Global Thermo-Hamburger War
While many of us have come to expect sly, hilarious hoaxes by our prankster pals The Yes Men, we might have some new players on the subversive prank field.
Serious Games is a company which creates customized “training software” for big corporations to press onto their employee drones. The company held a conference this week, in hopes of attracting more clients. One of the speakers at the conference was “Andrew Shimery-Wolf”, Strategic Communications Manager of “McDonald’s Interactive”. He talked about the fast-food industry simulation software they had designed. I downloaded their Power Point slideshow to see what they had to say. It looked like an increasingly complicated simulator program where you pretended to be a CEO of a fast food franchise, choosing where to place your restaurants, how much to buy in supplies, etc. Until this slide. Heh, they included in their simulator an “Externalities Inspector”, which let you look at the impact your fast food chain was having on global warming.
Then this slide, showing that at the present rate of global warming, you will kill off all of mankind, which will likewise harm your business’ profits.
Then this one, where global warming has caused sea levels to rise, and hundreds of your restaurants have been destroyed due to the flooding. At this point, the simulation seems to focus obsessively on slashing C02 emissions for the sake of saving your business.
And finally, the disastrous Game Over message.
This prank does not appear to be the work of the Yes Men, but email inquiries have led to RTMark. For years, RTMark has been more about matching up prank idea-makers with prank do-ers and people willing to finance the pranks. Perhaps RTMark is moving in a more active fashion, or perhaps this is just an example of their mysterious Protester™ software.
Anyhow, kudos to Mr. Shimery-Wolf (really, that name alone was worth the price).
[update]
Whoops, broken links fixed.
[/update]
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Your slide images are broken…
Comment by Trevor Bradley — June 7, 2006 @ 12:25 pm
Hmm, that might explain it….
http://www.lyingmediabatstards.com/pix/mcd4.jpg
“Bat Stards”? Sounds gnarly.
Comment by Trevor Bradley — June 7, 2006 @ 2:41 pm