2024/06/23

Alice Bucknell Samples Food in Videogames, Revealing Baked-in Social Commentary

“The game’s grotesque, hyper-synthetic eats are a critique of a near-future capitalist consumer culture that places next to no value on nutrition. [The] plastic-texture pizzas are so unappetising they became a point of gamer outcry.”
– Artist and writer Alice Bucknell, examining videogame worlds, here Cyperpunk 2077 (2020), as rich containers for mapping food’s relationship with human and nonhuman labour, ecological precarity, identity, grief, and care. “They prompt deeper, if weirder, understandings of the food systems we are a part of, extract from, and ultimately, must return to.”
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