McActivist McPrank!

From this article on Gamasutra, it sounds like there has been some interesting activist pranksterism afoot.

At the Serious Games Summit recently, a Strategic Marketing Manager for McDonalds, who headed up a group developing games/sims for training new management employees and the like, gave a talk on the sim they developed.

In the talk, he described how the sim they developed led them to conclude that McDonald's current business practices lead to disaster on a number of fronts (ecological, environmental, etc). The sim helped them determine new business practices that would be required (more eco-friendly, but less profitable). Then, when execs refused to listen to the sim's recommendations, this marketing-manager-with-a-consience decided to go public, starting with this conference in europe.

Hmm... something smells McFilet-o-fishy, (even though some were on the verge of buying it?).

Of course, this person did not work for mcdonalds at all, and this was part of a hoax to draw attention to McD's practices. Interesting to see such protests happening in games-land.

Gamasutra points out that the website of the supposed McDonald's games group is registered in Italy, as is Molleindustria, developers of the McDonald's game I blogged about a while back. Coincidence? I doubt it.

[BTW, if you've got some time to kill, Molleindustria has some very *ahem* interesting games on their site, including a game where you play a woman faking an orgasm (difficult to do given the bespectacled Itali-toon character you interact with), and a game called Queerpower: Welcome to Queerland, who's theme you can probably guess by the subtitle, in case the title wasn't enough]