Paper #3

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Thaidan Pham

Professor Hearn

EWRT 2

30 July 2013

Go with the Flo: Stereotypes, Culture, and Capitalism in Diner Dash

Click, drag, drop. 100 points for matching the customer’s color to the seat. Click, drag,

. . . quickly minimize the computer window for Diner Dash! Your boss walks past your cubicle

and you pretend to be diligently working. Published by PlayFirst, Diner Dash is a casual game

created with the intention of being played in the workplace. Played with the click of a computer

mouse, its easy and short gameplay is forgiving to interruptions in the workplace. Because of the

simplicity of the game, players may not realize it promotes values and beliefs beyond its

sponsors’ messages. Even though Diner Dash conveys a belief in gendered occupations, it

promotes a work-oriented culture that serves as an agent for American capitalism.

Diner Dash promotes the notion of gendered occupations, specifically addressing the

female workforce in a negative and stereotypical manner. Through the representation of Flo, the

game portrays women as incapable of managing professional white-collar careers. In the game’s

introductory narrative, players initially meet Flo as a discontent stockbroker. She stresses out

when assignments pile up, leading her to run out of the office and resign. Flo reflects a woman

that who cannot handle the demands of her job, unfavorably suggesting that women may be

unable to withstand the difficulties that white-collar jobs might have. However, Flo’s failure may

not be wholly attributed to her personal character. Since her suit reflects the masculine

environment in where she works, her failure may be that she cannot negotiate with the machismo

prevalent in the workplace. If preference is given to men at work, women may have to work

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harder than men to achieve the same amount of success, which can cause women to feel

frustrated. Flo’s representation is problematic because it can teach players to underestimate a

woman’s capabilities and regard white-collar jobs within the realm of male dominance.

Harboring this negative attitude can deter women from working and even participating in

society. By showing that women do not fare well in the professional white-collar sector, Diner

Dash contributes to the inequality gap between men and women in labor.

In contrast to demonstrating that women are unable to manage white-collar jobs, Diner

Dash stereotypically portrays that women are successful in performing emotional labor.

Emotional labor consists of occupations intended to manage the emotional experiences of

customers such as childcare, house cleaning, and nursing. In the game, restaurant customers are

depicted with hearts to quantify and visualize their satisfaction with Flo’s service. The hearts

represent Flo’s objectives as a waitress to attend to customer by executing emotional labor. Since

Flo is a female character, her objectives convey the stereotype that emotional labor occupations

are predominately female ones. Because of gender expectations, women are often regarded as

natural caregivers. Since these occupations require employees to exercise care and empathy

towards customers, women are more subjected than men to emotional labor. The stereotype may

create a separation between the work done by men and by women, limiting women to

occupations that are supposedly related to their natural responsibilities such as maintaining the

household. Thus, women may be driven into emotional labor jobs because of social expectations,

regardless of their abilities. Women may be at a disadvantage because, for instance, a woman’s

failure may be less forgiving than a man’s failure because she was expected to succeed. Since

players learn to regard females as the more compassionate one of the two genders, the game may

contribute to the gender division in labor.

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Even though Diner Dash portrays women in the workplace, it also portrays society’s

work-oriented culture. The genre of the game suggests that there is a breakdown between the

boundaries of time and play. Diner Dash is a time-management game, in which players

strategically manage time spent on various tasks to maximize efficiency; players can set multiple

tasks in motion and, after waiting for completion, return to amass the beneficial results. The

productivity of time-management games contests the conception that games are frivolous

pastimes. Intended for leisure time, games are usually seen as separate from work; however,

time-management games thematically portray the characters’ environment and tasks as similar to

those of workplace in the non-gaming world. This gamification of work suggests that society has

a work-oriented culture that encourages individuals to work even in times of play. Even though

work-oriented games can benefit players by preventing idleness, they may be converting well-

deserved leisure time into time-management training time. The games can cause the individual to

overextend herself; when the purpose of games to distract people from productivity recedes,

people may feel distressed because they lose an outlet to relieve work frustrations. Embedding

productivity into gameplay, Diner Dash may ironically extend work into leisure time.

