Text haKuRyu
Two nights ago, I asked one of the most philosophical questions of my life: What do workers eat for dinner?
Why specifically dinner? Because the content of lunch is not too difficult to choose. 711 Bento, cheap takeaway, Yoshinoya downstairs of the company, anyway, do not spend much money to eat enough.
However, dinner bothers thousands of workers: for single social animals who do not work overtime, dinner time is the most free time of the day. Freely choose the food you want to eat within the scope of your wallet, without being constrained by your workstation and the gaze of others... Such a dinner is given some sacred meaning, and naturally also makes people have difficulty in choosing.
In the virtual game world, the question of what to eat also plagues thousands of players. Starving a character in a game doesn't make real-life players grumble, but people always like to study weird things in serious games, so eating has become one of the most interesting topics in game history.
But there are hundreds of millions of gamers around the world, and there are millions of games of all kinds, and everyone has a different understanding of the food in the game - to count these things, I'm afraid that The Elder Scrolls 6 is released...
So I don't really want to write about any inventory today, but just talk about something that is both simple and profound: Why do people flock to food in games? In different games, what kind of meaning can food bring to players?
Note: The image below is a very realistic model of the food in Final Fantasy XIV, but it is not included in the text due to space limitations.
My pleasure is watching Kiryu kazuma eat.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not Nan tong, it's just that the food in Dragon among Men is too healing.
Imagine beating a bunch of unsightly on the street to the point of deliriousness, turning around and walking into the Korean barbecue restaurant next door, being taken to his seat by a respectful waiter and ordering the most luxurious beef diaphragm; or after a day of real estate business (rent collection), the usual exquisite tuna belly sushi, talking with the boss and finally buying the whole sushi restaurant...
I want to be a Japanese gangster, and no matter who wants to enjoy this kind of life, it's a life!
However, from the perspective of the game mechanics, the dragon among men series can not bring much benefit to the player: the food will only return blood and unlock achievements, and will not provide the protagonist with a messy Buff (the last few works will do). Players also can't collect a variety of strange recipes in Dragon among Men, because Nagoshi doesn't let players cook their own meals at all, and if they want to eat, they have to go out to the restaurant, and the recipes naturally lose their meaning.
True, it is too disrespectful for the dragon of Dojima to cook himself.
Yet no one has ever complained about this seemingly monotonous way of eating. And after Sega designed the food Buff for Dragons of Men 2, players went back and began to miss the simple cuisine of the past: people in the game thinking about what to eat tonight should be because of the simple "I want to eat this"; if you go to eat a specific food to get Buff, isn't that the cart before the horse?
Perhaps this is the connotation of the name "Like a Dragon" - if you want to become a real dragon, you must first decide whether to eat sukiyaki pot, crab dishes or tempura tonight. People who can't even take this step can't take the biggest gangster in Japan to the future.
Presumably, anyone who has experienced Monster Hunter Pocket Edition 3 (MHP3) on the PSP platform must have experienced such a big wordless event:
One day during the summer vacation, you and your friends found a corner in McDonald's and sat down, ready to give the Yellow Black Dragon over. Just when everyone was taking the props and confirming the departure, and eager to try the loading interface, the second dog next to you suddenly came: "I x, I forgot to drink the drink, this game is reopened..."
Whether you're an old hunter who's been playing for 2,000 hours or a rookie who's just starting out on the game, forgetting to drink is a must-have part of MHP3. Unfortunately, Capcom added the camp cat meal function in the later "Monster Hunter" works, taking care of the forgetful players while also burying this classic link in history, which is somewhat regrettable.
If the food in Dragon among Men interprets the concept of a dragon, then the food in Monster Hunter also explains the concept of a hunter. Like other Japanese ACT, Monster Hunter emphasizes "sneaking" output through cracks while dodging monster attacks, which is evident from cat meals:
For the old hunter who knows what to fart when he sees the monster raise his hand, the main meaning of cat rice/drink is obviously to increase the output efficiency, and the skill "cat's fire field force", which can only be obtained through cat rice/drink, plays a crucial role in it. Nicknamed "Cat Fire", this skill allows players to gain a lot of attack power when they are in blood, and it does not occupy the equipment skill grid, so speed-up players have begun to perform the restrictive level scene of barrel explosion self-masochism. However, in recent years, "Monster Hunter: World" has modified the mechanics of cat fire and cat rice, and now the big guys are sent directly to the monster's mouth - if you see your teammates bleeding at the beginning of the game when you are online, don't treat him as a rookie cute.
For Meng Xin, who can easily die of unknown AOE, the meaning of cat rice is much warmer: add a blood limit to yourself, save yourself from being slapped on the cat car by the monster, and use the term "increase the fault tolerance rate". In the cycle of eating cat rice again and again, trying to exhaust the cat car, eating the cat meal, and exhausting the cat car, meng xin's pace will become lighter and lighter, and the combo will become more and more skilled, until it successfully crusades the enemy as high as the mountain. Such an extreme sense of accomplishment may be what Cat Rice really wants to give us!
Of course, even if we don't look at the head-scratching things like blood and Buff, The Monster Hunter meal is very interesting, because all Monster Hunter players may have thought about a very serious question: What does monster meat taste like?
Maybe this is the gene of Chinese, and when I see anything, I want to study whether I can cook. However, there is a saying that I think it is common for people to want to eat balls and bird meat, and it can also be understood that some people want to taste what such a handsome creature as LanLong tastes like, but I once surfed the Internet and saw the remarks of wanting to eat poisonous dragons...
It's too much.
I think the most magical thing on the whole continent of Hailaru should be the pot.
