By Haritha Govind

You pick up your game controller and settle down in front of the screen to learn about South Indian family recipes. What you don’t realize is that you are about to be pulled into the emotionally charged world of Venba and her family in Canada, complete with the financial, cultural, and generational hardships and joys that are part of the immigrant experience. While cooking challenges have been a mainstay of video gaming, Venba presents itself almost like a composite ethnography where food means something more than simply cooking, serving, and eating. It introduces the player to a complicated network of what it means to be an immigrant and connect with your home culture through food (Waszkiewicz 2022).

As you play through the game, you are introduced to Venba and her husband Paavalan, who have moved to Canada from South India. Amidst the trials and tribulations of fitting into a new country and their son Kavin being born, you are taught how to make traditional Tamilian and South Indian dishes like idli (steamed rice and lentil cakes), biryani (layered rice and meat dish), dosa (fermented rice and lentil crepe), and murukku (crispy lentil and flour snack). All the recipes displayed to you are from Venba’s mother’s cookbook, with smudged and concealed text, inviting you to learn as you go.

There is a section in the video game where Venba asks a young Kavin what he would like to eat, and he requests a pizza with lots of cheese. In an attempt to introduce Kavin to more traditional Tamilian foods, she suggests they make a dish called puttu. At first, Kavin is not convinced, but when Venba explains that the dish reminds her of a rocket, he is excited. You are then whisked to the kitchen to cook puttu, using the smudged family cookbook and ingredients of rice, water, and coconut. This single narrative and cooking section represents the intergenerational struggle between preserving Tamilian culture and integrating into Canadian society. It forces you to think about more than the recipe and consider how foods come to be synonymous with identity in many immigrants’ lives. 

Towards the end of the game, you see adult Kavin opening his mother’s cookbook to feel connected to his culture and childhood. He decides to make nattu kozhi kulambu (spicy country chicken curry/soup) and fumbles his way through the recipe along with you. This section of the game allows you to step into the shoes of a second-generation Tamilian in Canada and understand the complicated connection between culture and identity. 

Venba creates a cozy atmosphere for its players, with lively Tamil music in the background, sounds of cooking, and vibrant aesthetic ingredients and dishes. The ingredients and foods are designed in an abstract style but are instantly recognizable if you are familiar with them. The cloves, cardamom, bay leaves, and fennel seeds in the biryani cooking section are stylistic yet iconic. Waszkiewicz has suggested that cozy or ludic games like Venba encourage the player to approach the game and recipes with respect and curiosity, pulling them into an unfamiliar culture (2022). The creator of the game, Abhi, shared that he wants players to understand specific details about a recipe whether that involves getting the rice-to-water ratio correct or tempering spices in the correct order (Waszkiewicz 2022; Abhi 2023). To help the player carry on after the play has ended, the game also shares complete recipes with the player to try out in their own home kitchens.

While you will have to play the game to learn Venba’s recipes, many Tamilian chefs and home cooks have recipes for the same dishes. Here is my mother’s recipe for Idli batter:

Ingredients:

• 3 cups  Idli rice (or short grain starchy rice)
• 1 cup   Urad (peeled black gram)
• 1 tsp    Methi seeds (fenugreek)
• 1 tbsp  Chutney daal (split yellow gram)

Instructions:

1. Wash and soak ingredients overnight.
2. Drain and grind ingredients in a high-powered blender until smooth and thick. Add fresh water as needed. Rub the batter between your fingers to ensure it is not gritty.
3. Pour the batter into a large bowl or container and cover with clingwrap, lid, or plate.
4. Let the batter ferment in a warm place for around nine hours.
5. Once the batter has doubled in size and developed bubbles with a yeasty smell, it is ready.
6. Add salt to the batter and store it in the fridge.
7. Use it for steaming idli in an idli steamer or thin out the batter to make dosa on a skillet.

The Venba video game is a good opportunity to see how storytelling and recipe sharing can go hand in hand. It is also a good entryway into understanding specifically South Indian cooking techniques and flavors, an area that has not gotten the same attention as North India in the Americas. It also opens the floor for more culturally detailed immigrant stories to be told via interactive mediums such as video games. The video game as a medium does something very different from a perspective of imagery and visuals, compared to other mediums such as text, or a static graphic novel. The movement and paced story development, that you as a player control, work together to remove visualization barriers between the story and the player. This visual storytelling is also an excellent model for sharing subjects like History, Anthropology, Food Studies, and Cultural Studies in a palatable and inclusive manner. I believe that there is great potential for visual storytelling as a way to expand academia beyond university settings. 

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Abhi. 2023. Venba. Steam, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series/Xbox One, Playstation 5. Canada: Visai Games. https://venbagame.com/.

Waszkiewicz, Agata. 2022. Delicious Pixels: Food in Video Games. Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG.

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