This week, when we were asked to play Candy Crush or Diner Dash, I admit, I had a small amount of disdain for the assignment- I’m ashamed to admit I played a decent amount of both games in my youth. However, my disdain was not because I had to play a game I dabbled in before, it was because I wasn’t quite ready to play a game that resembled a job I held for many years, and the shifts I experienced were much, much longer than the shifts in the game. I opted to play Diner Dash because I knew it required a little bit more attention and skill than that of Candy Crush (at least in my opinion). I was prepared to casually play in one of my previous lives, but I wasn’t prepared for how angry I would get over the misrepresentation of women and POC in the game.
The main character of the game, Flo, leaves her stressful office job to return to the life of a waitress (it’s told in earlier versions of the game that Flo left the restaurant life to go work in an office). As someone who has been working in restaurants since she was sixteen, I found this to be a somewhat disillusioned view of what it’s like to work in a restaurant. Yes, there are people who work in restaurants their whole lives- it’s their chosen profession, and more power to them. However, if someone has aspirations to leave the service industry, they more often than not, leave the industry for good; they were using the position as a stepping stone to their goal. Not to mention, out of all the jobs out there, I personally feel like working in a restaurant is way more stressful than working in an office- you’re on your feet for hours at a time, constantly dealing with people, and not really having any “down time” to eat or even go to the bathroom, not siting for the majority of the day with the ability to leave the office when you’re ready for a break. This little snafu in storyline rubbed me the wrong way, and it did not help when I started to analyze the game in regards to Aubrey Anable’s article “Casual Games, Time Management, and the Work of Affect” (which I will get to in a bit, first let me tell you all the things that bothered me about the characters in this game).
While I was playing, I noticed something a little bit odd about the customers coming into the restaurant regularly- they were all women. And on top of that, the majority of the women were white, there wasn’t a POC to be seen within the groups of customers. Because we were only required to play the game for an hour, we were introduced to three different characters, all with different needs- Barb, Shakes, and Gordon. Barb, who is the only POC we are introduced to, comes in with other Barbs, not integrated into the groups of white women. Speaking of the characters coming in with groups of the same character, they literally come in with the same character; there is no subtle variation in how a character looks, like hair color or eye color, but if you match their different colored clothing to a chair, you get a bonus (an unenthusiastic woo-hoo). Women are the only reoccurring customers that don’t have any sort of special object you need to complete in order reach the goal. As for the men, they are considered “VIP” characters, who require special attention in order to reach the goal for the level. This pedestal the men are on really bothers me, not only because it is reaffirming the patriarchy, but also because the customers whom I had really horrible encounters with while managing a restaurant were men (I had one man throw his food back at me because he ordered the wrong dish). I know this game is considered a casual game, but, I feel like there should have been more integration of actual ethnicities into the characters, and a better distribution of the genders as well, not just having white men be the important customers, but women and POC too. It would have also helped if we were able to create our character, instead of having to use Flo- even though it is her narrative, we are not all Flo.
In relation to the Anable article, Diner Dash really highlighted how gendered casual games are and their obvious marketing towards women. Because our character is female, this game “stage[s] the affective work of being a woman worker (what it feels like) as well as the work of being a subject who longs to feel differently in relation to work during a time when affective and immaterial labor has become the model for most work regardless of gender,” (Anable 7). This idea of being a woman worker gives sexist undertones of the woman being in a position to serve others, circa the 1950s, and that it gives the woman pleasure to do so; Flo is even giving us a Rosie the Riveter pose on the title screen, signifying that she is a working gal. Not to mention, Dinner Dash makes it seem so rewarding to be a woman serving others and that is a great aspiration in life. Anable points out that Flo is rewarded by being able to serve others even better at the end of the game, “After Flo has worked her way up and has built a restaurant empire, her reward is extra appendages with which to more efficiently serve,” (13). Yes, being able to more efficiently serve is a good goal when working in the food service industry, but it should not be the ultimate reward. Service should not be the reward for service, I liken this to getting raisins while trick-or-treating.
Perhaps it’s my experience working in restaurants, or it could be that I’m a woman who is simply tired of being surrounded by the white patriarchy, but Diner Dash is probably one of the few casual games I can say I really do not enjoy playing at my leisure. It’s like Anable says, “The time management games in the Dash series can be productively added to the female complaint genre, yet here the complaint is not only about women’s disappointment over lived intimacy, but also a complaint that expresses a whole range of disappointments. Not the least of which is the ways work culture and labor conditions in the 21st century seem to exacerbate gender inequality while at the same time universalizing women’s precarious status as workers to massive segments of the population, regardless of gender,” (16).
I feel this - I also was really surprised to see that the "difficult" female characters (in the sense that they are easily frustrated, impatient) were the only POC in the game and that the VIP characters are white men. Who green-lighted that?! I also wondered about the segregation between parties in the game. I assume that the motivation behind having homogeneous tables is to balance the difficulty of managing the needs of several tables at once, but I actually wonder if heterogeneous table groups might be a more interesting click-management puzzle, adding another level of complexity to the game (meanwhile also solving the segregation issues).