20081111
The Battle of the Virtual Cooks - Click!
Videogames are starting to evolve from a form of entertainment into a fun learning lab. They are becoming more interactive, educational, and physical. While game maker now have integrated many of the physical and interactive attributes thanks to more advanced technology and better programming, the next step now comes to make games more educational and fun.Words like "exergaming" (exercise gaming) and "edutaiment" (educational entertainment) are starting to become quite popular as there are certainly more skills and degrees of freedom to work with.
We are already seeing this phenomenon with games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band sparking more interest in learning how to play music. (From my own personal experience, learning the piano (somewhat well), guitar (not so well, but still having a good time), and the harmonica have been fun when you find time to play them.) And the Nintendo Wii and Konami's Dance Dance Revolution have certainly been praised for the involvement of physical activies.
But how would they be applied with other skills such as mechanics (tuning a bike, repairing a car, or building a small robot), gardening (in general, or just taking care of a few house plants), or in the case of a rising videogame trends, cooking?
Videogame developers had to be smart with this genre. Though many people have critized the genre of cooking videogames like they have exergames, they've probably never have been scared of working out in a gym, playing a musical recital, or cooked a mean without using the microwave.
Learning to cook is probably one of the most important skills for any person to learn. By instinct, it is one of the fundamental survival skills that a human being must know along with how to build a fire, what plants are healthy, edible and can be grown over the length of one growing season, which speices of fish or fauna would taste good to eat, and how to tend to injuries or other medical emergencies.
Face it, eating out is expensive. Eating out at fast food can be unhealthy. And eating pre packaged foods or the same thing constantly can also be unhealthy.
So it is important to know how to cook (and to plan meals if you are on a diet) so that you can live a healthy life style, along with exercise and good hygine.
Since good hygine isn't really something a videogame should teach (as you should probably learn this on your own), and exercise (be it mental or physical) seems to be undergoing a revival in the gaming industry, cooking seems to be the next challege of the video game industry.
Enter the battle of cooking games!
The game series that seems have kicked off this genre is Cooking Mama. It's mild popularity has sparked the interest of Gordon Ramsay and Alton Brown to jump on board. (Hopefully, Rachel Ray will sit this one out.)
Cooking Mama is an outstanding series. Despite the deadpan reviews by the critics (who also gave deadpan reviews to many other exergame and cooking games), Mama has persevered. So much so she has recieve sponsorship and endorsements from a couple of food companies as have her rivals.
In fact, embeded advertising has become quite popular in video games. If advertisers do a good job (easter eggs in online games, visible advertisments), gamers become interested in their products. If advertisers do a bad job (i.e. subliminal advertising, constant berating, lame products, or annoying adverts), gamers--and consumers for that matter--are less interested. (Take a few tips from Google Adwords, madmen.) One of the most interesting product placements this year, being an election year, was the campaign of the President-elect Barack Obama, who's campaign bought ad space in virtual reality and was certainly a good talking point in terms of advancement in technology.
Mama's latest advertising has been with Nestle. (Cheat: If you can't want for the latest Mama game to come out, check out Meals.com. Although, I've traditionally been a fan of Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book.)
There are pleanty of cooking websites out their with many recipies either through interest, method, grocier, distributor, food, or culinary style. Thanks to videogames, cooking is now something to get fired up about.
Labels: cooking, food, games, Wii
posted by Bushido Hacks 11/11/2008 08:02:00 PM
