My friend Sophia runs a catering company that I love to help cook at, and I swear the hardest part of her job isn’t cooking but dragging clients out of menu indecision. They’ll say, “Oh, something light and fun,” which could mean literally anything from sushi boats to deep-fried Mars Bars. To solve this, I’d love to gamify the process with a Build-a-Meal app. Basically food Minecraft but for weddings and corporate parties.
The behaviour I want to change is familiar: procrastinating, second-guessing and struggling to describe a menu when you do not yet know the options.
My proposed app would work like a painter’s palette. Clients could drag and drop dishes to design an event, with feedback on:
Budget impact (champagne towers vs. prosecco-on-a-budget).
Dietary needs: a clear view of which preferences and requirements have been recorded, ready to confirm with the caterer.
Plate visuals (so you can see how fancy your vol-au-vents actually look).
Seasonal availability: pumpkin soup in July? The app might suggest a different direction.
Course flow: three desserts and no mains could mean simulated adult guest mutiny—and very happy children.
Virtual guests could even react. Choose only kale salad and watch the animated partygoers sneak off for kebabs. The joke should invite experimentation, while the real guest requirements remain visible and taken seriously.
From a marketing perspective, I would want to test whether guided play makes the choices feel more manageable. Research on choice overload provides a useful starting point (Iyengar & Lepper, 2000), while choice architecture and co-creation offer ways to think about how options are presented and explored (Thaler & Sunstein, 2008; Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004). Gamification research does not make success automatic; the design and context matter (Hamari, Koivisto & Sarsa, 2014; Werbach & Hunter, 2015). The app should help people decide, not give them another entertaining way to put the decision off.
The ambition is less endless email tennis and more useful conversation about what the event needs. An app could help people arrive with a clearer menu idea; the caterer would still confirm feasibility, prices and dietary requirements. I really want to make this and play it. Food Minecraft—with an actual dinner at the end.
References.
- Hamari, J., Koivisto, J., & Sarsa, H. (2014). Does gamification work? — A literature review of empirical studies on gamification. Proceedings of the 47th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 3025–3034.
- Iyengar, S. S., & Lepper, M. R. (2000). When choice is demotivating: Can one desire too much of a good thing? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(6), 995–1006.
- Prahalad, C. K., & Ramaswamy, V. (2004). Co-creation experiences: The next practice in value creation. Journal of Interactive Marketing, 18(3), 5–14.
- Thaler, R. H., & Sunstein, C. R. (2008). Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness. Yale University Press.
- Werbach, K., & Hunter, D. (2015). The gamification toolkit: Dynamics, mechanics, and components for the win. Wharton Digital Press.