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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

video games

The Joy of Cooking in The Legend of Zelda

“Dad, I think you’re addicted, and you shouldn’t play tonight.”

That’s my seven year old acting like a parent, out of concern that I’ve been playing video games too much lately. He’s not entirely wrong.

We picked up The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild for the Nintendo Switch a couple of months back, and I can’t stop playing. It’s a problem. And while there is plenty of action firing bomb arrows at moblins and struggling to solve imaginative puzzles, one of the most enjoyable aspects of the game is actually . . . cooking?

Before we get into the culinary quests, though, let’s just say that Breath of the Wild is by far one of the best video games I’ve ever played. It’s a massive world that encourages deep exploration and rewards smart thinking. But the most impressive thing about Zelda is how all the attention to detail intertwines to create an immersive, unified experience. That includes the attention to food. What could have been a one-off, throwaway bit is actually central to how you play (and survive) the game.

There is some main plot to defeat some monster, yadda, yadda, yadda. That’s fine. Most games have that. It’s the discovery that’s much more fun. Zelda is a forager’s dream. Meadows, river banks, beaches and mountaintops all hold items you can pick: mushrooms, apples, honey (but watch out for the bees!), and so much more.

Plus, for the carnivores out there, you can fish and hunt, or visit a local bodega to buy ingredients like rice and milk. And everything you pick up goes into your inventory and can be used throughout the game.

Which is when the real fun begins.

There are stone fire pits scattered across the map. When you come across one you can reach into your inventory and pull out five ingredients. Throw them all in a pot and after a jaunty little song, it reveals your food creation.

At minimum you can throw just mushrooms into the mix and create a simple mushroom skewer, or throw boar meat on for a seared steak. But it’s way more fun to see what you can come up with by mixing and matching. I find myself channeling my inner chef as I spend several minutes examining and handpicking the best ingredients, trying to balance my salty and sweet flavors.

This is for a meal, mind you, in a video game.

IGN has the full list of all the recipes you can make, and they can quickly get all Michelin star-like. For instance: Combine mushroom, a bird egg, goat butter and rock salt to create a mushroom omelette. Throw salmon, rock salt, rice and goat butter together for a Salmon risotto. Then polish the whole thing off with a slice of pumpkin pie made from pumpkin, goat butter, cane sugar and wheat. (That’s a lot of goat butter.)

Even the in-game descriptions of each meal in the game are sumptuous in their own right, and could appear in an issue of Bon Appetit.

What’s interesting, and completely weird for me to type out loud here, is that making meals in Zelda actually makes me want to cook more in real life. I realize that’s insane. If I threw a whole apple, wild honey and a steak into a pot over an open flame the result would be inedible. Not to mention the fact that moblin is totally not in season right now. But in a weird sort of way, my Zelda adventures are making me feel like maybe I could be more adventurous when I cook in real life, too.

I can’t recommend Breath of the Wild highly enough for both gamers and non-gamers alike. It’s fun, and all the foraging, experimenting and cooking is really quite . . . addicting.

If Cooking Utensils Were Game Controllers, Would Millennials Cook More?

We have a cooking crisis on our hands.

At least that’s if you believe those who suggest Millennials are not mastering basic physical world skills – like cooking – as they wile away the hours staring at screens.

While surveys, including our own, have shown that Millennials are in fact cooking, there’s no doubt they (and my fellow busy Gen-Xers) could benefit from mastering some basic cooking skills. Coming up with reasons for cooking skills education is easy – you can save money, impress friends, try new kinds of food – but perhaps the most convincing argument is there’s a growing body of research showing a correlation between cooking at home and better health outcomes over time.

So, if cooking is good for us and society at large, doesn’t it make sense to get young people cooking more? And if so, the question becomes how to do that?

One way is to bring cooking and food information to young people in a format they can appreciate. Buzzfeed and others racking up billions of views monthly by creating highly shareable content in the form of visually fun cooking videos. YouTube and Facebook are enabling the rise of independent content creators as well as food-focused multichannel networks like Tastemade which tap into a growing hunger for food-specific content.

Another idea is teaching kitchens, which have become fashionable in places like Japan. ABC Cooking School has 125 locations in Japan, and the primary customer for the schools are young Japanese women (9 out of 10 students are women) who want to learn basic cooking skills.

But as most of us in the tech world knows, maybe the most surefire way to create more engagement in an activity is to add a layer of gaming to it.

One way to do that is through gamification. Gamification is the concept of adding game dynamics to almost any online activity. Whether it’s in the form of virtual rewards for your bank or badges from that online class you’re taking, most of us have used some form of gamification, and now cooking apps like SideChef are using game dynamics to get consumers cooking.

Then there are actual video games created to increase interest in a given topic. There’s no shortage of basic video games that integrate some cooking concept, from Nintendo’s Cooking Mama series to Overcooked from Steam, but where these games fall short in that they don’t put cooking tools in your hands. While you may be chopping veggies insanely fast on Cooking Mama, this doesn’t directly translate since you can’t use a game controller to make dinner.

But what if we were to make game controllers out of actual cooking tools? In other words, what if the knives, spoons, spatulas, and pans we used to make dinner with became part of the video game itself?

I know it sounds crazy, but bear with me. If you look at other physical crafts like knitting, creators have already started to make the actual craft tool one in the same as the video game controller.

Take Loominary, an open source game where the video game controller is a tabletop loom. The game’s creators created a computer software game that takes inputs from RFID tags on the loom shuttles and then registers choices made by the user as they start weaving on the loom.

You can see Loominary in action below:

Loominary Prototype Demo

Loominary uses RFID tags embedded in loom shuttles, but there’s no reason cooking tools couldn’t also use other sensors much the way today’s smart footballs and basketballs pack in sensors like accelerometers to track performance, speed and technique. Add in things like machine vision – and there’s no shortage of efforts to layer machine vision with food – and you may have the makings of an interesting video game concept: making dinner.

Imagine being immersed in a video game where you are egged on by a virtual Top Chef panel of judges as you cook a meal. You can compete against yourself, someone in another city, or against a virtual Heston Blumenthal.

At the end of the game, you not only have a score, but you have a dinner to eat.

While the Tasty One Top isn’t a game platform, there’s no reason it couldn’t be. If the company mapped all those Tasty cooking videos to work with the cooktop, why couldn’t they eventually track behavior and even have competitions for the best rendition of Tasty meals made at home?

And who’s to say you couldn’t combine cooking with virtual reality experiences. I’m sure Apple has thought about how the iPhone X’s augmented reality could be applied in the kitchen.

So maybe cookware companies aren’t gaming companies. But, with increasing investment in software and sensors, the arrival of machine vision and augmented reality, I’m betting some companies will look to create a tasty combination of cooking and gaming to get millennials to put on the cooking apron.