The Burger Meme Personality Test

The game is a parody of a personality test that a corporation would administer to potential employees. They're widely reviled, and so it's a pretty easy target. In addition, the author has imagined the test to be administered by AI, another easy target.

But, as a result, the game never gets all that funny. It starts off with a surreal question, and remains surreal and random throughout. In my opinion, to get to be actually funny, you have to be surprising, but inevitable in hindsight. Starting surreal and staying surreal doesn't give the game enough room to make the player expect something, so I could never really be surprised by anything.

EDIT: Replayed today at the SF Bay Area IF Meetup and we discovered the (Spoiler - click to show)dating simulator endings. Now that's what I call surprising but inevitable in hindsight. I've changed my review from 3 stars to 4.

To get to those endings: (Spoiler - click to show)Play along with the survey enough to receive a job offer, then choose "Not Awesome" and refuse to work there. When asked why, say that the survey isn't even really an AI.

I think I would have given this game 5 stars if all of the endings had been that good.

Bleak and relatable. The effectiveness of this one will hinge entirely on how much experience the player has with the "bullshit personality quizzes" this game is based on, and their overall opinion of the jobhunting process as a whole. As someone who's had to do a non-zero number of those things, which is too many in my opinion, they really are as unnecessary as the game portrays.

Jobhunting, especially for low-level jobs, can easily become a degrading process. It's degrading to be forced to jump through hoops and affirm how much you would love a company if it hired you, when you know the company sees you as a replaceable cog in the machine and wouldn't care if you died tomorrow. It's degrading to have to watch videos about how excellent the company and its CEO are and what a net benefit they are for humanity when you can look up the awful things they've done in a few seconds online. It's degrading to spend hours filling out form after form, potentially thousands of forms over hundreds of hours, and get either ghosted or rejected, thousands of times.

The process works like this because the ideal job candidate for a business is someone who's desperate and can't turn to alternatives. Someone who's willing to jump through any hoop for their boss, no matter how humiliating it may be. Someone who has no choice but to take anything thrown at them, so they can have enough money to live. Jobhunting makes soulless syncophants of us all. And when almost everyone in a country is forced to undergo this process, and only the most syncophantic/sociopathic people vault to the top of the hierarchy and become wealthy and powerful, what does that country become?

The bonus (Spoiler - click to show)dating sim ending was a neat touch too, I guess. Though I felt it didn't fit with the overall atmosphere of the rest of the game - too cheerful, for one, and for a game where a major theme is the replacement of human workers with AI and the economic effects it will have on millions of people's lives, (Spoiler - click to show)revealing that the AI was actually a human all along didn't sit right with me.

I played this game while waiting in line at the US Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), which might be ironic if considered from a certain angle. (Bureaucracies, innit?) The downside was that a lot of the large images took a very long time to load. Still, I replayed three times and got three different endings: (Spoiler - click to show)Dodged That Bullet Burger, Corporate Sellout Burger, and the successful dating sim ending, forgot what that last one was called. I imagine the other endings are what you get if you decide to stay friends with the employee, or reject the employee entirely.

Quotes:

> But what if I'm scared of clowns?

Sorry, but how exactly do you expect to work here? Our mascot, as you MUST know, is the beloved clown “Skibidi FAFO™.”

We’re not going to show you an image of him in case you really are scared of clowns. We’re not monsters. But we know you’ve seen Skibidi FAFO™. EVERYBODY has. He is the CLOWNIEST of clowns.

If you joined the Burger Meme™ family, you would see the Skibidi FAFO™ 490 times a day. His image is plastered literally on every previously unadorned surface at Burger Meme™ HQ. It would be like trying to work at Disney and being afraid of lawsuits.

Oh dear. You were a Liberal Arts major in college, weren’t you?

Liberal Arts majors don’t historically become productive members of the Burger Meme™ family. They become “whistleblowers” who “believe in the dignity of workers” and “try to start unions” so that employees can “take profits from parasitic shareholders and redistribute them to employees.”

Interesting fact!

Based on your answers so far, you have scored in the top 44% of people who will never have enough savings to retire!

