"Just like amma used to make": Venba and Packaging theAesthetics of Diaspora

This presentation aims to demonstrate how Venba's (Visai Games 2023) gameplay makes use of authenticity-porn as an affective appeal to its purported target audience.In this, the presentation is a study of the conveyance of the 'plated' aesthetic of 'authenticity' in a diasporic game like Venba through the framework of the appealing and desirable nature of this affective delivery, or 'authenticity-porn'.The actual ludic mechanics of Venba, advertised as a "story about family, love, loss, and more" (Venba 2023) have little to do with the emotional message of the game, which is instead rooted in peripheral objects.The processes of gameplay, namely reading and deciphering recipes, cooking, and clicking through dialogue, are rendered background processes in the face of this performance of authenticity.