Fandom Round-Up: Clean the Mutant Kitchen

I am having so much fun researching fandom: so much wacky and wonderful (and awful too) creative and inventive work out there.
I love that we humans never leave well-enough alone (much less not-well–enough).
 
Digital games are my area of weakness because I neither know nor care much about games in general.  
But I do care about gamers and their culture, which is much more interactive than I expected. Of course. Humans are pesky little monkeys who climb into and change everything, including computer programs. 

So, today I'm looking at [ohgod, so much new vocabulary]... looking at patches*, "hacks and mods" [modifications] gamers make to games:
such as creating new "skins" to wrap around the 3D–looking characters that come with the game, so you can change their gender, race, clothes, species, whatever.

Sometimes the whole game is changed--like this modified setting of shoot-em-up in a space station to a clean-up in a kitchen gone mad. I think I might even enjoy playing it (for a few minutes).
This, below, is all from Mutation.fem: Patches.



Bio-Tek Kitchen Patch
by Josephine Starrs and Leon Cmielowski
(starrs@sysx.apana.org.au, leon@autonomous.org)
Platform: MAC
Download: sysx.org/leon/mirror/biotek [this link is broken, but I'll leave it here]

The artists' official game description reads:

 "Players clean up the filthy kitchen laboratory of a home biotech enthusiast using weapons such as dish cloths and egg flippers. The player is attacked by nasty mutant vegetables which are the product of genetic nouvelle cuisine, and learns throughout the game of a world wide corporate conspiracy to take over the entire food chain." 

Although the gender of the protagonist in this patch may not be exactly female, the artillery of egg flippers, dish towels and other kitchen implements, point towards a particularly feminine rage. The player embarks on a violent rampage through a strikingly domestic kitchen maze setting. 
In Bio-Tek Kitchen the convulusion of male and female signifiers is unsettling and disturbingly funny.
__________

From the GLOSSARY at Mutation.fem 
www.opensorcery.net/mutation 

Patch -- any alteration to an existing game ranging from a fix-it of a simple bug to new graphics, architecture and sounds. Usually in order to view a patch or add-on, an official version of the game must be purchased.(Add-ons will not work with shareware demos of games.)