Cooking Mama: Cook Off (Majesco 2007) has players doing a series of food preparation and cooking tasks. After each task is completed, the player is given verbal praise (good or very good) or told to “try harder”. Points are attributed to each level of praise along with bonus points given for speed and accuracy of completion. Along with points, Cooking Mama will applaud your good work with phrases like, “Wonderful! Better than Mama!' or “Good! Keep Going!” as though the game itself is tuned in to our desire to be praised.

Mastery is an important part of why we decide to play games. Our initial interest, almost all of the time, is to learn the game, master it, and gain a sense of virtuosity. A sense that may be lost in other aspects of life like school, work, and sports. Anybody can play games if they so desire and games like Cooking Mama typify games that could be considered a stepping stone for novices because they emulate actions that are common in everyday life (cooking) through an apparatus that is easily understood.

Another possibility is the apparatus becomes a barrier between the player and mastery, thus creating a sense of annoyance that may not be easily overcome. Cooking Mama: Cook Off is played on the Nintendo Wii console, which uses a wireless “wiimote” instead of the usual wired control pad. The wiimote has motion sensing capability that allows its users to engage physically with the game. For example, a mini-game in Cooking Mama requires players to chop an onion. In order to chop the onion, players must mimic a chopping motion with the wiimote. The idea is simple, in theory, however there is a noticeable delay between moving the wiimote and the on screen response of the knife chopping the onion. Games with the “best controls” all share an important characteristic: when you hit the jump button, the character on screen spends almost exactly the same amount of time in the air.

Conversely, games with “bad controls” violate this unspoken assumption (Koster 74). Affectively speaking bad controls might cause anger, so much anger that one might throw the controller. “Wii have a problem,” (http://wiihaveaproblem.com/) is a weblog that chronicles players' problems with the wiimote. Problems fall between televisions being destroyed to girlfriends being saddled with black eyes are all over the blog. The lag in real time response forces players to feel a greater sense of urgency when communicating with the system, therefore leading them to swing the controller with more force, thus causing injury and annoyance. A player's relationship with a game then is only as strong as the relationship the player maintains with the apparatus.

Culture and communications theorist Alexander Galloway understands our relationship to the gaming apparatus as two particular types of actions: machine actions and operator actions. Machine actions are acts performed by the software and hardware of the game console, while operator actions are the acts performed by the players (5). Quickly dismissed by Galloway as a “completely artificial division,” the differences between machine and operator actions and, by proxy, player and console interaction should be analyzed more closely. Each time a game is played whether it be on a console or at the arcade, the player must submit to the machine in an effort to at first learn the rules and functioning of the machine and second to try to overcome the restraints and beat the game.

The machine, then, is always in a constant state of tension with the player regardless of whether or not the machine is cooperating. The game is there to offer a challenge, so the state of tension or struggle is expected and, in fact, welcomed. Games are exercises for our brains, if they fail to exercise our brains they become boring (Koster 38). Exercise is a struggle, but if there is a desire to get into shape (the analogy works for both our bodies and our brains) then struggling is inevitable.

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