McDonalds Videogame

Continuing with the protest game theme (something that I’ve found increasingly interesting of late), recently I played a few rounds of the McDonalds videogame.

The premise is that you’re running McDonalds (no coy alternative parody names here — they frankly use the brand and icons throughout) and must make decisions about how to raise and feed cattle, run your employment lines, and set up advertising systems. Some of your options are pretty disturbing: there are a range of hormones and animal-byproduct-based feeds that you can use to bulk up the cows, for instance. You can bulldoze rainforest and steal land used to feed the local population in third-world countries. And if you overgraze pasture for too many years in a row, it will lose fertility and eventually become an unrecoverable wasteland. There are plenty of opportunities for villainy.

The press I’ve read on the game generally suggests that it is meant to make us all question McDonalds and similar corporations. Personally, I found myself feeling unexpectedly sympathetic for the corporation.

Oil God

Only a liberal would find this game remotely interesting and even then not for long.

Teaching, Persuading, Lampooning

I’ve been thinking more about “Airport Security”. Maybe I’m being unfair and judging it by the wrong criteria: given the off-the-scale absurdity, maybe it would be most reasonable to regard it as a kind of interactive editorial cartoon, rather than as an interactive argument.

I might put Persuasive Games’ Disaffected into a similar category: it’s a frustrating game to play, in a way that pokes fun of the frustrations of a copy shop in real life, without actually emulating the system at work in any depth. And their Presidential Pong goes even further, with the game-play almost entirely separate from the political content, which is expressed chiefly in editorial-cartoon format. (The “special powers” of each candidate are cute, but some of them work better than others, both as political comment and as powers within the game.)

Is there a single axis here, from anti-advergames and lampoons through semi-educational pieces like Electrocity into hard-core investigative or scientific simulations?

And how much do supposedly incidental aspects of the user interface determine our experience? I’m not talking about the assumptions buried in the simulation — those are necessarily ideological — but about surface qualities, like how difficult or easy various tasks are, how well optimized the game experience is, and how it uses the frustration that Grant Tavinor identifies as one of the key emotions evoked by gaming.

I’ve now played several games whose persuasive point was mostly achieved by a) annoying the heck out of the player and b) framing that annoyance as the natural result of some kind of unreasonable system — Airport Security is only one example. This may be emotionally effective, but is it rhetorically fair?

Airport Security

Someone recently recommended “Airport Security”, a mini-game about being an airport security worker trying to keep up with a constantly-changing set of rules about what can and cannot be brought onto a plane.

While I sympathize with the message of the game, it didn’t really work for me, for two reasons.

A plug for Anchorhead

is up at PlayThisThing. (I thought about waiting for the new special edition Mike is working on, but honestly, I love the original so much that it seemed worth recommending anyway. After all, if the new version comes out, we can tell people about it again…)

Digital Humanities Quarterly

…features not one but two IF articles this issue: the finalized version of Dennis Jerz’s Colossal Cave article, and an article by Eric Eve on “All Hope Abandon”. A lot of Eric’s article is devoted to explaining IF for the benefit of an unfamiliar audience, but then he gets into interesting specifics about the IF medium and his particular work. Worth a look.

Updated syntax

In more very minor news, I have updated the Inform 7 syntax document to reflect the change log of the last couple of builds, including sound and external file handling, the new documentation features for extensions, etc.

Tiny new extension

Have added a “Mood Variations” extension to let authors mark up text to have varying effects depending on the mood of the person currently spoken to. It’s meant to be compatible with several approaches to conversation (and uses the same “current interlocutor” variable as Eric Eve’s conversation extensions). The “[set {mood}]” token then also lets you set the NPC’s current mood in the middle of other text.

Not a huge deal, really.

PlayThisThing

This particular item won’t come as news to anyone here, since I started with a review of an old-but-good piece, but I’m contributing reviews of IF to Greg Costikyan’s new indie and alternative game blog.

There’s some other cool and fun stuff to see over at PlayThisThing too. As it does pretty much everything but casual games, I’m hoping it’ll be a great game-a-day pairing with JayIsGames, where I get my casual fix.