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Review
The Burger Meme Personality Test is a satirical short game that mocks the personality tests that some companies use as part of their hiring process.
Certainly there is a rich vein of absurdity to be mined here. The last test of this nature that I took consisted of placing yourself along a continuum between two statements, except that the statements weren’t really in opposition—think “I like to make friends” vs. “I like to experience new things.” How do you answer if it’s neither, or both? What answer are they even looking for when both options seem like things you would broadly want? I probably thought a little too hard about the implications of it all. I didn’t get an interview. And that’s on the tame side for this type of thing.
Burger Meme definitely gets some good hits in. I like the unexplained “sins” counter at the bottom, and the part where it makes you rate the relevance of the test and then reveals that it’s taking those answers into account for hiring. (I do always wonder if they’re doing that.) The game also makes good use of multimedia, is highly polished, and is short enough not to overstay its welcome. On balance I definitely think it’s worth your time to play through at least once. (I played twice and got two different endings, neither of which involved getting the job.)
But the “good ending” you get for refusing to completely abase yourself feels a little hollow, to me. Like, sure, I’m too good for that evil company, good for me! I still need a job, though, don’t I? Do I even have any non-evil options? (I’m projecting a little, of course, but at the same time, the game seems to invite that.) “How much am I willing to suck up to the corporate overlords in order to pay my bills?” is in real life a complicated question, and in providing karmic rewards of a sort to anyone who decides the answer is “not that much”, the game makes it seem much simpler.
But hey—in the unforgiving landscape of the current job market, maybe a little bit of (occasionally schadenfreude-flavored) wish fulfillment is perfectly reasonable.
(That said, if you question the AI nature of the supposed chatbot administering the test, there is another suite of endings that are a little less expected—but I haven't had the chance to explore them very fully yet.)
