Herkes, Ellen (see also Redden, Guy) 141 hooks, bell 120 – 121 Hsia, Jenny Jiao 151, 160 – 161 hunger 2, 21, 25, 28, 66, 77, 80 – 81, 118, 122, 151, 156 – 157, 161 – 164 Ibrahim, Yasmin 103 I Love You, Colonel Sanders! 130, 133, 135 – 142,144, 146, 147 Independent games and industry 1, 29, 45, 48, 49, 74, 75, 82, 86, 89 – 91, 117, 121, 133, 134, 135, 158 ingredients IX, 3, 10, 22 – 23, 26, 28, 32 – 35, 37 – 41, 44, 50 – 52, 67, 72, 78, 81 – 84, 89, 94, 98, 107 – 108, 110 – 112, 147 intersectionality, intersectional IX–XI, 2, 7 – 8, 10, 16, 58, 153 intimacy X, XII, 17, 22, 23, 36, 37, 73, 74, 76, 78, 79, 80, 98, 100, 102, 111, 113, 145, 149, 150 Isbister, Katherine 134 Japanese games XI–XII, 74, 113 – 115 Jørgensen, Kristine 159 – 160 Juul, Jesper 74, 82, 90 Katamari 38 Keogh, Brendan 159 kitchen 8, 40 – 45, 47, 50, 64, 74, 81 – 83, 99, 142, 145 – 147, 149, 162 Kors, Marijn J. L. 155 Kretzschmar, Mark (see also Salter, Anastasia) 134 – 135 Kristeva, Julia 12 Krzywinska, Tanya 116 Lauteria, Evan 116 Lears, T. J. Jackson 90 Leer, Jonathan 111 Lee, Trena (see Mitchell, Alex) Lamerichs, Nicolle 167

136 – 137

Makinen, Merja (see also Gamman, Loraine) 118 – 119 Malson, Helen (see also Burns, Maree) 153 – 154

182

Index

masculinity 14, 42, 59, 111, 120, 130, 133, 140 – 142, 145 – 148 – culinary masculinity 140 – 142 Mario Bros 1, 26, 60 Markwith, Maureen (see also Rozin, Paul and Stoess, Caryn) 57 Maslow, Abraham 77 McDonnel, Erin Metz 103, 104 meat 14, 21 – 22, 24 – 28, 31, 46, 50, 56 – 61, 64 – 67, 77, 107, 123, 126, 136, 141, 146 – 150 Minecraft 38, 66 mini-game 22 – 23, 26, 33 – 37, 41, 45 – 47, 52, 80, 92, 109, 112, 151, 158, 160 Mitchell, Alex (see also Lee, Trena) 136 – 137 Monster Hunter 79 Mulvey, Lara 120 Navarro-Remesal, Víctor 72 Necrobarista 95 – 98 Neko Atsume 72 Nezlek, John 56 – 57 nostalgia 10, 74, 91, 136, 138 – 139, 142, 146, 149 Nour: Play With Your Food 38 Overcooked

38, 49 – 51, 105, 166

Persona 5 92, 98 Perullo, Nicola 5, 131 PETA 36 – 37, 59 – 61 Petrini, Carlo 9 Phillips, Amanda 124 – 126, 129 Piatti-Farnell, Lisa 11 – 12 playbour 28, 30, 37, 82 pleasure 5 – 6, 9, 11, 14, 26, 31, 36, 41 f., 47, 72, 85, 100, 102, 116 – 124, 126 – 132, 148, 151, 159 Pokémon XII, 34 – 38, 60 Probyn, Elspeth 8, 11, 13 – 14, 41, 117 – 118, 131 queerness, queer X, XI, 7, 9, 16, 22, 117, 119, 120 – 121, 124, 125, 127, 131, 133 – 135, 143 – 144, 148, 150, 155 Quinet, Marienne L. 101

race, racial XI, 3, 42, 43, 50, 63, 93, 94, 121, 123, 140 recipe 21, 23, 26, 27, 32, 34, 37 – 38, 40 – 41, 47, 50 – 53, 85, 103, 110, 111, 112, 136, 138, 139, 142, 146, 147, 149 Redden, Guy (see also Herkes, Ellen) 141 Reynolds, Whitney 114 Rozin, Paul (see also Markwith, Maureen and Stoess, Caryn) 57, Ruberg, Bonnie 30, 125 – 127, 149, 155 Russell, Sharman Apt 163 safety X, 1, 17, 22, 63, 67, 72 – 74, 77, 79 – 80, 86, 87 – 89, 91 – 96, 98 – 99, 100, 149, 151 – 152, 155 – 156 Salter, Anastasia (see also Kretzschmar, Mark) 29 – 30, 134 – 135 Sceats, Sarah 3, 7 Schaufert, Braidon 143 – 144, 149 sex 13 – 14, 116 – 118, 121, 124, 126 – 128, 131, 135, 144, 149 sexuality X, 13, 103, 116 – 118, 125, 135, 143 Shrinking Pains 121 – 123, 151, 156, 161 – 165 Sims, The 25, 40, 43, 66, Skyrim 40, 66 Sobal, Jeffrey 146 – 147 softness X, 1, 17, 48, 51, 52, 64, 72 – 74, 77, 85 – 86, 88, 100 Spiritfarer 75, 80 – 85, 97, 106 Stardew Valley 29, 66, 72, 75, 81, 83 State of Decay 63 – 64 Stoess, Caryn (see also Markwith, Maureen and Rozin, Paul) 57 Straub, Julia 91 Succulent 117, 124, 126 – 130 Sugar Rush 102, 107 Super Meat Boy 59 – 60 Szabo, Michelle 133, 140 Tavassolian, Amin 33 The Evil Within 2 87 The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild XII, 26, 38, 40, 44, 66, 75 – 76, 79 – 80, 84, 85, 98, 113 The Red Strings Club 92 tofu 59 – 61

Index

Tompkins, Kyla Wazana 124 Tyler, Tom 24 – 26 Uncharted 4

7 – 8, 11, 15, 123 –

74

VA-11 HALL-A: Cyberpunk Bartender 92 van Ryn, Luke 27, 46 vegan, vegetarian, veg*an 13 – 14, 55 – 68, 81, 144, 147, 152 Venba 1, 52 – 54, 166 West, Candace (see also Zimmerman, Don) X,140

Westerlaken, Michelle 66 – 67 Wholesome Games, Wholesome Direct 71, 80, 89, 155 wholesome games 29, 71, 75, 82, Wysocki, Matthew 116 Xu, Wenying

6, 136

Yang, Robert

117, 124, 126 – 129, 132

183

1,

Zimmerman, Don (see also West, Candace) X, 140