Riddle me this.

In a government study released a couple weeks ago, workers who prepare and serve food (cooks, bartenders, servers) had the second highest rate of depression among full-time employees, at 10.3 percent. Government officials tracked depression within 21 major occupational categories. They combined data from 2004 through 2006 to estimate episodes of depression within the past year. That information came from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, which registers lifetime and past-year depression episodes.

Conclusion: Working in a kitchen can be a crappy, soul-flattening job that beats you down until your amygdala is the consistency of loose Cream of Wheat.

Yet, Ludia Inc. announced yesterday that it will unveil video games based on the Hell’s Kitchen television series next year. Ludia founder and CEO Alex Thabet says, “The show has millions of viewers, and the game will bring the fun of the kitchen boot camp experience from the TVs to the PCs and consoles of this rapidly growing audience.” 

An electronic hell-spawn Gordon Ramsay will taste and comment on the culinary creations of players--browbeating, posturing and sprinkling those angry specks of spit all the while.

Conclusion: Working in an electronic kitchen presided over by a tiny, preening, British electronic chef is not a crappy, soul-flattening job that beats you down? Good times, good times.

Oh, and the video game comes with a recipe book.