The Simple Delights of ‘Celebrating Bubble Tea’ – A Google Doodle
When I first began thinking critically about video games, one of the refrains of discourse that I encountered was which experiences counted as “games.” Some critics would dismiss walking simulators or visual novels as inauthentic expressions of the medium, and I always found this strange. Games don’t require action to be compelling, and sometimes a single-button interface like Vampire Survivors is all you need to hook a player for dozens of hours at a time. To this end, I’d argue that Google Doodles – simple little artistic celebrations for culturally significant days – are also video games.
Sure, you can’t buy Google Doodles in your local GameStop, but a simple definition I’d offer for what constitutes a game is anything interactive where you follow a set of rules to participate in. I wrote last year about We Are OFK, which doesn’t even brand itself as a “video game” per se, but fits comfortably within my definition nonetheless. Even something on Netflix like Black Mirror’s “Bandersnatch” episode counts as a game, I’d argue, since the decisions you make – or participate in – influence your experience of the story and art.
Enter Celebrating Bubble Tea, a Google Doodle that’s as short and sweet as the drinks from which this game gets its name. Bubble tea, or as I know it, boba tea, is a Taiwanese beverage featuring a mixture of tea, milk, and tapioca pearls. It’s a comforting drink that, when my friend introduced me to the concept years ago, I had never heard of. Nowadays, it’d be more surprising if someone hadn’t heard of boba tea. Whether at cosplay conventions or my local Asian restaurants, boba tea is everywhere. So naturally some designers decided that the idea of boba tea was culturally significant enough to design an interactive game around the making of it.
Like boba tea, Celebrating Bubble Tea is a brief and delightful comfort. Panning down a misty mountain range in a rainy forest, the game depicts a traveling boba merchant dog wheeling their mobile shop up a path. The visual context of the scene suggests that this merchant dog finds an eager customer, another pup, who requests you to prepare an order of boba tea for them. As you interact with the screen, you are presented with an empty boba cup. To complete the order, you click and hold on the screen for each ingredient: tapioca pearls, tea, and then milk.
The mechanics of Celebrating Bubble Tea are quite simple, but I find that the timing involved with filling each order is more rewarding than expected. Each amount is different, and the click-release mechanic has a vague window of time to it, meaning that the mechanics feel imprecise in a satisfying way – the same satisfying imprecision of filling up and mixing ingredients in a beverage. If you add the exact perfect amount, the game rewards you with a rainbow chime and a happy star. If you add the perfect amount of each to the boba order, then you get a three-star rating, and the customer leaves happy. You watch a little animation where a lid is placed on the cup, the ingredients are shaken up and mixed, and then a straw is gratifyingly inserted before the customer trots away.
The game presents a total of five customers – well, nine, technically, as a few customers arrive in groups. After serving the first dog customer, up comes a koala to order their own bubble tea, followed by a little frog holding a leaf – presumably as an umbrella. Each of these thirsty little critters are adorable, but the reason I picked up this Google Doodle in the first place was the presence of two cats who share a boba tea. Once their order is finished, two straws are poked through the lid. The person who shared Celebrating Bubble Tea with me sent a screenshot of these two cats with the caption, “they are dating your honor,” which lovingly contextualized my short little experience with this game. As far as I am concerned, these are two little gay cats just enjoying some boba together, and that’s amazing. The final customer is a group of four ghosts, one of which takes a kitty form, and another which, inexplicably, is wearing shutter shades. Four straws poke in their boba lid.
After serving the game’s five customers, the view shifts back to where the game began. The rain clears up, the sun pokes out, and the dog packs up their boba stall to wheel it to another cozy locale. It’s an incredibly simple game, and unless you close the tab, there is effectively no fail state. You can just click three times during each customer sequence to advance to the end. In either case, the game rewards you with a “Well done!” But the allure of hitting five sets of three perfect stars, especially given the finicky timed nature of the click-release mechanic, made me want to replay. The simplicity of the design, not to mention the bite-sized presentation of this game, kept me around for just a few more attempts to get three (perfect) stars on each customer.
I closed Celebrating Bubble Tea, not anticipating to write about it. But for some reason, I kept latently thinking about this bubble tea game – how it reminds me of other barista simulators like Coffee Talk and Necrobarista, games that have quite a heavier focus on character relationships and storytelling. Somewhere between the rainy atmosphere, the teenage memories that have been reactivated by the mere presence of boba tea, and the fact that Celebrating Bubble Tea is a Google Doodle game that applauds a niche but wholesome aspect of east Asian culture, this little game hooked me. I started writing this article to explore why, and I’m ending this piece by suggesting that – if you made it this far – you should give it a play. It’ll be the most snug game you play all week.
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