Markup View

Author: NotOnAnyFlatbread

Aug 1st 2017 at 5:32:11 PM

^ I agree. As currently defined, this seems to just be a list of games/media where a "large" variety of food appears, without any clear link beyond "The developers decided to put in a bunch of food" (nor a clear definition of "large"). Is including 1000 types of food more meaningful and/or meaningfully distinct from, e.g., 1000 types of gemstones or 1000 types of potion or 1000 types of songbird in the background scenery? Especially if many/most of the 1000 types of whatever have no ''functional'' difference?

The lack of a narrative purpose to the many food types is likely to lead to ZeroContextExample-like entries, i.e., just a list of games and associated lists of food types. If there's no other criteria for the trope other than game plus "large" number of food varieties, then the examples are inherently going to be pretty content-free--what would that contribute to the wiki?

In addition, I would argue that, absent other context or meaning, having a variety of food is far more "chairsy" than having a large variety of many other in-game items. In RealLife, people eat a wide variety and food is a big part of people's lives. As a result, most game developers could probably come up with enough material for a FoodKitchenSink just by having the characters eat the same food the developer's eat in their daily lives, whereas having a similar variety of purely fictional items (e.g., potions or ray guns) would require significantly more invention on the part of the writers. Yes, it's an artistic choice to have the characters eat a lot of different foods, but not necessarily any more so than deciding to, e.g., have a lot of different colors of clothing on the NPCs. Both ''could'' have meaning, or they could just be to make it "prettier" and more interesting to look at.

Finally, the current descriptions contains some apparent self-contradictions that should be resolved before any attempt to launch:
"For this trope, it's not enough to have one kind of food, a few kinds, or even an entire group, such as fruits or vegetables, function as items. There has to be an entire variety of food that has a common role for the player. Not to say that they must all do the same thing; they could be all items that recover different amounts of health or have different functions altogether."

"[E]ntire variety of food" implies covering the breadth of a specific category of food, but it explicitly doesn't count to have merely "an entire group of food"--whatever the intended distinction is should be clarified. I assume "entire variety of food" was intended to mean something closer to "huge variety of food," but that is very vague and subjective as a criterion.
First saying that the variety of food "has a common role for the player" and then immediately saying "Not to say that they must all do the same thing; they could be all items that recover different amounts of health or have different functions altogether" makes no sense. Having a "common role" and having "different functions altogether" are mutually exclusive concepts.