#oiligarchy

A Broccoli Sprouts Critical Game Review | Molleindustria's McDonald's Videogame & Oiligarchy

There's a moment in McDonald's Videogame where the creepy background music starts playing and you realize you're already being brainwashed. Or, more accurately, your subconsciously embedded instructions are being reactivated. Internally lying that you don't like the catchy jingle is the first moral compromise with yourself you're forced to confront. It only gets worse from there.

I played two of Molleindustria's free browser games this week, McDonald's Videogame and Oiligarchy, and I need to talk about what it feels like when a game makes you win by being evil, and then punishes you for being good at it.

What Are Affective Games, and Why Do They Hit Different?

Affective games are designed to make you feel things on purpose. Not the "I'm having fun building a house" feeling of The Sims, or the zen observation of watching a city grow. These games use what game designer Paolo Pedercini calls procedural rhetoric. The mechanics are the argument. The game doesn't tell you corporations are exploitative. It makes you do the exploiting, and then watches you squirm.

The difference between affective games and something like The Sims is the difference between obvious, intentional critique and understated psychological conditioning. The Sims quietly teaches you to be a passive consumer. McDonald's Videogame hands you the supply chain and says: here, optimize this nightmare yourself.

Playing God, Losing Your Soul

Both games give you a "God's eye view," but here, having God's perspective means having God's ego and being expected to wield God's wrathful vengeance, or you lose.

As a McDonald's executive, I found myself treating workers and animals as interchangeable resources rather than humans. In Oiligarchy, viewing the world as extractable zones mirrors exactly how fossil fuel companies must conceptualize the planet to operate successfully.

The games don't obscure reality. They reveal how dehumanizing the viewpoint required by these industries, and their customer base, must be in order to create a profitable margin.

Playing "successfully" rewired psychology in my brain I thought I had matured out of. Abstraction was favored over logical thinking. Numb reactivity and greed replaced linear common sense.

I felt like a child being made to shoot a gun, and I think that is the point.

The Punishment for Not Being Evil Enough

In Oiligarchy, the first time I played, I delayed as long as I could to interfere in the Middle East and drill in Alaska. I tapped Texas wells almost dry by 1980 and even drilled in Nigeria, hoping I could avoid a disaster. Then, without my asking or ordering the action, the Nigerian government protected their financial interests by assassinating dissenting members of the Oboni tribe. Meep.

In McDonald's Videogame, maximizing profit through seemingly "smart" agricultural choices led to environmental devastation and social upheaval every single time. The more efficiently you play within the system's rules, the faster everything collapses.

This design intentionally traps commonly understood concepts of morality, science, and nutrition under the player's inherent goal to win. The contradictory mind-switches you have to make to get there, ignoring the actual mechanical connection between actions and consequences, is the whole game. You're not optimizing a system. You're exercising and strengthening your tolerance to moral friction. That's what corporate success actually is, and these games make you feel it in your body.

What These Games Include (and What They Leave Out)

These games curate their procedures according to the supply chain. From the ground up, literally. Conquer and spend. Money makes the world go round; you gotta spend money to make money.

The tutorials were helpful, because without them I might have spent the whole game raising happy cows in South America and bankrupting myself every time, blissfully unaware that the claws don't take the cow into the skies. (They definitely do not take the cow into the skies.)

McDonald's Videogame focuses specifically on the cattle and beef industry: displacing jungle for GMO soy crops, labor exploitation, environmental destruction. It pointedly excludes marketing and franchise dynamics. Oiligarchy emphasizes resource extraction and political corruption while simplifying the geological and engineering aspects. This selective modeling allows for deeper exploration of specific systemic issues rather than attempting comprehensive simulation.

Do These Games Make You More Empathetic?

Here's where it got personal.

These virtual experiences increase empathy not through emotional manipulation and psychological coercion into favoring consumerism, but by bluntly helping players understand how systems shape behavior. Pedercini's approach works because the discomfort is procedural. You can't skip it, you can't opt out, you have to do the bad thing to play the game.

I wasn't inspired to take direct action. I don't drive a car or eat McDonald's, and haven't in years. But I was inspired to think harder about the human cost of every "sight unseen" service and product I use for convenience. How often am I blindly living out my life according to reflexes, and at what cost, to whom?

Take calling 911, for example.

A neighbor could smell smoke and call the fire department, not realizing someone was just burning their food. Diverting that resource could cost someone else their life. Or maybe the absent-minded neighbor has PTSD, and being barged in on by three fire marshals after midnight induces terror. Surely the opposite of what a well-intentioned neighbor wanted.

This actually happened to me. I'm the absent-minded neighbor who burnt food, still dealing with the reverberations in my health, my relationships with my neighbors, and the legal status of my tenancy.

The day after playing these simulations, I found myself on the other side of the equation. I saw a three-foot campfire blazing inside a bus shelter in North Portland, ten feet from a building where I used to buy textbooks. I saw a person huddled under the shelter, warming their hands. I felt bad, but I called 911 anyway. By the time the fire department arrived, it was a smouldering ash-stain. One firefighter got out to tell the guy to move along. They looked annoyed.

I wondered what kind of reaction my neighbor had when our own incident occurred. Of course I bit his head off in the hallway, an almost uncontrollable reaction that night due to my C-PTSD. How dumb! How could you think it was a good idea to call 911 because I was burning food!?

The greatest empathy I developed wasn't sadness for exploited ecosystems or outrage at corrupted elections. I already knew those things. It was understanding for the fear and inadequacy instilled in everyone, from national economic systems down to the individual CEO, the local manager, the farmer doing the bidding of a corporation whose president holds their livelihood in soft, unworked hands.

I didn't think I would get there, but I feel bad for how scared my neighbor was now, more than how pissed off I was at him being such a dumbass. Unlike the CEOs in question, he at least utilized his fear hoping it would benefit someone else. He was acting out of ignorance, not being able to see where the smoke was coming from and hoping his decision was for the best.

Do the CEOs tell themselves the same story? Or are they like me, dialing 911 out of fear and concern, but looking at who they're going to push out of the way the entire time, already knowing how much others will suffer before the consequences reach them?

Play These Games Yourself

Both are free, browser-based, and take under an hour:

McDonald's Videogame: mcvideogame.com

Oiligarchy: molleindustria.org/oiligarchy

Fair warning: you will not feel good about winning. That's the point.

Affective games serve as powerful tools for systemic critique, using their mechanics to create meaningful emotional and intellectual experiences that prompt shock, laughter, and then grim reflection. Through careful design and selective modeling, they achieve their goals not by perfect simulation of life, but through applying life through an impeccable simulation of art, revealing truths we hide from ourselves about the systems that shape our world via cute characters doing deadly and awful things to achieve "success."

As a complicit observer, player, and actor on consumerist demands, this is hilarious, depressing, wry, and terrifying all at once.

Have you played either of these games? Did winning make you feel like garbage too? Reblog with your experience, especially if you felt that moment where the game decided you were losing even though you were "winning."

Better luck next time losers! pic.twitter.com/9UTGQnwy5f