The joy of cooking imaginary food

When I was around 13, I became obsessed with The Sims 2, the early-2000s life simulation game in which players guide their Sims from birth to death, building relationships and carrying out everyday tasks that mirror real life. The appeal of it was straightforward: having the power to make my cartoonish charges do anything my nerdy little heart desired — which was, in my case, to cook. My Sims hosted dinner parties and became celebrity chefs, set frying pans on fire and made blobby meatballs and dishes I’d never even heard of, like lobster thermidor. I loved to zoom in on the food, all funny angles and perverse shading, like someone had printed a close-up of “meat”, and then cut it out into the shape of a pork chop. I couldn’t get enough.

It was a shortlived craze, though not for lack of dedication: I stepped on the game disc one day and it shattered. And that was my last computer game — until last year, when I was introduced to Overcooked. Known by some players as “divorce kitchen” for the fights it can provoke, it’s a demented multiplayer restaurant simulation in which you and your gaming partners play chubby animal line cooks trying to complete as many tickets as possible before the clock runs down. I was instantly hooked. It distilled everything I liked about the Sims into one perfect, frenzied game: the primary-coloured dishes, oddly delicious-looking in their pixelation; the gratification of discovering then mastering a new dish; and most of all, the labour of cooking.

Food has featured in video games since at least the 1980s, when Pac-Man first chomped his way around a maze. Mario has his magic mushrooms, BurgerTime its malevolent pickle. Candy Crush is nothing but food. In 2006, Cooking Mama, a Nintendo DS cooking simulation game, became one of the genre’s first hits. Since then, we’ve seen narrative cooking games, like Venba, in which a woman reconnects with her Tamil roots through her mother’s old recipes, and cruder brand tie-ins, such as Hell’s Kitchen: The Game, or Jamie Oliver’s What’s Cooking. In some games characters even cook food that resembles the real thing, like in Final Fantasy XV, where golden, bumpy pieces of schnitzel hang off plates and the fat glistens on the surface of a stew.

But I prefer my video game food to look janky. I want spherical burgers and a baked Alaska glowing at a Sims 2 party like uranium glass. I want shrimp that’s red like a raw nail, and straw-yellow pasta covered in gobs of brown. In Overcooked and its sequel Overcooked 2, the dishes have a static 2D weirdness that I find rather charming; they suggest the idea of food and let you fill the rest in yourself. That’s if the ingredients are distinguishable at all; I always thought the noodles in Overcooked 2 were cobs of corn. I’m still not really sure when a knob of dough is a potato or an egg.

The internet is full of logs of attempts by players to make their favourite dishes from video games, from the Sims’ French toast to The Legend of Zelda’s restorative “red potion”. In one sense, these are inventive expressions of fandom, but they also seem to be a response to the strange tension at the heart of cooking games. In real life, the reward for cooking is usually eating; in Overcooked, the reward for slinging a chicken pizza through the serving window before the hot air balloon housing your kitchen tumbles to the ground is making the next pizza. This is the subversive promise cooking video games make to their consumers: work that usually produces something will produce nothing — and you’ll enjoy it.

The Overcooked games are primarily ridiculous — the goal is to defeat the main antagonist, the Ever Peckish, a meatball monster with spaghetti for arms, and a zombie horde of the “unbread”. But in toying with the pleasure of labour for the sake of labour, I think the games’ stout little chefs might be waddling around some kind of philosophy of craft. As they chop and fry and throw raw ingredients around, they gently nudge the player into the realisation that the effort of making something might bring as much joy as the end result.

There’s something sweetly affirming about the existence of these games at all, in the way they deem something as mundane as chopping a vegetable a worthy subject of entertainment. And in turn they remind me of the satisfaction to be found in real life in the smooth slicing of a courgette or the perfect flip of a frittata, the magic of watching the oil in a salad dressing or a pasta sauce emulsify before my eyes. They remind me that the act of cooking itself sometimes fills me with such pleasure that I’m not even hungry by the time I plate up a meal. They teach me that kitchen work can be a kind of play — the kind that’s much, much more fun IRL.

Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend Magazine on X and FT Weekend on Instagram