What I imagine many readers are looking for from an English social media and technology blogger is an overdue Thanksgiving treat. So here you are:
<(delme)embed src="http://www.peta.org/cooking-mama/swf/cooking-mama.swf" width="300" height="219" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" /> Widget deleted for noise pollution!
This is a cheeky bit of social media from US animal rights organisation PETA (full size and downloadable versions here). It’s a sort-of protest that plays on and satirises the Cooking Mama games from Majesco Entertainment. You might come across the latest instalment on the Wii over the Christmas period. As you’ll see if you play the game, you prepare a thanksgiving dinner with an emphasis on the unpleasantness of it all — it emphasises the visceral elements of cooking meat and was thus intended to draw attention to the sad plight of turkeys and prompt people to give up meat.
Sadly (for the animals, I guess, and also PETA’s marketing gurus) reaction to the game doesn’t suggest that it’s created a lot of hard-core vegetarians with this release:
(from the digg comment thread)
This game is AWESOME!!!
Can we have Slaughterhouse Mama next? I wanna bash some cows IN THE HEAD on my DS!
Seriously, PETA. Nintendo’s gonna sue you, Majesco’s gonna sue you and all you did was make the game more awesomer.
EPIC FAIL FTW!!!
(from the thread on Kotaku)
To be honest, this just makes me hungry, and reminds me I need to buy meat
(from the thread on Rampant Coyote)
Not only did the game miss the mark in inspiring the gross-out they wanted to achieve, but doesn’t that message miss the point entirely in the first place?
I mean… “Don’t kill animals… it’s gross!” Is that what PETA’s message is now… not kindness or concern or humanity… no. It’s about keeping clean now, cause you know, don’t wanna do anything that’s gross.
I could have respected something like, a cute little turkey with big eyes pleads with you not to kill it or something, and if you do so you end up feeling evil or something. This is nothing like that. So yeah, even from a crazed PETA-freak perspective, it still misses the mark, I thought.
The web makes ideological interventions tricky for organisations because you can’t be sure who the audience is going to be. If you follow current trends and make your game bloggable and portable through a widget, you increase the reach of what you’ve done, but also increase the chances of a very different reaction to the one you had planned. While Cooking Mama is a kids game, the parody was launched in the adult market, and its widget-ness helps it spread in that demographic. Adult gamers are generally used to pretty good gore, while this offers nothing more gory than Wolfenstein 3D. It would be equally tricky if they produced something photorealistic and considerably more graphic, in which case they’d be accused of attempting to shock, terrify and traumatise children.
Food for thought, one way or another.
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Thanks for the mention! The game has been immensely popular, and I disagree with the commenter who said that we haven’t achieved any conversions because of it. The reaction to it has been great so far, and we have more games planned in the future.
PS: The turkey’s head was intentionally left on for longer than it would be in reality, which addresses the last commenter’s concern. :)
Thanks, Lianne.
The feedback from the gaming community was overwhelmingly negative — as I illustrated.
Any response to that, or a pointer to a (non-veggie) community where you got positive feedback?
This game is very clever. It plays on the fascination of the web community for slightly sick humour which buys it plenty of distribution and market penetration. That target market is the carrier and was never intended for the message to effect. However this takes the message where PETA can not hope to ever go and out there are people who will see the message and react.
At least, if they meant to do it like that it is very clever.