You Can’t Cook: The burnt out cooking analogy of tabletop games.
Within my first couple of weeks on bluesky I saw Nael Fox (sfxprb.bsky.social) cut up food stuff into miniature props and weapons into little lego-looking weapons. This interested me for two reasons. For one, I was seeing the unbridled joy of someone creating a thing, and secondly, I was relieved to see a seemingly experienced cook talk about tabletop games.
There is a bugbear within table top games where poster-critics compare tabletop gaming to the act of cooking, which only leads me to believe those people cannot and do not actually cook. The basic argument goes that games, like recipes, have rules and procedures to follow to create an intended experience. Straying from the recipe might lead you to an undesired result, which is ultimately your own fault for even trying. That may well be true for anything you piece together following a set of instructions, like an office chair or a chia pet. Yet you might never learn the fundamentals of cooking if you only ever follow recipes.
When I first moved to Chicago after graduating college, I would make meals of rice, beans, and pineapple chunks in tomato paste and spices. I thought this dish was a secret I had just uncovered, some new recipe no one had ever before assembled. As I was typing this, I googled those three main ingredients, producing a plethora of recipes I had never seen before just now. So, (1), my dumb little dish wasn’t anything new, and (2), whatever pursuit I had in flavor profile and combinations was pursued by others long before me. This is a comfort to discover! Because it is through experimentation that we determine what constitutes the experience we desire.
When quarantine hit the US in 2020, my own cooking skills began to improve. I cooked meals for my roommates, trying new ingredients and ways to prepare them. I did indeed follow recipes, but only up to the point where I felt confident enough to experiment further with new tastes. At some point, following the recipe seemed pointless, cowardly even. This coincided with my own curiosity and further exploration into the indie sphere of tabletop games. Fancy that.
Let’s even take a look at recipes themselves, seeming as there are a dime a dozen recipes for nearly each dish you can think of. Any one of these recipes featured contains a section that we all skip over stressing the personal relationship that said recipe has with the writer. And each recipe itself might feature different measurements or methods, additions, subtractions, or replacements for any number of ingredients. What are these if not “house rules”?
Yet what happens when you are left without a recipe to follow? When you lack any semblance of ingredients and only possess seemingly diametrical building blocks? Making a meal from what’s in your fridge and cabinets is akin to making a dungeon with just a scrap paper of ideas. You will find the structure as long as you have the confidence to work through it.
Let me be honest on both fronts: you will eat some shit meals and you will play some shit games. However, any bad experience is no reason to quit the pursuit in its entirety. One of the main fundamentals of cooking is improvisation, correcting courses on the fly and making substitutions to missteps. After the taste test you can judge what is overbearing or lacking, where the salt is needed.
Ask yourself: are you interested in the recipe or are you interested in the meal? Personally, I want to eat the meal. More so, I want to eat that meal with my friends. You can give the recipe freely and whenever (if you’re not stingy), but the meal is the singular point of sensation we are all experiencing at the given moment, like any other shared activity. Cold pizza over the sink does well in a pinch.
So, with your knowledge and experience, what are you cooking? It is not entirely unlike the riddle of steel. There is only so much reliance on methods or tools before your own skills are developed through experimentation. It is the transmutation of the inedible into the edible.