The Secret to Success in Business is No Bottom Line -- Cook, Serve, Delicious!

Cook, Serve, Delicious! is one of the more mechanically complex of the extant games in the time management sim genre. The premise is pretty simple: you are the new owner of the run-down in-house restaurant in an office tower, and must make your eatery a success by serving customers delicious food cooked to perfection. First you must purchase foods and build an appealing menu which balances different types of foods with different attributes to generate positive 'buzz' which will attract diners. As  each day rolls by, customers will order food which you must prepare by following a set of instructions on the keyboard and/or mouse. Time flies by at a furious clip, customers crowd in during the lunch and dinner rushes, and you must deftly fill orders with perfect precision before your customers leave, angry at the wait, while juggling various chores to keep the restaurant clean and sanitary. There are a few other bells and whistles -- betting, cooking challenges, health inspections -- but that's the heart of it. Pretty standard stuff, although the menu design aspect and the wide variety of foods and recipes make for a particularly challenging experience.

What struck me as I played this game is the way that, like most of its genre, it abstracts away certain aspects of the process of owning and running a restaurant to focus on ... perhaps not the most fun parts of the job. I'm not sure most restaurant owners are particularly enamored of frantic rush hours or struggling to pass health inspections. But these games are trying to provide a certain experience which would be bogged down by such somewhat boring details as budgeting and crunching accounts, which themselves are primarily or exclusively the province of completely different game genres. So in Cook, Serve, Delicious! there are literally no costs to pay in running the restaurant. You must make one-time payments to get menu items and time-saving or traffic-enhancing equipment, but once you've paid for your recipe you receive "a surplus" of ingredients -- enough to last you literally forever. No need to calculate the production cost and profit margin of each item, keep enough ingredients in stock or account for spoilage, no rent to pay or even any need to take home money for your own subsistence; every order you fill is basically pure profit. If you fulfill the goals necessary to raise your star rating, the owners of the tower will even remodel your restaurant for free! No need to take on debt in a gamble to increase your customer appeal.

I certainly understand, from a game design perspective, why this choice was made. People who are playing a time management sim don't necessarily want to manage a bunch of spreadsheets or dick around with the prices and inventory of their food; they just want to challenge themselves to quickly complete tasks and actively manage incoming information. But what I find fascinating is the picture that this presents of entrepreneurship. The implication is that success as a small business owner is simply a matter of plugging away, doing your job and providing the best service you can, and watching the cash roll in. Occasionally you might need to make a major purchase, but going into the red and eventually going bankrupt is just not an option. As long as you keep your head down and satisfy your customers, things will go great. In reality, 9 out of 10 small businesses fail, and not necessarily due to poor customer service; sometimes you just can't compete in a saturated market or against established players with more resources, economies of scale, and political connections on their side. And the restaurant business is particularly harsh and unforgiving; profit margins are razor thin and competition is a shark tank. One of the core assumptions of capitalism is that business owners, especially small business or startup owners, are entitled to the profits of their enterprise because they take risks. A worker is selling a commodity, their labour, and gets a day's pay for a day's work; entrepreneurs are risking their capital assets on an uncertain venture which may fail and take all of their money with it. No risk, no reward. In Cook, Serve, Delicious! there's no possibility of failure, only pure upside, and this kind of serves as a propagandistic message that in capitalist enterprise, everyone wins. Just work hard, provide excellent customer service, and obey the whims of government in the form of the health inspector, and you too can build your shabby little cafeteria into a five-star restaurant and become a celebrity chef who competes on the Iron Cook show. A little elbow grease is all it takes. The waste of resources and ruined lives represented by the constant failure of risky businesses does not exist.

