I found myself thinking a lot about eating while playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution. In the game, you play a cybernetically-enhanced corporate enforcer who has all these super powers like being able to punch through walls, skewer hired goons upon your snickety-snick arm blades, crush people under vending machines, and excrete explosives from every pore. But your energy for these abilities is only partially rechargeable, and your only method of fully recharging your batteries is to eat.
So you have to eat a lot of energy bars. You can’t eat anything else. Only the energy bars. They come in single units, in wholesale-size multipacks, and in those big plastic jars like you see in health food shops for protein milkshakes. But this kind of eating is not really about eating at all. The act of eating itself never comes into it. There’s not even the courteous ‘munching’ sound effect that some games throw in when you ‘use’ a food item. We are not interested in the actual time or effort one would have to expend in consuming a whole jar of powdered energy stuff (though I couldn’t help but picture my cybernetic alter-ego tucking into it a handful at a time while firmly wedged within an air vent).
Games have been about eating and running and killing since Pac-Man. Bioshock had a fairly typical approach to the food thing: as is fast becoming rather old-fashioned, you were given a red health bar and a blue bar for your EVE levels (the mana-like stuff which powers your supernatural abilities). Eating crisps and cakes raised your health, drinking alcohol raised your health but lowered your EVE (and made you a little drunk), and smoking cigarettes raised your EVE but lowered your health. On one hand, this was partly just a way of branding powerups that once would have been portrayed as generic gold rings or magic mushrooms. Yet the effort that’s been put into making these items part of a world ought not to be written off as pointless frippery.
Games are also about sorting through stuff, and part of being good at any game involves figuring out what is relevant and what is a novelty. Game food is in the odd position of being both relevant and novelty. Often, in any given room, there will be more interactive objects than are useful to the player or necessary to advance the game: you can open up drawers, move the refrigerator around, turn the lights and water taps on and off, perhaps even read books or rifle through the correspondence of the person in whose room you happen to be (almost always illegitimately – otherwise where would be the fun?). Eating is only one part of all this semi-relevant stuff. While it hardly evokes much realism, it does provide a kind of tactile feedback: in noticing it, it makes us feel like the game has noticed us.
This kind of thing has been going on at least since Duke Nukem 3D allowed you to proffer cash to willing strippers for a glimpse of some pixellated nipple. Perhaps it peaked in silliness with GTA San Andreas, in which (as a good American consumer and serial killer) you could choose from several different varieties of fast food which not only restored your health but made you slow down and put on weight if you ate too much. In practice, this functioned like much else in that game: an amusing novelty the first time around, but otherwise a pointless distraction from the fact that its ridiculously huge sandbox world was mostly very dull. And yet when I played San Andreas I found myself keen to try out every little stupid detail at least once before I uninstalled it in disgust and frustration.
There’s an interesting distinction to be made here between the competing tendencies of so-called ‘casual’ games and ‘serious’ games like Deus Ex. Many casual games allocate the player a certain quantity of ‘energy’ within a given period which they can use to play as they wish – after the energy is depleted, the options are usually to wait in real time and play again later, or to gain further energy by either performing some kind of social action within the game (e.g. recommending it to a friend on facebook), or to pay the developer to let them play some more.
Conversely, Serious games don’t want you to go anywhere. They’ve got you right where they want you, and they do all they can to keep the player playing continuously. Not only do they aim to make it easy for you to settle into a chair and play for hours, it’s very difficult to play a game like DE:HR for anything less than half an hour because progress requires a certain amount of forethought, exploration, experimentation and trial and error. The relatively recent trope in games for regenerating health and a cover system mean that the player is rarely held back by the feeling that they are too weak to progress any further. The game only stops if you die, and even then the frequency of the modern autosave means you needn’t even have to retrace your steps very far.
Oddly, this means that you don’t actually need to eat the energy bars in Deus Ex at all. They make certain situations easier, but most of your encounters are solved through careful gameplay choices rather than simply letting rip with your superpowers every so often. In fact, so open is the game to alternative methods of conflict resolution (with the exception of those dreadful much-discussed boss battles) that I wonder if any non-quest item in the game could really be considered essential to its completion. You could say I didn’t eat because I was hungry; I ate because it made me feel better about myself.
