As a first introduction to a possible genre for our work, we will play The McDonalds Game by Molleindustria.
The McDonald’s Game was made in 2006 at the height of the popularity of Flash and the web as platform and context for the creation and play of small games outside the mainstream industry. Lots of people had web browsers and the Flash plug-in was almost as ubiquitous. Of course, this was before the iPhone came along and changed the trajectory of smartphone adoption, so ubiquitous meant something else back then.
Anyway, this is where people were making and playing games. It was something that was growing outside its previous niches thanks to other efforts like the Nintendo Wii which had everyone’s grandmother playing faux tennis and bowling.
Table of Contents
Reflective Play
We start off by playing the game cold, probably not knowing much about it. This is a precious moment in any gameplay history that we will never recover but which is important to reflect on so that we can be good designers ourselves. We ask questions of our understanding of this new world, our feelings, what we think we’re doing and how the game either enables this or puts barriers in our way.
Really, it’s important to take notes here. Stop a moment and write things down. You will need to learn to act and reflect at the same time, and this may take a while. Pay attention to how the game is trying to teach you to play it.
Since we’re lucky enough to be doing this together, we take some time to share and sort through our impressions of this game and what it might teach us about our own work in the future.
Again, we should be cautious here to come to any conclusions that feel very definite. Although we’re likely to have a good amount of experience represented among our numbers, we are still naive in the sense of being likely rather removed from many of this game’s contexts. It is a decade-old flash game, for starters.
The way we try to be careful is
- Separating observations from interpretations
- Asking questions rather than coming to conclusions
- Admitting many possibilities
Googling for Understanding
Next, we seek to become somewhat less naive, and to learn some of the broader contexts that give this work meaning. In general, this is when I start Googling. Both the game itself and its surrounding issues are what we mine for good keywords. Depending on the game and our needs, we may want to be more or less specific about what we try to find. I may want to get a sense for how successful this game was. That’s fairly specific as long as I know what I might mean by “successful”. But maybe I just want to find some basic context and if anyone wrote anything at all deep about this game.
Besides Google itself, I will specifically look in a few places
- Google Scholar – for official academic work related to the game and its topics
- Gamasutra – lots of industry academia here. Deep writing by those doing the making.
- Critical Distance – unofficial academia, CD is a metablog that keeps track of a good amount of the deeper video game blogging happening across the web.
Here are a few resources that I found in my search, and which I’d like you to check out.
- Molleindustria, makers of McDonald’s Game and others
- Interview with Paolo Pedercini, lead dev from Molleindustria
- Persuasion is Futile: Anti-advergames don’t work – an article about the likely hopes for this genre of game
- Can games change people’s minds
- Truffaut and Siskel – There is no such thing as an anti-war film. Going a bit more general than video games, we can enter conversations about media effects in other contexts.
Assignment
I’d like you to read these sources above, gather your thoughts, and do a bit of googling yourself for related work and ideas. Certainly mine your personal experience. Take some small part of these thoughts and try to write something a bit coherent about where to take them. This doesn’t need to be an essay, and it might be best if you could keep from coming to too clean a conclusion. The point isn’t to be right about this game and its success or design, but rather to use it as a way to start thinking about games, their design, and uses.
Create a document in our shared folder in Google Drive. Title the document so a reader knows who wrote it and a bit about what to expect from reading it.
When you’re done, share the link to your document in Slack, along wit ha brief (like one sentence) synopsis, again encouraging readers to actually check it out because they’re interested in the topic you’re writing about.
On Thursday, we’ll look a bit more into this subject and what everyone has to say.
