Ms. Pac-Man’s Revenge

October 25, 2019 Admin 0 Comments

In an essay for the anthology “Women on Food,” restaurant critic Soleil Ho wonders if gender has something to do with the lack of food in video games

As Charlotte Druckman notes in the intro to Women on Food, out October 29, the anthology is unlike typical anthologies that compile a genre of written work, often published elsewhere. Everything in Women on Food, was written specifically for the book. It spans formats — with interviews, essays, profiles, and standalone quotes from 115 writers and chefs — as well as moods. There are meditations on racism, class, and of course, sexism in the food industry. But Women on Food also includes works meant to provide joy and levity. In a section that reads like something out of a magazine, Druckman invites her contributors to recommend foods that are good to eat on toast. The sum is an entirely original collection that encapsulates the way women in the industry are thinking about food right now.

In this essay from Women on Food, Soleil Ho, now the restaurant critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, tracks the history of food in video games and wonders: Does the presence or lack of food in gaming have something to do with gender? — Monica Burton

When I first picked up Harvest Moon 64, a farm simulator game that came out on the Nintendo 64 in the late nineties, I had two objectives: to marry a cute girl and eat a piece of cake. The first task would, I quickly found out, involve days of wooing, small talk, and daily gift optimization, but the second would be quite easy. After selling a few turnips, I could afford a slice of sweet, pixelated perfection — with vanilla frosting and bright red strawberry slices sandwiched between two layers of white cake and a whole berry on top. Potentially, though, you could go the entire length of the game without buying a piece of cake. Instead, you could opt to replenish your stamina (much-needed for a full day of chopping wood, watering crops, and milking cows) with cheaper berries foraged in the mountains or raw fish pulled straight from the water. But where’s the fun in that? For the first time, I’d found a game that simulated the pleasure of eating something delicious for its own sake.

It was 1999 and it’s not like food was a new element in gaming: it had been a staple — literally, as in, a necessity — of many earlier releases. To replenish your health in side-scrolling arcade fighters like Streets of Rage and Double Dragon, all you needed to do was kick a trash can and eat the hot dogs and roasted chickens that popped out. In Castlevania, players can restore health by hitting walls to potentially unearth plated roasts — spoken of among fans as “wall meat.”

It can be an enemy, too: one of the most iconic food games is a longstanding arcade regular called Burger Time, where the player is a chef attempting to make a giant burger while avoiding attacks from malevolent sausages and eggs. In Super Mario RPG, a gorgeous, multi-tiered wedding cake (strangely named “Bundt”) turns sentient and goes on a rampage, attacking Mario and his friends.

Food might also make an appearance as a reward, like the iconic Black Forest cake in Portal. In these games, marketed for an audience that was probably not of the gourmet persuasion, food is less feature, more window dressing: None of them dwells on how the food actually tastes.

Why has food, which is arguably an essential part of our day-to-day lives, been so marginal in so many games? It could be due to ingrained assumptions about their intended audiences: If these products were meant to appeal to men, why waste effort on rendering food when one could focus on more masculine motifs, like monsters and spacecraft? And yet, one of the earliest examples of game developers’ thinking outside of the box and bringing food to the forefront is one of the earliest games: Pac-Man. In an interview with Eurogamer, the game’s developer, Toru Iwatani, admits that his inspiration for the overall design had culinary origins. The fruits that Pac-Man eats up are easy to spot, but the design for the protagonist himself is, notoriously, related to food, too: “I was trying to come up with something to appeal to women and couples. When I imagined what women enjoy, the image of them eating cakes and desserts came to mind, so I used ‘eating’ as a keyword. When I did research with this keyword I came across the image of a pizza with a slice taken out of it and had that eureka moment. So I based the Pac-Man character design on that shape.” In a burgeoning scene where games were mainly about shooting asteroids and aliens, Pac-Man stood apart for having gameplay that only asked the participant to eat.

