The game that I chose for the project is called ‘Cooking Fever’. The game is a point and click game as well as a role playing game. The gameplay involves the player becoming a chef in a fast food restaurant. You are given a soda dispenser, a table for laying out burger buns and a grill to cook the burger patty. In the first level you only have one of each. You start by clicking on the raw patty which moves onto the grill on being clicked. After a few seconds, you are prompted that the patty has been cooked. The player is given a few seconds to click on the patty which moves into the burger bun on being clicked. The player can serve the finished burger by clicking on it. Customers walk into the screen and let the player know what they need through speech bubbles with a picture of what they want. Once given all that they want, the customers leave. They pay according to the amount of time that it took for the player to serve them the food. The more time the player takes, the less money they earn. As the game progresses, the player gets new additions like hotdogs and more toppings for the burgers and hotdogs. The player also has the option to use the coins that they collect in every level to upgrade their equipment by reducing the cooking time and adding more cooking counters. The final objective is to finish all the levels with the highest possible score. This happens by serving the maximum number of people in the minimum amount of time. The condition for passing a level is to serve a certain number of people while also earning a minimum amount of money.

The game space is a restaurant and the player operates specifically in the kitchen. It is made to mimic reality by using sound. For instance, when the patty moves onto the grill it makes a sizzle sound. Also, when the soda is pouring into the glass, you can hear it being poured into a glass. The graphics are also very 3-dimensional which makes the elements look more realistic. However, these 3 dimensional elements are placed in a 2 dimensional space. The creators have used colours and shadows to help create the 3rd dimension of depth but they have not used the z-axis explicitly to establish depth which is an interesting point. Further, in terms of the theme, the background behind the customers in the screen is that of tables and chairs like that in a restaurant which helps establish the theme of the player being a chef in a restaurant rather than in a food truck or anywhere else in a kitchen. The game borrows aspects from the real world in terms of the procedure of cooking which helps the player get used to the steps in just one go. It is very obvious the the cooking process involves cooking the patty, putting it in the burger buns and then serving it. The game uses the same logical procedure without adding any extra and unnecessary steps which would make the player confused and maybe even frustrated.

Creating an environment where the first thing that the player sees after starting the game is pans and cooking utensils, it helps establish the fact that the role that the player will be playing will be that of a chef. The second thing that the player notices is the restaurant background which helps establish the overall environment of the game. The customers are shown walking in and out of the screen horizontally which gives the illusion of them coming into the restaurant even though this is a 2 dimensional aspect (they are only moving on the x-y axis. There is no z-axis involved).  This also helps the player to notice and make a mental note of when a new customer ‘comes in’ and to prepare the anticipated order (for instance, start grilling the burger patty if there are none cooked yet just in case the customer orders a burger so that it would take less time to serve it).

The gameplay is not bound by time directly. However there are a lot of indirect influences. The player needs to take as little time as possible to serve the dishes to get the maximum number of points. The fast-food restaurant theme of the game helps establish this concept since even in real life, the customers do not wish to wait long for their food. This is especially relevant in the case of fast food which is what this specific game is about. So it borrows the element of taking less time to ensure a happy customer from the real world to also help establish the restaurant in the fictional world of the game. It also helps establish the urgency that a chef probably feels in real life because even in that fictional world the player would not want to keep the customer waiting as that would mean less money earned which might lead to failing the level. This element of the game helps the player to also connect emotionally in a small way to a real chef through the fictional world of the game. However, one thing that I found really interesting was that the creators never show what the chef in the game actually looks like. In my opinion this also helps the player feel like they are the chef in that game world because they are not provided with a fictional character who is a part of that world to associate the job that they are performing with. The creators have enabled the players to directly relate themselves to the game world by taking away the existence of a fictional character that exists to bridge the gap between the real world and the fictional world of the game. This game enables the player to use their own imagination to bridge that gap by becoming that bridge themselves.

In conclusion I would like to say that while playing this game I felt that it borrowed a lot of elements from the real world which helped make the process of getting used to the environment of the game very easy. Even though every action required a lot of steps and each step took multiple seconds to finish, it felt very natural. Even doing multiple things simultaneously in the kitchen space felt very natural because I could instinctively understand what I have to do next for every step as I have grown used to it in the real world. At the same time, the game was able to create its own fictional world and characters with the player being given the chance to bridge the gap between reality and fiction on their own without help from a fictional character to represent the real world player in the game.