Ian Bogost - Water Cooler Games - Conference organizers unknowingly set stage for McDonald's Interactive hoax

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Water Cooler Games served as the web's primary forum for "videogames with an agenda" — coverage of the uses of video games in advertising, politics, education, and other everyday activities, outside the sphere of entertainment.

The site was maintained at watercoolergames.org from 2003-2009, where it was edited by myself and Gonzalo Frasca. It is now archived here in full.

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Conference organizers unknowingly set stage for McDonald's Interactive hoax

by Ian Bogost June 9, 2006

categories: Business Games , Political Games

Stephen Totillo of MTV News has written a great story on the McDonald's Interactive hoax we covered a couple days ago. Here's what the real McDonald's had to say:

Reached for comment Friday (June 9), McDonald's spokesperson Julie Pottebaum said, "This is an outright hoax and a complete misrepresentation of our people and our values. Anyone who knows the facts about McDonald's' social responsibility track record knows that we're a recognized leader on the environment."

And apparently the connection to La Molleindustria's fantastic McVideogame was in fact accurate, although not in the way we expected. It was born out of an embarrassing failure on the part of the conference organizers to understand the premise of that game.

According to people involved in the hoax, the McDonald's Interactive charade began accidentally in early April, when an ISGE organizer reached out to the developers of a computer game called "McVideoGame" and mistook the satirical program for a product of the real McDonald's. In an e-mail, an anonymous member of the Italian consortium Molleindustria, which created "McVideoGame," said conference organizers wrote them a note that stated: "It would be a fantastic PR opportunity, let alone a chance for you to see what other organizations have achieved with Serious Games."

Sensing an opportunity, the Molleindustria team reached out to the loosely organized group to which Jean-Michel belongs. That group had called itself the McDonald's Resistance Collective and drew inspiration from a six-month 2003 occupation of a McDo restaurant — as they are called in France — to resist what members saw as unjust treatment of store employees and the environment. Jean-Michel said he and another McDonald's Interactive planner were among the strikers at the occupied restaurant in 2003.

They hatched a plan to exploit the ISGE's assumption that the conference was dealing with the real McDonald's. " 'Do we want to make it completely believable?' " Jean-Michel remembered the team asking. " 'Or do we want to do something very crazy and funny that will shock them and make them laugh?' We decided to do something serious because it is a serious issue."

Now, it's possible that the conference organizers were actually trying to get Molleindustria to discuss their approach to social criticism via games, but if so... wouldn't they have noticed that a very similar idea cropped up from a group supposedly sponsored by McDonalds. Amazing, fantastic, and pretty embarrassing!

Comments (1)

Conference Information Packets on USB Drives

Call them Flash drives, pen drives, USB drives, memory sticks.

In any case its a whole lot easier to have a user manual, conference information,

catalog on a memory stick small enough to put in your pocket.

Not so long ago, our conference and trade show clients would order a three

ring binder, with printed tabs and then have someone collate all materials

printed at the copy center.

The trend now is Memory sticks. For $10-$20 you can have a memory stick

printed with your conference logo, or a custom imprinted USB drive printed with

a sponsors advertising message or web address. On this little bugger, not

much larger than a pack of juicy fruit gum, you can fit the whole conference program.

You can also offer plenty of space for attendees to store their own conference notes.

These custom printed pen drives are the rage.

Many people have one, but everyone welcomes another. They are much easier to carry than a conference bag full of brochures, conference schedules, and maps.

At first the price tag may seem high, but think again. ImprintItems.com offers many styles and memory sizes.

Here is a comparison from just 10 years ago.

This is what a client of ours ordered for a conference.

500 3 ring binders printed with conference logo on front and map on back

cost $4.90/each

500 sets of printed tabs x $1.45/set

500 sets of printed material 200 pages each =$3.50 set

500 programs showing many advertisers logos and products @ .90/each

Then they hand collated brochures for local restaraunts, museums etc.

and added those.

For this price they could know put the conference logo and website

and all materials on a memory stick to be handed to all attendees at

registration.

We can accomodate all of your information needs on one small logo memory

stick. You can put all of the above information on these and more.

Some of our clients offer sponsors a chance to offer their complete catalog

on the pen drives. Imagine how much more value this holds for an advertiser

than simply listing a name and phone number in a directory.

Seriously, many such sponsors after a trade show normally would take the attendees

list and mail each of them a catalog. Catalog cost $2 x 500 people = $1000

Postage cost 500 mailings x $3 /each = $1500. Assembly of mailing ??

These sponsors typically may have paid $200 for a directory listing. With there complete catalog on each attendees USB drive, they often will pay up to $3000

for the service.

This is an Everyone wins situation. The attendees no longer need to pay to ship a box of catalogs back to the office. For the advertiser or sponsor, its better yet.

Why? Because many attendees facing the hassle of packing this information back to the shop with them would simply through bags of materials in the garbage before leaving the hotel to get back to the airport.

No one, and I mean almost nobody will through away a memory stick.

imprintED on November 30, 2006 4:34 AM

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