Food, Glorious Food

A seemingly minor facet of most games is a necessity for sustaining us in real life: food. Most games have a hunger system, and though we all may find a welcome break in the games that don’t require characters to eat, it’s not terribly realistic if your character doesn’t have to stop for food and water once in a while.

Because food becomes just another piece of equipment vital for survival in the games that have hunger systems, it’s easy to overlook the value of food types themselves in maintaining a good game theme.

Here are some examples of food in MU*s, and how it enhances—or detracts from—each game:

In Avalon, an old game that I’ve played plenty in my day, there’s one piece of food that’s barely ever used, but is an interesting idea. They have a boiled sweet (i.e. candy) that provides very little nutrition, but costs next to nothing to create, and sells very cheaply. The trick is, only novices (those new to the game) can eat these sweets; older characters find them "too sweet." So the coders have provided a type of food that is affordable for newer players, but that older players won’t abuse by buying up loads and satiating themselves for much less money than a proper meal. It’s a good concept!

Discworld MUD, a hilarious and unbelievably well-developed game based on Terry Pratchett’s novels, has restaurants where you can "dine out." Particularly in the cosmopolitan areas, you can visit a huge range of restaurants for virtually any type of cuisine. Each place has a "menu." It’s worth noting that this MUD doesn’t have a hunger system; players never actually need to eat, but there are tons of options should they choose so to do. It’s a wonderful tool for roleplay, particularly of the quirky Pratchett-esque variety!

Orone has a neat cooking system, whereby players can train their professional "cooking" skill and specialise in the creation of foodstuffs. Raw ingredients are available through growth or in the market via trade, and there are a hefty number of types of food that can be created. It has proven to be a good way to get players involved in the hunger & food systems without just having them pop ‘round to the closest shop or NPC to get a bite to eat, or casting a "food spell"...

...Which brings me to my biggest pet peeve about food in MU*s, the "create food" spell. We’ve all seen it, it’s stock in tons of games out there, and it really irks me. That’s just a personal thing, though, I have a hard time accepting the idea of anyone with basic magic abilities being able to summon forth food from thin air. The very fact that it exists in so many games automatically detracts from any game’s atmosphere, because they all start to look like carbon copies, to me.

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