Death of Thousand Cuts, Part Two: I Hunger

by Sam Witt
May 16, 2001

Last week I talked about using the necessities of life as a way to add depth and interest to a game's world. My discussion centered on the need for sleep last week, and this week I'll talk about another must-have: food.

Well, technically, I'll talk about food and drink, but what I'm really talking about is fuel. Characters are the vehicles of the players' imaginations, and it's only fitting that we require all vehicles to burn fuel.

Now, admittedly, a lot of games misuse food. If you design your game so that players spend more time hunting down their next meal than they do chasing adventure, then you've done something wrong. Food and drink should be necessary, but they should also be background elements rather than primary concerns. Even in Horizon Station, where the lack of food is an important story element, players will not have to worry about their characters starving to death.

Food should also be fun — characters should have a wide variety of things to eat and drink, and a lot of those things should have some sort of bearing on the character eating them. Alcohol, for example, is a favorite of game designers because we can do so many interesting things to those characters that imbibe our little drinks.

More importantly, you can tie the need for food in with the need for sleep. What if food helps characters go longer without sleep? What if overeating reduces a character's stamina? By building an equation with just these two elements, you give the players new tools for character manipulation.

And you give purpose for yet another craftable item. As I discussed last week, once you put a limit on characters, the players will start trying to get around it. So you make food able to replenish limited amounts of stamina. Harder to make foods, and those that require the rare components to make, will restore more stamina. And now our world has bakers and restaurateurs.

Of course, other levels of complexity can always be added. What if characters have definite preferences for different types of food? Suppose, for example, that your character greatly enjoys bacon sandwiches, but hates tomato soup. If all she has access to is tomato soup, she won't starve, but she certainly won't eat anymore than is absolutely necessary.

With that added bit of detail, characters gain an extra level of depth, but also creates additional markets for all those cooks. With the demand for many different types of food, there will be room for a lot of cooks, each specializing in a different type of food.

And there you have it — a relatively simple way to enforce a bit of reality onto the game while simultaneously creating new avenues for character development and achievement.

Got some good recipes? Click the link below and share with the group.