For the past few months I’ve been making an honest effort to learn how to cook. Though my first few efforts were mediocre at best, I’ve definitely stepped up my game. Though I am far from an Iron Chef, it feels liberating to know that I’m in a place now where I can actually cook real food. One day, I hope that I’m good enough as a chef that I can make a decent meal on the fly with whatever ingredients and cooking tools I have at my disposal.
Though cooking can be a time-intensive process, that hasn’t bogged down my enjoyment of the process, which I enjoy quite a bit. Why? Oddly, I’ve been able to draw a connection between my enjoyment of cooking and enjoyment of video games.
In my early experiences with cooking, I’ve pretty much had to learn everything from scratch. I didn’t understand how to prepare any of the food, how to cook any food or how to use most of the utensils you’d find in the average kitchen. While I’m leveraging cook books and the advice of my girlfriend and mom to help me with specific recipes, I’m also making mental notes about the general ‘mechanics’ of cooking. Beyond following instructions by the book, I want to gain a core understanding of how to cook, so that I can improvise with any mix of ingredients and cooking tools to make something that tastes delicious. Once I have that understanding down, I can let my creativity do the rest.
My enjoyment of learning the mechanics of cooking is a lot like the excitement I get around learning the mechanics of a game. I’ll never forget the joy of learning the fundamentals of Super Mario Bros. on the NES. The game’s mechanics dictated things like the fact that you move to the right, you can jump varying distances based on whether or not you were running and that there were certain power-ups that enhanced your abilities. Once you understood those mechanics, you could get creative in your use of them. The most classic example of this has to be the warp zone in World 1-2. If you hadn’t heard through the grapevine how to find it, it could have very well been something you found on your own by getting creative with the game’s core mechanics.
For me, the sensation I feel when I’m figuring out new combos in Street Fighter X Tekken is the same one I feel when I’m learning, finding, or making up new ways to cook chicken, as that sense of exploring a set of mechanics is essentially the same thing. It’s a weird perspective to look at things, but it’s neat to be able to draw parallels between two very different interests.
Can you draw any sort of similar correlations between video games and other interests you may have? I’d love to hear your connections in the comments!
In Third Person 