Now Wash Your Hands: Understanding Food Legislation Compliance in a Virtual Reality Restaurant Kitchen

The Corrupt Kitchen is a room-scale virtual-reality game in which players act as a chef servicing a queue of customers. Tasked with making burgers, players must prepare the food while ensuring it is safe to eat, engaging explicitly and implicitly with challenges related to regulatory compliance and derived from UK legislation, but also efficient and ethical decision making; washing hands, placing rat traps, hiring appropriate help, time saving and money making. Interviewing nineteen players with professional involvement in food preparation reveals a diversity of perceived alignment with participants' everyday real-world practice that ranges from rules to be gamed to serious concerns. We contribute an examination of how the game, combined with a study protocol that further prompted debriefing and reflection, demonstrates opportunities for training, reflection and engagement with the subject matter. We consider how fidelity and immersion allow comparisons between gameplay and real world compliance.