Food and water, infrastructure, justice: all those things will come, but only through guns, only after guns make them possible. The threat of death is the foundation of every civilization. If we want to rebuild society, then we will have to shoot those members of society who get too far out of line. Well, if no one gets too far out of line, we’ll still have to shoot a few people. People have to know we are SERIOUS.

Awesome!

The Burger Meme Personality Test is about applying to a fictional corporation called Burger Meme™. You’ve already gone through the application process- (Spoiler - click to show)chip implantation and everything- and this A.I. powered personality test is the final step to see if you’re truly worthy.

Ready to learn a little more about yourself and not hold Burger Meme™ responsible for any trauma this required voluntary test may cause?

What could possibly go wrong?

Gameplay
There’s not much I can clarify for you here. The test asks questions. You answer them from a list of responses. And get judged by a snarky A.I. every step of the way.

One notable feature is a counter at the bottom of the screen that says Sins. If you select an answer that goes against the values of Burger Meme™, you gain a Sin and risk your potential future with the company.

The funniest part for me was Question 3. It features an artwork of a couple standing by an ocean. The man is doing… something vaguely affectionate to the woman. I'm not sure what the original artist had in mind, but the game’s author decided to interpret it as the woman’s neck being broken. We are then asked to identify how we most relate to it:

> I relate to the man breaking the neck of the woman.
> I relate to the woman having her neck broken.
> I relate to the uncaring blue of the sea and sky.
> I relate to the useless yellow flowers, helplessly watching a murder occur.
> I have a different interpretation of the picture.

Why is this so funny? No idea.

And that’s the case for much of the gameplay.

What I wish I knew in advance: This is not a game to play around other people unless you want them to ask, "dude, what's so funny?" because you keep trying not to laugh.

That said, players will either relate to my experience or be turned off by its rapid-fire style of humor. In that regard, the game is more hit or miss.

Story
The Burger Meme Personality Test is a parody of the use of personality tests in actual hiring practices. Rather than using a developed story, the game portrays this general concept by saturating it with comedy. Its appearance and clown mascot is a casual dig at McDonalds and exhibits a whole range of corporate clichés that extend to countless other real-life corporations.

The test is filled with the identifying features of a minimum wage, no benefits job at a corporation that presents itself as a “family.” It also has repeated reminders that your opinion matters, generic HR teamwork-themed imagery, and claims of being stewards of the environment. Oh, and corporate buzzwords.

In fact, it’s inspired by a true story, one that the author found on Reddit’s Mildly Infuriating subreddit.

Someone applying to FedEx had to take a personality test that involved looking at what appears to be stills from a video game that looks awfully like The Sims… except the characters are blue-skinned elf-humans. The applicant was then asked to state if they could relate to any of the characters in each image. For real, the only possible answers were “Me” and “Not me.”

The results were way off. The applicant did not feel like their result matched their actual personality. Apparently, one result said, “Can be taken for granted because you complete tasks without objections.”

?!?!???!?!?

Remember, this is FedEx.

In the end, the applicant decided not to put up with this rubbish and withdrew their application. And I thought Burger Meme™ had some screws loose. No offense to anyone who works for FedEx.

Keep in mind that the author isn’t outright opposing the usage of personality tests in hiring. Instead, it makes fun of tests that have little platform in terms of being reliable assessments of a person’s inner workings.

Plus, the game lightly touches on real-life problems such as the chances of being able to retire at a reasonable age and how “Full and Comprehensive Medical Plans” can be all talk, no coverage.

Characters
The Burger Meme Personality Test is a dorky test that isn’t meant to be taken seriously, but there is an unexpected twist that gives it more depth than games that share a similar premise.

Visuals
Being modeled off McDonalds, most of the game uses a yellow background with dark red text. Meanwhile, the epilogue/endgames opted for a basic white background with black text. Cleverly, (Spoiler - click to show) the Jwala endings, which involve Jwala contacting you on a dating website, featured a basic chat interface with speech bubbles and a website logo.

And tons of ridiculous imagery. Go play the game.

Conclusion
So, are you hired?

I found a great deal of humor in this game. There are multiple endings and loads of replay value. Playing it is time well spent. Even if you don’t get hired.

But wait, there’s more! - Some of my favorite results include:

(edit: grammar, pesky grammar. I swear I proofread these things)