Bad for Business

I recently installed and played mojo master because, apparently, I am filled with self-loathing. Mojo Master successfully blends Magic: The Gathering, Singles, and a desperate cry for help into a gaming experience that isn’t so much bad as it is horrible. But you can’t exactly blame the game for its overwhelming crapitude after all, it was created as a promotional gimmick for Axe Body Spray. In the alternate hellscape universe of this dating game, Axe Body Spray is a potent power-up instead of a substance that will make you smell like a strip club bathroom attendant’s worn and spattered Hush Puppies. If you’re capable of making that cognitive leap, then OK, maybe you can eke a little enjoyment out of conning digital vixens into dating you with the sub-middle-school double entendres that pass for wit in Mojo Master.

Then again, Mojo Master just might be the Noel Coward of corporate gaming. After playing I’m sorry, enduring Mojo Master, I took a quick spin around the Internet to see what other corporations had to offer in the way of games. Most corporate websites indeed feature some sort of gaming, most of it incredibly bad Shockwave mouse clickers that effectively whittle away a few of the minutes between now and your inevitable death with the added benefit of a special sneak preview of what purgatory might be like.

Take, for instance, the entertainment Coca-Cola provides at mycoke.com it’s all New Coke–caliber bad. For example, MyCoke Recycler cunningly captures the special tedium of fetching tools for an irrational factory foreman. “Bring me the Poofs!” it commands. “Bring me the planks!” it orders. First off, what the hell are Poofs? And why are planks going in my soda? Uh-oh! Be careful one wrong step and you might get incinerated by molten steel! Or electrocuted! Sweet Moby Dick, is this the same company that wanted to teach the world to sing? Another game, MyCoke Coaster, seems a more natural fit until you play it and discover that instead of promoting responsible beverage-cozy usage, Coaster is a sequence-memorizing game that charges you with getting a roller-coaster car to the top of the rails. Coke the beverage of one-armed, bail-skipping carnies.

Unlike Coke, the Pepsi.com entertainment isn’t designed by monkeys fed a steady diet of peyote and psilocybin. (I’ll pause here to note that while I don’t know how to spell “psilocybin,” Microsoft Word does. Make of that what you will.) Instead, Pepsi.com pimps its products not through bad games but personality tests, albeit tests packed with wild, wacky, eXXtreme ’tude. Through this no doubt rigorously scientific process, I am matched as an ideal Pepsi Twist drinker because when confronted with naming a hypothetical band, I opt for The Plastic Tart over choices such as Seventeen Sprain because The Plastic Tart was merely stupid as opposed to incredibly stupid, and because my real dream band name, Crawlspace Cowboy, wasn’t an option.

You’d think that such huge corporations would have the wherewithal to create better-quality content. Sadly, they don’t. These games don’t do anything to enhance their parent brands, and some aggressively degrade them. Like McDonald’s games. The company created those playgrounds at its obesity-dispensation centers in order to hook younger consumers, so surely its website is chock-full of fun for the youngsters, right? Wrong. The only real game I could find consisted of trying to click on a flitting Big Mac that shed lettuce and taunted me by declaring “MY BUNS DEMAND BOTH HANDS!” While this very phrase is doubtlessly useful in negotiating salary increases (yes, I’m looking at you, Ryan “Mr. Moneybags” Scott), its efficacy as a slogan related to a greasy food product is, at best, questionable. Your buns demand both hands? Of course they do, fat ass.

Some companies seem to worry if their Web visitors are even up to the task of gaming. Take Preparation H its website proffers a leisurely ’50s-style quiz show in lieu of anything too taxing or lively because, y’know, odds are if you’re visiting the Preparation H website you’ve already got enough aggravation. As you’d expect, Preparation H is all about the end result, and after you’ve wrestled with whimsical hemorrhoid humor in the form of multiple choice answers that postulate “Hemorrhoids often occur with birthday parties,” you’ve laughed a little, you’ve loved a little, and you’ve learned a lot about swollen rectal veins.

Yet the most unsettling diversion and definitive proof that businesses have no business in the game business comes courtesy of Nabisco. Journey to nabiscoworld.com/games and you’ll discover the unfortunately named CornHole, an innocuous enough little recreation yet the most badly named recreation since, um, Scab Nibbling. Short of finding a rat bottled in your soda, CornHole, with its subtle visual of a big, dark, round hole cut into a board, is the most inept brand enhancer ever, successfully linking snack chips with (at best) outhouses and (at worst) a little spot on the body which should avoid birthday parties at all costs. Bon app�tit!