As those of us in the States gluttonize on Thanksgiving turkey, those of you who haven't seen it might want to try out PETA's "unauthorized" Cooking Mama satire Cooking Mama: Mama Kills Animals, which hit the web a week or so ago. Like PETA's KFC attack game Super Chick Sisters, Cooking Mama: Mama Kills Animals uses a familiar title's gameplay, imagery, and sound to draw fans into their desired message. In this case, the accuracy and quality of the Cooking Mama gameplay is remarkable. If only all serious games had this level of production value.

Instead of chopping and stirring, Mama Kills Animals asks the player to decapitate and disembowel. And while the gore is fun and effective, its purpose is somewhat lost. PETA has claimed that the game is a protest Cooking Mama creator Majesco's failure to release a vegetarian version of the game. Majesco responded, noting that in their latest release, Cooking Mama World Kitchen almost half of the recipes are in fact vegetarian. PETA still hopes for a "Vegetarian Kitchen" edition, perhaps a reasonable suggestion indeed.

Indeed, the game itself is not about vegetarian cooking (although players who persist will be rewarded with a tofu-molding level). Instead, the game attempts to characterize the brutality of turkey farming and slaughter, standard PETA fare, as it were. The problem is, Cooking Mama is a game about food preparation, not farming and slaughter. The "grossness" of poultry prep isn't something any carnivore would dispute. And information about the "living conditions" of industrial farm-raised turkeys is limited to video and textual assets preseted as rewards for successful gameplay. It's too bad PETA didn't choose a different design: starting with the preparation of the bird and backtracking out to the process of slaughtering and raising it. That might have had a persuasive impact on players no matter their gastronomical persuasion.

Instead, Cooking Mama: Mama Kills Animals derives only rhetorical heft from the videogame medium. It works as a piece of mildly shocking media, which when combined with its delectible copyright infringement garnered a strong and immediate response from the press. As PETA representatives have admitted, the organization sees games as a way to speak to an audience who might not normally seek out them out through other means. Here the game works not by means of a procedural argument within, but simply by being a game, albeit a well-produced one. It's a shame, because games offer so many opportunities to express arguments about the experience of things, including matters like animal rights. Perhaps as PETA considers their plans to create "many, many more games" they will also consider embedding their positions into the gameplay, not just into the press release.