"Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are."
— Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
If you want to understand a group of humans — where they live, how they speak, what they value, how they use their time or what they are proud of, a good place to start is with how they eat.
We'd like to place the deep bond between food and culture at the heart of an interactive experience: What can you learn from a group of people, based on what they eat?
Tell Me What You Eat is an in-development game where players are invited to discover human cultures living in a fictional world, using their cooking practices as a red thread. If I tell you how they prepare food, can you piece together their history, where they lived, how they spoke, what they loved?
We intend to make Tell Me What You Eat a sort of generative detective game: each time you replay it, the world you explore will be recreated anew. New landmaps, new plants, new populations, new historical events — that will in turn, influence the recipes of this world. You might want to cook one of these recipes yourself, or try to imagine with your friends which kind of world exist around them.
I. Recipe-ography — Recipes of the world
The first prototype of the project, The Recipe-ography Machine, was built as part of a game development module at the Doctoral Centre for Intelligence in Games & Games Intelligence, in 2021.
We combined simple generative systems together to create the first iteration of a fictional interactive cookbook. Each culture spreads on the world map and creates recipes with ingredients available to them within their borders.
Team: Olliver Withington, Amy Smith, Younès Rabii
We tried to cook our interpretation of one the new recipes generated within Recipe-ography.
We gathered ingredients that tasted like the fantasy plants in Recipe-ography, and tried to follow the cooking instructions — as well as being creative within the constraints the recipe provided.
The event was shared live on Twitter with the audience reacting to our recreation of the recipe, giving their own suggestions and interpretations as we went.
On other platforms like Reddit, people commented about how it inspired them to try it themselves.
By Younès Rabii
III. Lango Guesso
« When civilizations explored the world around them, they gave names from their own tongue to each region. Can you guess where their homeland is, based on this atlas alone? »
Lango Guesso is a game jam prototype that aims to playtest only one of the deduction mechanics that would emerge in Tell Me What You Eat. Each population has a unique language, and as they explore the world, they give names from their languages to the regions. Here we reverse the map generation process to make it a deduction game: Can you guess where those populations are located, based on the names of each region?
Prototyped during the IGGI Game Jam 2022 by Younès Rabii.
Recipe-ography: Generating Fictional Recipes From the Ground Up
Where we discussed the motivations for the first prototype, its architecture, its reception and emerging phenomena and its possible future. At the IGGI conference 2021.