MolleIndustria Video Games - McDonald's Favorite 

Practitioner: 

Date: 

Mar 7 2006

Location: 

Online

In this game, you own and operate McDonald's. You have the choice to try to operate ethically or make decisions like using genetically modified soy or administering bovine growth hormone. If you go the ethical route, you bankrupt the company and lose.

The game then forces players to become "the bad guy" gleefully firing workers, plowing over rainforests, and bribing nutritionists in order to stay profitable.

In the end, the game leaves players understanding fast food as a systemic problem in a scope that they actually experience rather than reading about.

From Wikipedia:

The McDonald's Videogame is an online game created by the Italian company La Molleindustria. It is part of the general class of "anti-advergames", in which games are a satire of specific companies and their business practices.

The McDonald's Video Game is a parody of the business practices of the corporate giant McDonald's, taking the guise of a tycoon style business simulation game. The game presents the player with four views, the farmland, the slaughterhouse, the restaurant, and the corporate HQ, and through each of these views, decisions can be made which will affect the fate of the player's company. In the game, the player plays the role of a McDonald's CEO, choosing whether or not to feed the player's cows genetically altered grain,[3] or plow over rainforests, or feed the player's cows to other cows. The player can also choose advertising strategies and public official corruption to counteract opponents of the player's actions.

Some choices within the game, such as the opportunity to demolish villages or bribe public officials, paint the corporation in a negative light. These aspects of the game are unflattering to McDonald's, who issued a statement saying that the game "has no association with McDonald's, and is therefore a complete misrepresentation of our people and our values."

Posted by SteveLambert on

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