In a 1982 article in Electronic Games magazine, critic Joyce Worley wrote, “No discussion of women as electronic gamers would be complete without a deep bow in the direction of Midway’s incomparable Pac-Man. The game’s record-shattering success derives from its overwhelming popularity among female gamers.” Before Pac-Man came chomping through his maze and arcades repositioned themselves as family-oriented establishments, Worley claimed, women were rarely sighted playing on the game machines. In his book, Atari Age: The Emergence of Video Games in America, Michael Z. Newman writes,

[I]n North America, Pac-Man appealed widely to children and women in addition to male players, and to both more casual and more serious visitors to arcades. Its financial impact was staggering: it earned one billion dollars in revenue in its first fifteen months in the United States, and the home console version was predicted in the pages of Time to be a bigger money-maker than Star Wars, a widely recycled factoid.

Iwatani’s gambit was so successful that the company subsequently produced Ms. Pac-Man, which came with its own rom-com-esque storyline, as an explicit thank-you nod to their female fans.

Since Pac-Man, we’ve seen food emerge as a staple in what are known as “casual games.” These would be the intuitive and noncommittal variety that tend to be more popular among women and comprise the bulk of food-centered games, including Candy Crush Saga, Overcooked, Farmville, Cookie Clicker, and Cooking Mama.

When I was a teenager, in the early days of browser-based Flash games, I became obsessed with a very simple cooking game, which asked only that I drag pieces of raw beef onto a photo of a grill, where it would start to sear with a satisfying hiss. The game, Yakiniku, by indie developer Yoshinao Mori, matches your pace, supplying more and more plates of raw beef as each batch finishes. It appealed to me with its simplicity: in the midst of chemistry homework, interpersonal drama, and hormonal nonsense, focusing on the act of searing virtual beef and dipping it in BBQ sauce was an amazing way to allay anxiety. I could imagine I was dining solo at some old-school Japanese restaurant, free to zero in on the frivolous question of how well-cooked I’d prefer my beef to be. In casual games like this one, where there are virtually no stakes or storyline beyond what the player is willing to fill in on their own, such a simple set-up works quite well.

Though food has long been a staple of casual games, and a few production-heavy console games have featured food-themed minigames as well — like the sushi-eating contest in Pokémon Stadium and the Iron Chef–style competitions in Suikoden 2 — it’s been rare to see food and cooking at the center of the action. But recently, those games that fall into the “hardcore” category have begun to embrace it as a motif worth exploiting. Final Fantasy XV (FFXV), a high-budget Japanese role-playing package released for the PS4 in 2016, quickly garnered attention for its involved cooking minigame. Players can concoct dishes for their fighting party to eat to replenish their health, but these are not the generic roast chickens of the Streets of Rage days. If they choose to dig into the one-hundred-plus recipes listed, they can make photorealistic dishes reminiscent of Hainanese chicken and rice, nasi lemak, xiaolongbao, truffled risotto, and cassoulet. If they don’t care to go to the trouble, they can just stick with toast and Cup Noodles (who probably paid big money for product placement in the game). One of the sidequests even asks players to journey in search of the perfect extra ingredient to make their instant Cup Noodles really sing.

In an interview with Eater at the end of 2016, FFXV director Hajime Tabata cited “meshitero,” a dramatic portmanteau of “food” and “terrorism” that roughly translates to “food imagery that strikes indiscriminately.” The development team was so serious about the realism of the food, they went camping (much of the game takes place as a road trip) and took photos of the food they were able to create outdoors. Part of their quality control was, of course, taste testing: If a dish didn’t taste good to the team, they wouldn’t put it into the game. “Recipes 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,” Tabata said. “We have to create truly delicious-looking food scenes similar to those that appear in movies and anime.” Any fan of Studio Ghibli films like Spirited Away or Howl’s Moving Castle, in which the glistening of dumplings and crackliness of fried eggs is rendered in careful detail, could see the relation.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, released the following year on the Nintendo Switch, also features a robust cooking element capable of producing charmingly cartoonish renditions of curries, stews, and rice balls for characters to eat. Though there are distinct recipes, players are invited to experiment and combine ingredients haphazardly to see what happens. The improvisational spirit of cooking is all there — an aspect that’s bolstered by the fact that players must hunt and gather the components, from whole fish to wild mushrooms to moose meat, on their own. And Stardew Valley, an immensely popular fantasy farming simulator similar to Harvest Moon, includes seventy-one recipes for dishes the player can make and gift to NPCs (non-player characters).

