Good Eats

Wizards and Weight Watchers

My wiser self smiles at how cheekily Fable 2 handles food, but my other self, the one that's slightly foolish and maybe just a bit sullen, feels victimized. I've been indiscriminately eating my way through games for decades, and now I'm expected to pay attention to calorie content? When I'm a whisker's breadth away from pushing up daisies, I'm supposed to pause and reflect on the nutritional value of my healing options? Am I really being asked to pay attention to the food pyramid while I'm out saving the world? Seriously?

Only if you want your character to stay slim and trim comes the swift and knowing reply from my know-it-all conscience. Stop giving in to pangs of digital vanity, and you can eat whatever you want without pause or regret. And therein lies the rub: I'm not being forced to do anything. I can still be an all-powerful hero, rich beyond measure, with a spouse in every town; I can, in fact, be a champion in every single way the game measures success. I'll just be fat. If I can't live with that, well, it's not the game's fault, now is it?

Maybe not Fable 2's fault, no, but perhaps just about every other game that's featured a hero with abs of steel and lungs of iron. Part of the fantasy - that one where you're strong enough, clever enough and brave enough to save the day - is that you're also perfect, and fair or not, we've been taught that "perfect" means having a hyper-idealized body. Perhaps I should applaud Fable 2 for doing its part to remind me that champions can come in any size or shape and that heroism knows no weight limit. I certainly don't hold people in real life to the same standards I do my avatars.

But that's the whole point: Videogames aren't supposed to be real life. They exist to let us escape the bonds of normal existence and be something more, something better than what we really are. And yet here I am taking a break from adventuring to uphold the strict requirements of my bloody diet. Something, somewhere, has gone awry.

Games are escapism, certainly, but some aspects of real life are easier to escape than others. Not that I have time to ponder the deeper implications of that conundrum just now. The vendor has finally shown up, the vegetable stall is open, and I have celery to eat.

Susan Arendt has been known to bake some seriously delicious lemon macadamia cookies in between bouts of videogame adventuring.