A game that I strongly remember from the past is a game on NDSL(Nintendo Dual Screen Lite/Nintendo Develop System Lite) called “Cooking Mama”. It’s basically a cooking-simulating game where the players are provided with recipes and they would need to cut meat, peal vegetables, crack an egg and whip it, cook them, and even make cakes and bread. All these tasks require interactions with the touch screen of the console. Base on the speed and precision of these interactions, the game would give players scores from zero star (failed) and three stars.
I lived in a dorm in my primary school and there was only one classmate who had the NDSL console. All the girls would come to her and watch her play the game during the breaks and when she was not able to get three stars for the levels, we would try one by one and sometimes have several friends to play the parts that they were best in to achieve the perfect score. As a result, even though it might not be the purpose of the game, I really learned the lesson of cooperation and also the fact that I was not good at everything and that someone can do better than me in certain areas. I also gained much knowledge about cooking from the game and it also helped me understand my mother’s thoughts because she cooked every day in my family.
A cultural assumption would definitely be that mothers are always associated with cooking and housework because the main character in the game is a mother. There is also an assumption of the mother knowing a lot of things related to cooking. The pink color theme of the game can also be an assumption that female would prefer this kind of color theme. Because of the color theme, none of the boys in my class played this game, at least in front of other students.
A way to misplay the game would be to use the bug when you are using two stylus pens on the touch screen at the same time. Because the touchscreen was meant to be used with one stylus pen, using two would disturb the way the screen recognized the pen and therefore make the action of cutting meat really fast (cutting meat was the hardest part of the game). I think this misplay could reflect the fact that when we did not have the ability to do something, we tend to think of a way to go around it or find a shortcut.