The culinary improvisation introduced in Breath of the Wild and in later versions of Harvest Moon got a little bit closer to the truth of what real-life cooking is like. Rather than asking players to follow predetermined formulas, the games invite them to reason out what ingredients would go with each other. Like any real life chef, the player is lead to ask, “What can I make with what I have on hand?” The recipes in Breath of the Wild are shared with the player verbally by non-player characters, so sometimes they’ll make suggestions like, “You could also throw a couple of berries in there,” or “Use whatever meat you’ve got.”

It’s a lot like what Tom Colicchio and Samin Nosrat have done through their cookbooks, Think Like a Chef and Salt Fat Acid Heat, respectively. Rather than being filled with standardized recipes, with measurements and processes clearly outlined, these books focus on the psychological aspect of cooking. They show the reader how to use foundational ideas and flavors to build dishes on their own. I remember reading Colicchio’s “Trilogy” chapter as a high-schooler and being awed by the idea that, by flexing a reliable three-ingredient combination like ramps, morels, and asparagus, you could create a huge variety of dishes. His approach asks the reader to look at the ingredients they have and build ideas from them, like a chef would with the spread of produce she picks up at the farmers market. The set of skills Colicchio and Nosrat try to build with their writing seems especially good for novices who might be overwhelmed by all of the terminology and techniques assumed by conventional recipe books. While it’s rare to see their philosophies echoed in mass market recipe collections online and in print, it’s even stranger to see major video games subtly prompting players to think this way through in-game mechanics.

With these newer, more involved iterations of virtual eating and cooking came more cross-platform coverage of the games: both food publications like Eater and gaming outlets like Kill Screen and Inverse began to play host to conversations about the culinary aesthetics of new releases. The fact that these food and game publications, whose mastheads and readership respectively skew heavily female and male, had enough shared material to construct a Venn diagram is significant because of how cloistered-off the games publishing world has been for the majority of its existence. Criticized in recent years for catering to an audience of mainly white straight men at the expense of the diverse gaming public, the adjacent publishing sector has faced major growing pains. On the one hand, movements like Gamergate, a precursor to the modern, online alt-right movement, have frequently moved to silence critiques by white women, queer people, and people of color in order to preserve control over their patch of land. And on the other, outlets like Waypoint, VICE’s gaming vertical, have worked to diversify their stable of writers and add an element of critical consciousness to their published work.

Courtesy Square Enix

At the very least, the increased presence of food in games has prompted a shift in participation and coverage among many mainstream gaming media outlets: now, readers swap recipes in article comment sections, news verticals report on food brand partnerships with game studios, and writers often post listicles describing the “best” digitally rendered dishes of various games. On the surface, at least, the mainstream gaming media has become more receptive to including “feminine” content, though it remains to be seen if that will translate to more inclusivity of non-men in that world at large. If Pac-Man is any indicator of how things may go, then perhaps there is a chance that positive change may occur.

Outside of the mainstream gaming media, there’s another pattern of fusion happening: a few gamers, mainly women and queer men, have started food blogs that focus exclusively on the dishes that appear in games. You might find recipes that turn the 1Up mushrooms from Super Mario into cake pops or real-life adaptations of fantasy game health potions into fruit smoothies. Part of the puzzle is figuring out how to make dishes that provide very little information to go on: It’s not like the games’ recipes involve much more than a list of ingredients for the player to gather. For example, a Google search for “cinnamon butterscotch pie,” a food item used in the game Undertale, unearths multiple attempts by bloggers — and random kids on social media — trying their hand at the imaginary confection and bonding over their successes (or failures). For a blogger like Everett, the man behind the Stardew Valley Recipes page, the process of puzzling out how to make something like the Strange Bun is a game in itself. The Strange Bun, crafted in-game out of a periwinkle, flour, and Void Mayonnaise, a black sauce made from a witch-cursed egg, has no real-world equivalent. For those following at home, he eventually settled on preparing a yeasted, savory pastry with a filling made from canned snails — no Void Mayonnaise required.

