Food practices and representations in gamer culture

Theories and ethnographies of an emerging field

Abstract

The relationships between food and video games have been approached mostly from biomedical perspectives, producing a stereotypical image that associates sedentary lifestyles, junk food, and gamer culture. Emerging research in the social sciences provides a more complex and diverse picture of dietary practices and connections in this cultural context. This article presents a narrative review with the aim of delimiting the field of study of food practices in gamer culture, offering an overview of published approaches as well as new lines of inquiry. Various elements discussed in existing work are addressed, such as the functions of food in video game mechanics and the limitations of current studies, the emergence of cooking games as a genre and the debates surrounding domestic labor, the issue of culinary heritage, the Eurocentric bias of many cooking games, and the responses currently being developed within the industry. Furthermore, attention must be paid to the interpretation of fan practices, ranging from community rituals to intermedial productions such as cookbooks and online discussions, which reconfigure the meanings of food beyond the screen. This article argues that the relationships between food and video games constitute a cultural space where social, identity-based, symbolic, and affective dynamics intersect, underscoring the need to further investigate their history and to complicate hegemonic and stereotypical discourses that represent only a small fragment of a much denser and more complex narrative.