Politics has taken more than its share of swipes at the video game industry in recent times. But what happens when games bite back?

Socially- and politically-aware games are becoming increasingly common online, the most recent being Molleindustria's McDonald's Videogame, a multi-tiered sim satirizing the process by which Mickey D's tallies up its millions served.

According to Paolo Pedercini, spokesman and founder of Molleindustria, the McDonald's Videogame was inspired by books lik Jeremy Rifken's Beyond Beef: The Rise & Fall of the Cattle Culture and Naomi Klein's No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies which deal, respectively, with the cattle industry and the emergence and persistence of brand-based culture.

"We have often claimed that video games have the potential to make complex systems such as the economic and social easy to understand," says Pedercini, "so we tried to give a practical example."
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