As I browsed through the recipes on popular video game food blogs, I could hear my chef voice nagging, saying things like, They should have used real butter, or Why did they use pre-made whipped cream? The photos are often a bit janky and dim, with results naturally looking like emulations of pixelated images more than real food. But that was me missing the point: These sites are far from the precious food blogs that I’ve gotten used to, where, if a post isn’t sponsored by General Mills or Blue Apron, everything is perfect and bespoke, with the food a natural complement to the writer’s diary-like prose. Even the cooking videos that I’ve found, which often require more production effort than written blogs, are pretty awful. Eurogamer, a popular games journalism site, produced a video in 2016 where one member of their team re-created a recipe for “hagfish quenelles” from Dishonored 2. Armed with a list of ingredients specified in-game and a slim knowledge of what quenelles even are, the host ends up making a dish that, at best, looks like it fell out of a Soviet Army MRE: a beige, lumpy mess. (Ironically, the version posted by Nerds’ Kitchen, a Polish blog, looks way better.) The popularity of these blogs and videos, especially among gamers, might not only be due to their subject matter but also to the fact that they validate the experiences of their audience and meet them where they’re at.

In addition, there’s a fascinating new type of instructional food videos, mainly by men, that caters specifically to people who play video and PC games. With titles like, “Top 10 Gamer Foods,” “The Perfect Gamer Food,” and “Brain Food for Gamers,” sometimes the videos are just lists of snack foods, like chips and candy, that the host enjoys, and sometimes they feature actual, if rudimentary, recipes. In “8 Simple Microwave Recipes for Gamers,” the hosts demonstrate how to use pantry items to prepare quick, single-serve meals like a biscuit made with Spaghetti-Os and a mug quiche. In a curious marriage of YouTube genres, they conduct their cooking lessons through the frame of a Let’s Play video, “playing” the lesson with controllers and commentary as if it itself is a game.

The idea of there being a distinguishable sort of “gamer food” or “food for gamers” speaks to the cultural hold this hobby has on people who take it seriously as an identity. It’s not like there are similar videos about “snacks for knitters” or “podcaster recipes.” The closest comparison might be to the subset of people within the tech world who make up the core consumers of Soylent, the Ensure-like meal replacement smoothie that purports to do away with the inconvenience and messiness of food and enable an uninterrupted work life. For them, food is something marginal — like the garbage-can roast chicken picked up to replenish hit points — to consume while pursuing more important tasks.

However extreme my doom and gloom visions of sad couch dinners in cups may seem, this trend runs up against what may be a very real problem for gamers: A recent Canadian study found that, in a small sample of adolescents who played games, subjects ate more calories while playing, despite not performing any physical movements beyond handling a controller. Interestingly, an article on the study posted by Lifehacker generated comments that spoke to the contrary: Commenters said that playing games often made them forget about eating entirely. One wrote, “It’s the case of ‘I’ll eat when I get this far’ turns into ‘Oh my god it’s 1 a.m. and I haven’t eaten since lunch.’” Regardless of whether an individual eats more or less, it seems apparent that gaming does affect diet in some way. Videos about gamer food are speaking to this idea, whether they’re simply reminding gamers to eat anything at all or giving them the tools to consume more nutritious options.

While the boom in game-related food content is interesting in its own right, one has to wonder if the approach the more popular blogs and videos take is informed by gender, especially when it comes to their amateurishness. On some level, the looseness of the creators with regard to their culinary skill levels and the food they make could be an affect that is informed by the patriarchal notion that men just aren’t naturally meant to cook or take care of themselves, so the assumption of skill and expertise common to female-led food media would be inappropriate for a mostly male audience of gamers. It would, in a word, make them “inaccessible.” The emphasis here tends to be on the novelty of imitating video game content in real life, as a sort of extension of the live-action role playing (LARP) tradition, or on optimizing caloric intake without disrupting one’s play session to pause and make an involved meal. Blogs like Lvl.1 Chef, which revel in the work it takes to perfectly execute game food, are a much rarer breed.

