The Line When Soup Becomes Soup

I spend a lot of time fascinated by the mutability of words, which is one of those things that’s seeped into my fiction from time-to-time. This made me a sucker for Something Something Soup Something, a concept that’s part-online game and part philosophy experiment about the mutability of a simple concept like “soup”.

The narrative behind the game is simple: it’s the future; aliens are making soup and teleporting it into your kitchen, but their understanding of soup is often flawed and needs a level of oversight. You stand by the teleporter and look at their creations, saying yes or no to each, and after a round of 20 or so serves the game will put together your personal philosophy of soup based upon your choices.

It’s a really simple concept and a similarly simple bit of coding, but the gameplay is secondary to the experiment going on behind the scenes – while there’s a general consensus about certain elements that make soup soup, these aren’t universal. The concept is vague, shifting, and impossible to define, particularly once you’re presented with options that might be soup.

The results challenge the idea that any concept is truly knowable, despite our belief that there are specific definitions. It’s a timely reminder of the problems inherent in that assumption:

Most people believe that we live in a world where everyone understands what words mean. But that assumption seems to be very flawed from the outset. So if we actually misunderstand each other on such simple concepts as ‘soup’, imagine how badly we misunderstand each other on more complex matters like democracy, freedom, or justice. The implications are very real and very telling. 

(From You Don’t Know What Soup Is in Think! magazine)

What’s interesting about this for writers isn’t just the commentary on how language works, but the model that it presents with regards to genre. People love to assume that genres are static, knowable things, but those definitions are constantly in flux and willing to shift to accommodate texts that only meet some of the requirements. The process Something Something Soup Something asks players to go through is analogous to the theories of genre that I was looking at for the PhD, and which Kim Wilkins talks about in her essay about the way her novel was positioned (and repositioned) by various publishers and readers who wanted it to be a fantasy, a romance, or something else.

For the record, I am strongly in the camp that believes that food should be served on plates, not wooden boards or kitchen sinks or whatever tragedy of culinary service finds its way to We Want Plates. The discovery that my personal theory of soup is largely dependent on the liquidity and edibility, and willing to allows for a diversity of containers and eating utensils, caught me a little off-guard.