Play With Your Food

  When I refuse to come down to dinner or go out on a walk, my brother knows there’s only one explanation. I’m probably sitting in my room somewhere, staring at a bright screen. I see futuristic robots, imaginary creatures, and a spaceship defying physics. There are at least two dozen other players in my field of vision, the chat box filled with back-and-forth opinions about the new cooking update. 

There’s one thing that comforts me more than food: video games. My first experience with a game was early, and is still clear in my mind. Tom sat in front of our dad’s computer with me, opening up an MMO called Seer. He made me my very own account.

“Use these keys to move,” he instructed patiently, “you can click here to talk to this old guy for a quest.”

After a few days I’d already made all the possible recipes to feed my fairy pets during battles. They were pixelated, nothing like the graphics in modern games, but I could just barely make out a fluffy white ball filled with some sort of meat and a gnarly green mush in a royal purple bowl. I’m not sure how my team enjoyed eating those. Each time I played Seer, the idea of traversing these sci-fi worlds made me imagine just a little more: of making hundreds of friends, of training little cartoon monsters, of traveling through outer space.

I did travel through space soon after. When I was five years old and absolutely ignorant of the English language, we moved to Westport. That summer, while my parents house-hunted, we stayed at their friends’ home. There, we had some of our usual Chinese cuisine, but it was combined with unfamiliar American components. Fried rice with fried chicken, takeout pizza and stir-fried noodles. They may have cooked delicious food for us, but their sons showed us Minecraft.

Mojang, the game’s developer, had a tagline for this game: “Build. Explore.” For me, this would’ve been more like “Cook. Create.” Every time I clicked Create New World, instead of speed-running a full diamond set or reaching The End, my first inclination was to achieve every single blocky recipe. A humble cooked pork chop became an impressive beacon relatively quickly. Through the years of restarting this tedious task, I enlisted many to join my repetitive journey starting new worlds. In one of these worlds, I started a village with my best friend and we tried to make a YouTube series about it. In another, I spent hundreds of hours building a theme park. A game I started playing with my brother (and “brothers”) became a game I played with friends from Westport and eventually around the world in Shanghai.

This journey continued as I moved back there. I was now one of the most proficient in English at my new international school. Through that plane ride across the world, through moving into a metropolitan apartment where we regularly ordered delivery, I was lost as I traversed this other world I’d long forgotten. Three things made me feel at home: food, talking to my brother, and stepping back into more “other” worlds.