Of course there is one more element of the game that I have not yet mentioned: the Buzz. This mechanic could be said to represent something of the risky nature of running a successful restaurant. Like a real business, your cafeteria lives and dies on word of mouth. Every day you get a buzz factor, which is affected by active and balanced menu management and by the ratio of perfect orders to angry customers during the previous day. More buzz, more customers through the door; bad service and bad food, less traffic, right? But as I played the game up to the two-star level, as my buzz grew and grew through the effects of my own pretty good play, I didn't really see much difference. If buzz had an effect, it was subtle. So I decided to experiment and try to break the game. I tanked my buzz through poor menu design, filling my menu with fatty foods and letting stale items rot, and by deliberately screwing up every order and leaving cleaning tasks unfinished. It worked; it only took one bad day to go down to 0% buzz, and I easily kept it there the next day. I was expecting that my customer throughput would nosedive, but that I would still maintain a trickle of business to get me back on my feet. But the poor reviews didn't seem to have any effect on my traffic at all. The rush hours were still crazy busy, and even in between rushes, I still got the steady drip of orders coming in. External sources claim that buzz does make a difference, but if so, it wasn't one I was capable of detecting. The difference between 50% buzz and 0% was absolutely negligible. Not only is it impossible to fail; it's impossible to even feel like you're failing.

One final, somewhat incidental comment: because of the launch of the sequel, Cook, Serve, Delicious 2!!, the daily challenges in the game's Battle Kitchen mode have stopped coming; as is often the case when a new product hits video game storefronts, content updates for the old game have gone the way of your restaurant in the plotline of the new game. According to Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2!!'s store description, your original restaurant went under because the owners of the office tower it occupied were embezzling funds. So there is at least one thing that can make a business in the Cook, Serve, Delicious! extended universe fail: economic forces completely beyond your control.

Prologue -- Why This Blog Exists

I decided to start this blog for three primary reasons:

1. I have over 1000 games on Steam and GOG combined, as well as a shelf full of board games and a massive collection of tabletop RPG PDFs, most of which I have never played, and sunk cost fallacy dictates I must do something productive with them or have wasted my investment.
2. I just got a nice new gaming computer which can run some of the more resource-intensive titles.
3. Gaming as an artistic medium, while as old as human history, has undergone an unprecedented evolutionary leap and a massive increase in innovation and variety over just a few decades thanks to the invention of the computer and mass manufacturing and merchandising. Along with the development of games as a flourishing form of popular art and culture, there has been an attendant blossoming of the fields of game studies, ludology, and artistic game critique. It's a very exciting time to be talking about games in an academic context, and I want in on the action!

I leave it as an exercise for the reader which factor most influenced my decision.

To be serious, this is a project I have been considering starting for some time. The intention of this blog, A Winner Is You, is to look at modern video and tabletop games in a sociological and philosophical context. I hope to unpack a bit about what these games are trying to communicate, and what they may unintentionally communicate, about the world. I will definitely be looking at games from a narrative perspective, but I am particularly interested in talking about the way in which the mechanical aspects of games inform the worldview that is being communicated. Game mechanics are at base a way of illuminating and simulating a certain kind of system or process, whether that system is intended to be realistic, fanciful, or purely abstract, and the choice of what kind of system is simulated and why has certain implications that I feel it would be valuable to try and explore.

Why am I qualified, if qualified is not too strong a term, to perform the kind of work I intend to accomplish here? First, I have a certain degree of academic training. Although I do not have a background in ludology or game studies (few do, as only sparsely do academic opportunities for studying these subjects yet exist), I do have a Bachelor of Arts and Sciences in Environment and Society from an accredited Canadian university. My primary area of study, which I undertook mainly for the (futile) prospect of career advancement, was in geography, a mix of both human and physical. However, I did dedicate considerable time in my university career to obtaining a minor in philosophy, as well as study of sociology and political science, which are all areas that hold an intellectual fascination for me beyond any prospect of technical of material advancement, and it was these studies that I found the most rewarding.

