When Brendan Main and his wife got stuck in a slumhole apartment in an unfamiliar city with Cooking Mama as their only entertainment, they both had the same hare-brained idea: to assemble a makeshift kitchen and try their hands at a few of Mama's strangest recipes.

Cooking is time consuming, enraging and frequently dangerous. But if you have a mind for details and an obsessive focus on self-improvement, you may find the hobby a natural fit. Rob Zacny explains how gamers and cooks have more in common than you may think.

Fable 2 is a game about choices: If you rescue villagers from bandits, you'll earn a halo and a saintly glow; if you sacrifice them to a dark god instead, you'll grow horns and draw flies. But some decisions are a little more superficial. Susan Arendt recounts her time spent dieting in Albion.

Leveling up your in-game cooking skill is often as simple as gathering up some ingredients and clicking a button a couple dozen times. But Nova Barlow has more ambitious plans: to max-out her real-world cooking abilities with a series of videogame-inspired recipes.