In addition to Diner Dash’s gameplay genre, society’s work-oriented culture is also

present in Flo’s persona throughout the game series. Flo is evidently a workhorse in each

installment of the series. In Diner Dash 2: Restaurant Rescue, she works at her four friends’

restaurants. In Diner Dash 3: Flo on the Go and Diner Dash 4: Hometown Hero, instead of

enjoying her vacations, she respectively works as a waitress on the cruise and at landmark

attractions in her hometown. In each installment, Flo’s work ethic is celebrated when her

restaurants expand and other characters admire her waitressing abilities. Therefore, Flo portrays

the American Dream, in which endorses that hard work is encouraged and will achieve success.

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However, Flo can be seen as a critical representation of the ideal. By showing that Flo works

even outside of her restaurant, the game portrays society as enslaved by work. Furthermore,

Flo’s workaholicism goes unaddressed because an addiction to work is a culturally accepted and

encouraged. A work-oriented culture may be productive, but it can come at the cost of a healthy

work-life balance. With a workhorse as the game’s central character, Diner Dash socializes

players to admire good work ethics, but, in a work-oriented culture, players should be weary of

becoming engaged in workaholicism.

Because Diner Dash promotes a work-oriented culture that values productivity, the game

can serve as a socializing agent for capitalism. The gameplay of Diner Dash embodies the

factory system, an early but dominant mode of capitalist production. First, players follow basic

steps: seat customers, take orders, deliver orders to the cook, deliver food, bring customers the

check, and clean tables. These repetitive steps are analogous to the routinzation of work tasks by

the factory system. The game and the factory system both offer some kind of uniformity,

respectively, in the style of play and in products. Second, gameplay occurs all in one screen. This

convenient aspect of the game is comparable to the building design that factory systems employ;

under the factory system, there is central building where production occurs to manage machinery

and the flow of material. The game emulates aspects of the factory system that contribute to the

productivity and efficiency capitalism is directed towards maximizing. By embedding capitalism

into its gameplay, the game associates feelings of enjoyment with the economic system. In this

way, the game can socialize players to admire capitalism and promotes its persistence. However,

players may be critically unaware of the drawbacks of capitalism that the game does not present

such as economic inequality, exploitation of labor, and depletion of resources. Since Diner Dash

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presents capitalism in an entertaining way, players may be unaware that they are becoming

advocates for the economic system.

The factory system is important to capitalism because it cheapens production to

maximize profit. Diner Dash also embodies this core tenet of capitalism – the profit motive. In

capitalism, manufacturers expand their business when they earn enough profit; profit becomes an

incentive to produce and sell goods and services in the marketplace. Likewise, the game is based

around a profit-like motive. Players can advance on to the next level and upgrade the restaurant

if they earned enough points at the end of the level. By rewarding the player after each level, the

game creates an incentive to play. By imitating capitalist motivation in its objectives, the game

socializes players to encourage capitalist activities. First, since expansion increases the depth of

the game, players learn to associate the technological advances that capitalism seeks to cheapen

production with positive benefits and will be more likely to promote them. Second, since the

game relies on points to progress, players also learn that capitalism depends on profit or else the

capitalist market will fail. Players may be inclined to participate in capitalist activities such as

consuming and producing to maintain the economic system. By embedding capitalism in its

gameplay, Diner Dash may cause players to adopt the principles of capitalism unknowingly.

Players may be hostile to other economic systems without understanding “the other side of the

argument.” The game follows aspects of capitalism and becomes an agent that contributes to the

persistence of the economic system.

Diner Dash first appears as a casual game, but analysis of its gameplay suggests it offers

players more than entertainment. If Diner Dash was a cultural artifact discovered by civilizations

thousands of years from now, it would portray the current stereotypes of women, the emphasis

on work, and the encouragement of capitalism in society. Although a few of these applications

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have positive implications such as productivity, they also have negative ones such as

overextending people’s lives. Like literary works and artistic expressions, games reflect aspects

of society not create them. Therefore, if the reflections are problematic, altering or eliminating

the game is not the solution; the responsibility lies on society’s shoulders.