Whether you pick a tree or a fish in the water, plan the ground, buy it in the store, or pick up a corpse... As long as you throw what you think is an ingredient into the pot, the pot will make all kinds of dishes. Even if you throw in an indescribable thing, the pot will spit out an indescribable delicate mosaic dish, and Link can really eat it.
What's more, all the pots in the whole Hailaru Continent are exactly the same in this regard, belonging to the automation standard production and belonging to the yes.
In the days when The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wilderness was first released, a group of "Sai Scholars" were working on the pot every day: it didn't matter what saved the princess from liberating the continent of Hellaru, their only goal was to unlock the correct way to make all the recipes in the game.
It's not a simple matter, as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wilderness doesn't have an electronic recipe. All the laws need to be studied by the Cecitonians themselves, and the recipes and ingredients need to be discovered by the Seychists themselves in all corners of the continent of Hellaru, and they can't even save the current recipes for the next time—the Seychologists have to record the failed recipes outside of the Nintendo Switch.
However, the effort paid off, and the Scholars finally found out how to make all 116 kinds of food, even the "unspoken rules" that were not written in the detailed description, such as "saltwater fish is more nutritious than freshwater fish" and "the more simple the dish, the more it can play the ingredients".
Thank you to the Serbologists for their hard work. Without them, I wouldn't have known link could only bring up to 60 dishes.
Of course, for most ordinary players who only want to have fun, the main value of this pot is to deal with the messy materials in the backpack, and then return some blood and then put on a Buff.
From this point of view, the pot on the continent of Helaru adds a touch of warmth: throwing apples, fish and mushrooms into the pot that you don't know when to pick up, watching the cooking animation and expecting what will eventually come up with a dish; or lighting a campfire in the cold snow-capped mountain region to make a warm and bloody skewer... It's also a bit of a spice up on an adventure.
This spirit extends even to the real world: In 2019, young New York chef Peter Abreu launched a project called "The Legend's Cookbook" on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter. From the simplest fruit stew to the most complex seafood chowder, Legendary Chef's Skill is a collection of 70 foods from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wilderness – you'll never have to drool at the NS screen again.
But then again, maybe The old Ren just wants the player to drool at NS...
princess? Dogs are not saved. It's three o'clock, and the tea is first.
Yes, people will starve to death if they do not eat, and Xiaobian is also very surprised.
After talking about the above-mentioned more well-known games, I plan to bring a little bootleg to talk about some hardcore American role-playing games that are not well known, because the food in these games also plays a crucial role.
The first is Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, or CDDA. It's a super hardcore indie game about the apocalypse that struggles to survive, with a rather exaggerated degree of freedom, realism, and richness of content.
Eating in CDDA is an extremely realistic thing to do: you can break a piece of glass in the game, then pick up the glass slag as a weapon, but at the cost of hurting the elbow; then stab a rabbit with glass slag, make a pointed wooden stick with a stick and another stone, find a bush to light a fire, and finally combine the above to make roast rabbit meat.
You may ask me why bunny rabbits are so cute why I eat rabbits, I can only say... It's true that people starve to death without eating. The entire pre-CDDA game experience revolves around the word "eat", and if you are not careful, you may starve to death due to lack of food.
The second is the relatively less hardcore but still very hardcore Atom RPG. This is an American CRPG produced by a Russian studio that tells the story of players traveling through the Russian wasteland after the nuclear war.
Nuclear Explosion RPG also has a hunger level setting, so players have to prepare a little food in their backpacks all the time when traveling on the wasteland. But just like the forgetful hunters in Monster Hunter who forgot to drink, there is a group of adventurers in "Nuclear Explosion RPG" who forget to buy food and go out on an expedition – every time, eating is as scary as playing mahjong.
Why is it said to be playing mahjong? Because you never know if this unidentified piece of meat you're holding in your hand will eat you to death, just as you never know if the next card will be fired by someone else or by someone else. If you are lucky, you can fill your stomach while the radiation dose increases, which is a small triple of self-touch; if you are unlucky, you will not be able to eat for a long time because of poisoning and begin to bleed, and finally you can only tearfully read the file, which is to be ordered by someone to be a national soldier.
Fortunately, "Nuclear Explosion RPG" later added attribute previews for all the meat, not as exciting as opening the blind box, otherwise God knows how many heroes Haojie will be embarrassed by this piece of meat...
In such an extremely realistic but materialistic game, players completely lose the freedom to decide what to eat. After all, in a game where the protagonist may starve to death at any time, eating is just testing the player's resource management level.
And in other role-playing games, if you really don't like the designer's way of eating, you can also use the "don't eat" method as the final resistance; in these immersive RPGs, you can't even exert this last resistance, because starvation will not be able to continue the game.
It's hard to say whether fans of hardcore American RPGs are playing games or being tortured by games... Or being tortured by the game is their fun.
Reversed, I am one of these jitter m pinch.
With so many examples of games, it's time to address the philosophical issues discussed at the beginning of the article. I think whether you can provide Buff or not, whether you will starve or not, the meaning of eating in the game is the same:
From the designer's point of view, eating is part of the "game reality" of this organic world, and it is also one of the best ways for designers to show you their values and aesthetics; from the player's point of view, eating can bring both numerical improvements and an indispensable sense of substitution, and allow everyone to find their own fun.
Players will become the legendary Dragon of Dojima in Dragon among Men, the shining blue star in Monster Hunter, the continent of Hellaru in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wilderness, and an ordinary person struggling to survive in the hardcore American RPG... But no matter what kind of person, you must seriously think about what to eat in the game.
At this moment, the game creates an emotional resonance that transcends all barriers, making people feel happy from the heart, and this is what the game should have meant.
I eat Golden Arch tonight, what about you?