Play with your Food: Enjoyable Meals, Eatable Games

Abstract

This paper offers an approach that encourages children to play with food in a creative way. Children create video-games out of food while they cook or eat. We propose the use of Inventame, an App that allows the user to focus on the creative part. He crafts his own game in the real world with his preferred physical ingredients. Then, he takes a picture of his creation, configures a few options in the App, and the picture becomes playable. After this creative process, the user can play the digital version of his game once he has eaten the real one. This paper also describes four examples that illustrate the creation of playable food from several different ingredients and with different functions and playability.