Second, I have continued studies in these subjects, as well as some study of ludology, on an informal basis throughout my life and particularly in recent years. I have read a number of important texts in the field of game studies and kept up to some degree with the academic literature, although I hardly consider myself an expert in the subject; I am definitely somewhat of a dilettante in this respect, but I flatter myself that I am able to talk about these subjects with at least an educated layman's competence. I strongly feel that informed and rational consideration of all areas of human endeavour is essential to the creation of well-functioning societies, and we live in an age where this kind of knowledge building and discourse is more accessible to the populace as a whole than at any other time in human history, and I will be damned if I do not take full advantage of this fact. I hope to come at my subject from a variety of perspectives, although with full acknowledgement that my personal values and goals will inevitably colour the results, so if you disagree with me regarding anything I say in these blog posts I welcome healthy, reasonable, and informed discussion. That being said, trolls will get the banhammer with extreme prejudice.

Finally, in my personal life I have been an avid gamer since as long as I can remember. Some of my most cherished childhood memories are of playing the new and exciting medium of computer games, first on a Commodore VIC-20, then on a Coleco Adam computer with a built-in ColecoVision console, then on an NES, a Super Nintendo, and a number of IBM-compatible PCs. During High School, I participated in tabletop role-playing, particularly in D&D, Shadowrun, and Rifts, completed several lengthy JRPGs, and got into the then new and exciting world of Magic: The Gathering, though I later dropped that particular hobby due to the expense and only recently have rediscovered my love of the game through MTG Arena (which, do not fret, is not a sacred cow and will receive an analysis in due course). I also dabbled in computer game development, though I ultimately found that the detail-oriented nature requisite for coding was not my strong suit. This love of and fascination with games has continued throughout my life, most recently manifesting in a growing involvement with the tabletop gaming scene and embarking on the design of my own tabletop games and the creation of a small game company, Last Minute Panic Games, with a view to one day publishing them. I would hardly call myself a hardcore gamer, especially as the time commitments of adult life have seriously impacted the time I have to dedicate to gitting gud at games, but I have a sincere love of the art form that leads me to want to explore it in its fullest depth.

Before we end today's preamble, I would like to talk about a few things that this blog is not. This is not the place to come for game reviews, let's plays, or how-tos. Although I may mention whether I enjoy certain games and why, detailed reviews are not my intention. There are already a wealth of resources out there if you are looking for help in deciding whether a game is right for your collection. I myself purchased most of my non-physical games from various bundle deals, and as such I have a wide variety of genres, styles, and levels of quality available for research; unless the game is just an abysmal experience and I can't stand playing it, I will be conducting these explorations without reference to perceived quality or fun factor.

You should also not expect academic level-discourse from this blog. As I mentioned, I am an educated layman, not a professional academic. This is intended to be merely a repository for my impressions and ideas, as well as hopefully a platform for discussion and debate, not the final word on the subject. I am looking forward to possibly doing a Master's degree involving these subjects some time in the future, and if I do the quality of my analysis will no doubt improve, but until then you are stuck with the meandering peregrinations of a person with a familiarity with the main ideas of the disciplines I am touching on, and some knowledge of the published literature, but not rigorous research or an impeccable working-out of ideas. I will also be basing my approach to the subject primarily on my experience of the gameplay itself, without a lot of reference to outside sources.

Finally, although I may be talking about the relationship of things like business models and design philosophies to the wider industry, I will not be engaging in games journalism, and though I certainly will take the historical context of certain older games or games with complex histories into account, I will not be engaging in games history. Again, other sources do this better than I can, and I will be trying to stick to a particular niche.

The schedule for this project may be erratic, as I have both a day job and a number of other projects on the go, and don't have a lot of time or energy either for gaming or for writing. I would like to make a tentative commitment to an article every two weeks, though I promise nothing concrete. I will post about a game when I feel I have played it enough to form a reasonable impression of what message it seems to be putting out into the world, and that may take longer for some games than others, although I will try to interleave my consideration of lengthier and more skill-intensive titles with shorter and more casual experiences.

Last but not least, I would like to thank a few of my influences and encouragements in my journey toward starting this project: The Digital Antiquarian, The Gaming Historian, Game Makers' Toolkit, Extra Credits, Innuendo Studios, Folding Ideas, Feminist Frequency, the Ludology podcast, Game Studies Journal, and of course, thank God for Jim Sterling.

Now let's play (and have in-depth discussions about the philosophical and sociological implications of) some games!