mdlake.net

There’s net-sophisticated companies, and there’s net-foolish ones. The Frito-Lay corporation has apparently heard about this new “internet” thingie, and apparently somebody told them the internet was popular with the youth demographic. Eager to hitch their wagon to a rising star, Frito-Lay has decided to join us in this wonderful new “cyberspace,” as the kids call it.

They’ve had a web site for years, of course, but somebody must have explained to them that the internet is a crowded place, and that generating mass interest takes more than a web page reminding folks that, yes indeed, we make snack foods, and we hope you’ll buy some. So, to launch Frito-Lay into the new millennium, some executive was put in charge of finding something else to draw eyeballs. He settled on a Doritos game.

To the clueless, this makes sense: kids like the internet, kids like games; give kids a Doritos game on the internet, and they’ll see lots of Doritos ads. Think things through a little farther, though: what can you do with a Doritos game that won’t suck? And a sucky game is not really what a smart marketing executive wants to attach his product to. The executive and his staff were clever enough to realize that somebody who wound up in the Doritos marketing department probably is not an A-list game designer, so they aren’t going to design their own suckiness directly. Instead, they turned the bad idea of a game into a three-tiered bad idea.

Phase One: hold a contest asking entrants to submit a game design! The five best ideas, selected by Frito-Lay, will earn their creators a wide-screen TV. These ideas will also suck, in part because the basic material is so flimsy, even with the hint to “Use our iconic shape, bold flavors or simply our intense experience—whatever comes to mind. How you use that inspiration is entirely up to you.” That is to say, a game with an isosceles triangle, or maybe some orange burst icons. Inspiring. But the ideas will also because, in the computer design business, you get what you pay for—if you’re lucky enough to get that. Somebody who can conceive of great games will not work for a television screen. I remain suspicious that the “tips from industry experts”—coming soon!—will turn the uninitiated into great game designers.

Phase Two: hold a poll about which game will be the best! In theory, this engages the whole online community. In practice, the poll only engages those whose arms the entrants can twist for a vote, because nobody cares enough to seek out a Dorito-intensive lifestyle. The poll will not select the least sucky game; it will select the game of whoever browbeats the most friends.

Phase Three: make the game available to visitors! Most people who hear about the game will immediately decide the game will suck, and go instead to their favorite porn site. The ones who foolishly try it out will soon learn it sucks. Any further thinking they exert on Doritos will be associated with a dumb game, and the youth demographic is not kind towards what it considers a dumb game.

Also, because the five finalists will be selected by the marketing division, I can already predict what three of the five games will be, because they’ll have to be cheap to program and easy for the marketing division to grasp. One: a Pac-Man descendant, in which you try to gobble up chips without letting the bad guys touch you. Two: a Space Invaders descendant, in which your vaguely-airfoilish isosceles triangle zaps bad guys threatening to interfere with humans’ Dorito-intensive lifestyles. Three: a Tetris descendant, wherein you try to match up groups of isosceles triangles with the same bold flavor (represented by color) until the screen ultimately fills with mismatched triangles. Super-intense triangles will allow you to clear a whole region at a sweep.

Aaaaand I’m out of ideas. Two more, and I could sweep the finals. If I had the energy to submit my ideas, I assure the judges that all of them would provide an iconic, bold, and above all intense experience. Or maybe not.