The season of Lent, which I observe, came to its usual close yesterday, and gave way to the season of Easter. In a rare confluence, the solemnity was observed on the same date in both the Julian and Gregorian calendars (or in both Eastern and Western Christendom, if you prefer). To my great regret — mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa — I wasn’t able to put together another series of meditations upon one of the Eight Virtues during Lent; my offline life was simply too busy. And even this, my customary Easter post, is coming a day late.

Now…allow me to now shift topics in a sudden, jarring fashion.

In the great debate over world interactivity in computer games, it is arguable that there is no more profound an example of a fully manipulable world than…well, almost all of Ultima 7, if one is honest. But in particular, the example of baking bread in the game stands out as a truly key example of the sort of world interactivity that the Ultima series once, almost uniquely, delivered to its players…which feature has been sorely lacking in most RPGs since and to date. The screenshots above illustrate the bread baking system in (more or less) its entirety: you open a sack of flour, “use” (that is: double-click) the opened sack of flour and spread some on a nearby table, obtain water in a bucket from a nearby well, and use the water in the bucket on the flour on the table to make dough. The dough is then placed on the ledge of a nearby oven, and turns into a loaf of bread after a couple of seconds. All of this is driven by a usecode script running in the background, and it is incredible to think that the developers at Origin even bothered to allow the came to consume the precious bytes of memory necessary for this frivolous and wholly unnecessary system to work as it did.

Because this is Ultima 7 we are talking about, after all; the game was notorious (or legendary) for its memory-intensive nature, and often required players to write custom AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files so as to boot up MS-DOS, and the game proper, in an environment where overhead memory usage was reduced as much as possible. This was a game that forced many players to fight with their own computers, tooth and nail, for every spare kilobyte of memory. And yet, this was also a game that expended quite a bit of that memory — and this in the days when games could only access 640 K of memory, mind — on driving systems that did nothing at all to contribute to or advance the plot of the game. There’s no reason to bake bread in Ultima 7; Britannia and the Fellowship do not rise and fall on the Avatar’s baking prowess.

But Origin wanted to build a game that felt real. It made sense to have a bakery in Britain. It made sense for the baker to be busy about his shop, engaged in the endless task of baking loaf after loaf of bread. It made sense to have all the ingredients of that process visible within the bakery. And it fit the design of the game to allow the players to use those ingredients in the same way as the baker, in pursuit of the same end. Because that — and hundreds of other, similarly pointless interactions that were implemented solely because the relevant parts were there — made Britannia feel real.

And so baking bread has become a kind of punchline — and, indeed, almost an argument unto itself — where world interactivity in computer games is concerned. And precious few games exist which meet this surprisingly exacting standard.

As is my wont, I see an interesting parallel here — it is entirely fitting to me, as a Christian, that the foremost example of a so-called Western RPG can have one of its most important features summarized in the act of baking bread in-game. Like as not, much of the history of the West is the history of Christendom, and much of the philosophical underpinnings of Western society are caught up in Christian philosophy. And Christianity talks about bread a lot. Especially around Easter.

Jesus is tempted by the Devil in the desert to turn stones into bread, and at the time He refuses to do so. But later, He breaks bread with his apostles — at the Last Supper — and asserts it to be His own Body (thereby both completing a lesson He had begun earlier, and instituting a practice that all Christians do well to emulate in remembrance of Him). After His resurrection, He was again revealed in the form of bread, broken and shared, with the disciples He met on the road to Emmaus…which, arguably, hearkens back to an earlier miracle He performed, in the feeding of the 5,000. There too, He broke loaves of bread.

Food — nourishment — is obviously important for all creatures; we are all of us dead without it. But there’s a difference between what is merely nutritional and what is food, I would argue. To cook well is as much art as science, and a flavourful meal is a joy second to very few things. Historic centers of Christendom — France, Spain, Italy — have also been centers of enjoyable, delightful cuisine, and continue to be to this day. And why should this not be? At many different points in the Gospels, the imagery of a banquet is used to symbolize the joy of Heaven. And the process of creating food — of creating, adjusting, and perfecting recipes — has a beautifully meditative quality to it that has animated, among other things, the breweries of many a monastery. I recall reading a story once about a college student at a Catholic university who volunteered, week after week, to bake the unleavened bread that would be used in Masses at the college; she wrote at length of her great joy and somber reflection as her hands wove together simple ingredients to create what would become the very Body of the Lord. Taking the point of her story more generally, I reflect that the act of cooking something connects us to others; there’s a beautiful, and often humble, outpouring of service in working to create a meal for family and friends, and the process brings one closer to them.

Another anecdote: the first time I met my wife’s grandparents (on her mother’s side), I did two things that more or less cemented my acceptance by them, and both of these involved cooking. In particular, I earned a great deal of respect from her grandfather by grilling him a perfectly blue-rare steak, a guilty pleasure of his that he was only rarely able to indulge. Then there is the story of how I became one of the few people who was even allowed to cook anything in my wife’s grandmother’s kitchen…because she is indeed one of those women for whom it is her kitchen. I think I’ll table telling that one for now, however…suffice it to say that my wife is still marvels at the fact, five years on, that I was ever allowed to cook anything in that kitchen.

Cooking connects us…to people, yes, and to places, situations, and experiences. Christian teaching has, for nearly two thousand years, been heavily intertwined with the symbolism of food — bread in particular, and meals in general — and to this day maintains that these things have revelatory significance. And even today, Christian philosophy is a part of the cultural foundation of the West. The symbolism — and poignance — of food persists to this day, both in the sense of its creation and in the sense of it…negation, I guess (there is, after all, a reason that “cooking disaster” reality television is so entertaining, just as there is a reason why articles such as this at once shock and inspire laughter).

So maybe it’s just me, but I find it oddly fitting — especially in this season — that the foremost example of a Western RPG, and indeed one of the most powerful examples of the computer game as a work of art, can be summarized in the fact that it allows you, its hero and protagonist, to bake bread for no reason at all, and in pursuit of no other purpose than that it is only appropriate that you be able to do so in its world, because its world is meant to seem as real as can be.

Just as there is something very real indeed waiting just behind the accidents of a thin wafer of unleavened bread.

Christos voskrese, everyone.