In a sense, this contrast runs parallel to the gender imbalance in the audiences for casual versus hardcore games. Though the Entertainment Software Association, a US trade association for the game industry, puts the gender ratio of female to male players at roughly forty to sixty (sans any data about players who identify as nonbinary), in 2016, game analytics company Quantic Foundry found that the kinds of games played varied heavily according to gender. In a survey of 270,000 players, they found that, across twenty-three genres, proportional female participation varied from 2 to 70 percent, with matching and farm/family simulator games sharing the lead and sports, racing, and shooter games sitting at the very bottom of the chart. Nonbinary respondents, who made up 1.1 percent of the pool, favored farm/family simulators and exploration games. Harvest Moon, the game that fed me my first slice of pixelated cake, would certainly be at the very top for the former category.

The mainstream games that I referred to earlier, including FFXV and Breath of the Wild, fall in the middle of the chart. It’s safe to say that the majority of games that meaningfully incorporate food in their designs and narratives are the ones that appeal most to female-identifying players. It’s clear, given the results of the survey, that within the umbrella of “gamer” or “people who play games,” there’s a great deal of varying experiences and personalities, with quite a bit of diversion along gender lines. This can speak to the difference in the tenor of gaming and food videos, with some appealing to the Soylent crowd and others to enthusiastic home cooks.

Rather than being anything subversive or educational, could the inclusion of food in games play a part in the gender segregation in the gaming industry? Food itself could potentially become a signifier for less “serious” games that won’t be as hyped up or lauded by the gaming media. There is also the dark possibility that it may be a way for developers to superficially pander to female consumers without having to, say, include well-written, gender diverse characters into their narratives or reckon with hiring and firing practices that punish women and nonbinary employees for being outspoken about gender issues in the industry. The tying of “female” with “casual gamer” has deleterious effects on women in the games industry, as noted by a Kotaku investigation into sexist hiring practices at Riot Games, the developer behind the hardcore game, League of Legends: “[T]alented women have fallen through Riot’s hiring processes because they weren’t considered ‘core gamers,’ which one source described as ‘an excuse.’ Two sources familiar with Riot’s hiring practices say the company checks interviewees’ League of Legends stats prior to bringing them on campus for interviews.”

This kind of surface-level appeal without impact, the kind that I think we’re quite used to within capitalism, might be all that we get. After all, as much as we’ve talked up the freshness of Ms. Pac-Man as an early female game protagonist, her narrative was all about her romance with Pac-Man: We don’t even know her name.

And yet, despite the potential for the kind of gender-based consumer segregation that might pop up as the market for more casual games grows, perhaps including nice pixelated food benefits everyone. Maybe it’s a good thing that gamer kids can see their favorite characters whipping up millefeuilles and paellas and be motivated to try it on their own. There might be some division among the gaming community regarding genre preferences and the binaristic gender stereotypes, but it’s not like a game media reader can cordon off the sections of gaming publications that take food seriously as an element of game aesthetics. And a game like Dishonored 2, with its inclusion of a detailed recipe that intrigued its fans enough to get them to make it, really does walk the walk when it comes to representation, with a quietly diverse cast of characters who inhabit a wide range of roles. Finally, as food becomes an even greater and deeper part of game design, as we’ve seen in the releases of major developers like Square Enix and Nintendo, it has observable reverberations in fan culture, piquing interest in creative home cooking among a group of people who are often not catered to by mainstream food media. Sachka Sandra Duval, the lead narrative designer of Dishonored 2, told me via email that the game’s hagfish quenelle recipe “was a reference to the famous dish that you find in most restaurants in Lyon, where [Arkane Studios] is located.” Inspiring American gamers to make an authentic Lyonnaise dish that greats like Julia Child and Paul Bocuse would have recognized and savored feels like a coup in itself. We might not all be diving headfirst into making it, but I’m sure many of us have since wondered, “How do those taste?”

A future where even hardcore gamers might be able to rattle off recipes for laksa or bread pudding doesn’t seem too far off, though we’ll have to hold out for more developers like Arkane and fewer like Riot. Perhaps one day Tom Colicchio and Samin Nosrat’s improvisational and, frankly, playful approach to cooking will permeate even further, inspiring more young cooks who grew up gaming, just like me. And maybe we will see people of all genders learning — and loving — to cook both digital and analog food. (Pro tip: Cake tastes even better when you make it IRL.)

Excerpt of Soleil Ho’s essay from the new book Women on Food by Charlotte Druckman. © 2019 Charlotte Druckman. Published by Abrams Press. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.