Wedding Dash makes me want to never get married

Preliminary Game Analysis

Game: “Wedding Dash” http://www.shockwave.com/gamelanding/weddingdash.jsp

The protagonist of this game initially gets roped into organizing her best friend’s wedding last-minute. After doing such a “great job,” she begins to get booked as a wedding planner every weekend. To play the game, you must pay attention to each couple’s desires for food and wedding location so that you can “order” the correct items. You also must pay attention to whom the guests request to sit next to (and whom they specifically request not to sit next to), as well as which table they want. The game player also controls a second, nameless character who serves dishes and cleans plates. The main protagonist does little except watch the wedding and occasionally put out mini-disasters such as feuding bridesmaids and swarms of bees.

The ambiguity in the title, “Wedding Dash” is evident upon game play. Although the protagonist is literally dashing around through weddings or at least from one wedding to the next, the subplot in the story is her desire for a wedding herself. After her first string of successful weddings, she is congratulated by her friend Flo (of “Diner Dash” fame). However, her reply is not happiness with accomplishment of making money or being an excellent wedding planner, praised by both happy couple and guests alike, but instead is with her happiness that she received a date. She is elated with all the single men available to her and replies, “The best part is that the best man asked me out a date! Too bad I’m booked for the next 7 weeks!”

This seems to reinforce the traditional idea that a successful woman must either delay or sacrifice a personal life; she cannot have both. It also seems to suggest that the female character is motivated not by personal or professional reasons but instead is motivated only by a desire to meet “single” men.

Later in the game, when she goes on the delayed date (these scenes are relayed via a cartoon) the dinner is interrupted by a call to the protagonist’s cell phone. She excuses herself to take the callm, which we find out is from work. While she is gone, her date chats with a blonde waitress and ends up leaving with her. Again, this makes a clear argument that a woman can either have a professional or personal life, but not both—in order to keep a man happy, a woman must constantly be available for him or else he will run off with someone else who is.

The game also contains a narrative of the failure of marriage. The newlywed couples are constantly having bubble conversations in which they are simultaneously elated (“Lets’ have her plan our 50^th anniversary” and “I am so happy!”) and ignorant or incompatible (i.e. “You do want 10 kids, don’t you?”). This is not restricted to any one couple but instead each couple seems to be set up as an object of ridicule, as doomed to fail. Still, our protagonist constantly makes offhanded comments about how she wishes she were getting married instead of planning the weddings, despite the fact that they seem doomed to fail.

Spatially the protagonist seems incompetent as well—she does not really do anything. With the exception of consoling Aunt Ida, who cries at weddings, and preventing other “disasters” (Disaster averted! 200 points!), she simply watches the wedding from afar, something that seems to reiterate the fact that it is not her who is getting married or participating in marriage. When the user plays the game she is generally playing as the waitress rather than as the protagonist. The main character of the story is distanced from the user; we do not as much identify with her as we do her work for her (she is incompetent and just wants to date). Although we play the role of the employee (the waitress), we are not being ordered by her and instead have the ability to make our own decisions, and, in some cases, order her (to extinguish cooking fires, etc). This places the female protagonist in an extremely weakened position; she is essentially an airhead (who always dresses in skirts/dresses) who wants to get married. The confusing identification Flanagan writes about is therefore nearly impossible as the protagonist literally does nothing.