McDonald’s Game: More Fun Than A McNugget

This morning I was reading BoingBoing, and I came across a post titled “Twisted game simulates running McDonald’s.” I always did love The Sims, so the idea of being able to manipulate the inner workings of one of the most iconic (and controversial) American fast-food chains immediately appealed to me. After heading over to the game and reading its thirty-page tutorial, I realized there’s more to it than just flipping burgers and ringing up Happy Meals.

In the McDonald’s Video Game, which, of course, is in no way connected with the actual McDonald’s, you are the controller of four domains: the Agricultural section, a Feedlot, a Fast Food restaurant, and the company’s corporate Headquarters. A player of the game would have to be responsible for purchasing enough land in Brazil in order to grow sufficient amount of GMO soy crop for the company’s cattle, while bribing Sao Paolo’s mayor in order to bulldoze acres of rainforest to make space for the cows.

In the Feedlot, you’re in charge of how many hormones the cows get, what kinds of nasty by-products to add to their feed, and, when a cow contracts Mad Cow or gets sick from its food, you have to pull the trigger. Literally. Sick cows are destroyed by a flame-thrower, which is at your control. It’s kind of funny to watch the cows get green faces, until you realize that the truth is probably pretty close to this scenario - sans flamethrower, obviously.

In the restaurant arena, you hire and fire employees at will. Unhappy employees can be scolded, and the workers who don’t complain get an “Employee of the Month” badge. Cashiers take money from customers, the Grillman runs the fast-paced burger production line, and the most important aspect of running the restaurant is maintaining the mile-high piles of ground beef in the fridge.

The corporate headquarters is the scariest part of the game. You decide how many press releases to write, and how many government officials and nutritionists to bribe. You choose whether to fund a Disney campaign to target kids, or a “McDonald’s For the Third World” campaign to compensate for the bad press you get from chopping down rainforests. And if you fail at any of the aspects of running the company, the profit-obsessed board gives you the axe.

I’m typically no good at video games, mainly because I get too stressed out. So, I knew I would probably fail at this one, given that there’s so many different things to think about at once. Still, I wanted to give it a shot. I decided to be as cruel as possible from the outset, thus gaining the most profits for the company. Rainforests, schmainforests. I was going to go whole-hog.

It was fun for a while, bulldozing the forests and signing up for one bribe after another. I ran a couple of PR campaigns and the customers came pouring into the restaurant, and the board of directors were oh-so-happy. Everything was good. But then I got a notice saying environmentalist groups were upset by the loss of rainforests, which I tried to abate with a quirky ad campaign, but then the feedlot manager started yelling about all the customers that were getting sick because I hadn’t killed off enough sick cows, and then I felt bad for the cows crammed into the small pastures I had designated for them, and so I gave them more land. Profits dipped, production went down, and ultimately, I was fired.

I guess I’m just not cut out to run McDonald’s. According to the game, having a conscience is a liability. All the bribes and disgusting feed additives were a bit too much for me to manage. I wondered, how close to the truth is this game? My suspicion is that the truth is probably much, much stranger (and more unethical) than fiction.

One of my favorite parts of the game is this quote from the agricultural section of the game’s tutorial:

If we had to rear all the cattle we need in our part of the world, our cities would drown in an ocean of cow sh*t. Pastures and soy culture need a lot of land and South America is one of the best places for it. Obviously you have to conquer your land as our forefathers did. Remember the old saying: ‘Under every forest there is a lawn.’ “

The amount of grain needed to feed this country’s cattle is ridiculous. I looked all over and found that figures vary significantly, but the basic gist is that if we fed humans the same grain we feed beef, we could feed many, many people all over the world. To produce one pound of grain-fed beef requires several pounds of grain, which would go much further in your diet than that one pound of beef would.

But I’m not going to get all preachy on you. Basically, if you’re going to eat beef, the solution involves two parts: One, eat less of it. I like to think of eating meat in terms of how I’d eat it if I had raised it myself. I wouldn’t go out and kill a chicken or a cow every single day if I was the one responsible for the butchering, so I save my meat consumption for special occasions (and occasional cravings). Secondly, make sure it’s been grass-fed for its entire life, and that it hasn’t been finished on grain. Cows aren’t supposed to eat soy and corn, they’re supposed to eat grass. It’s pretty simple, really.

So there you have it. Eat less beef, support grass-fed cattle ranchers, and enjoy the McDonald’s Video Game. Hopefully you’ll have more luck at it than I did, though maybe that’s not necessarily a good thing.