McVideogame’: A Very Playable Critique

‘McVideogame’: A Very Playable Critique
McVideogame is an adorable resource-management in the accessible style of popular casual titles like Diner Dash, Restaurant Story.

and DQ Tycoon . It’s also a scathing interactive attack on fast food production.

McVideogame plays on our casual game expectations and our desires to be successful in games. Players begin by clearing land to make pastures for cows and fields for soy, a simple mechanic found in FarmVille, Ravenskye City, RocketOwl’s Green Space , and, oh, just about every social game ever. The cute red bulldozer does have to clear a little bit of rainforest to get there, but balancing enough soy fields for fodder to feed the meat cows is a familiar enough game challenge. Beef becomes patties, and hamburgers are assembled by employees and then sold to hungry customers.

Players who start to succeed, and are presented with more ethically questionable choices. You’re doing so well you need to bulldoze this village to produce more! Meanwhile, difficult gameplay challenges can be fixed with a little bit of moral flexibility. You can add hormones to your cow production, genetically modify the soy to increase growth, fire employees who aren’t smiling enough, and run advertising campaigns to counteract bad press.

These advertising initiatives are hilariously tongue-in-cheek suggestions to hush up those darn hippies or promote happy meals to kids to take the focus off the tainted ingredients. The whole game is snarky and funny, but the corporate office section is the highlight.

I’ve written before about using game mechanics to share a message in GameTheNews.net’s Endgame Syria and Seth Alter’s Neocolonialism . McVideogame does this really well, and actually uses difficulty balance as part of the message. Players who take the point, and try play McVideogame as a straight resource management game, trying to make the moral and sustainable choices, will be reprimanded and fired by corporate heads for losing so much money.

McVideogame seems to turn up in every conversation about serious games or creating a playable message. It’s an older game, from Italian studio Molleindustria, playable in your browser at McVideogame.com. Molleindustria’s recent release, Way , won the grand jury award at IndieCade 2012,  and they’ve also released, which seems to turn up frequently in conversations about artistic games.