Online games are unpredictable things. Most of the time, people are content to play within the guidelines, doing what the designers intended. But sometimes, they need a broader canvas on which to express themselves. Such, I expect, might be the case with the guy roleplaying a McDonalds cashier I encountered while playing Destiny 2 last night.
Our fireteam had just stopped by the Tower to pick some things up before running a Grandmaster Nightfall, when one of us noticed a player named OneClipMagYT standing in a hard-to-reach area: the service window behind the Postmaster, on the way to the Hangar. The route to get into that area is long and circuitous, requiring a series of jumps across catwalks and into vents before finally dropping down there. Right now, there’s no reason to access it — unless, of course, you wanted to pretend you were working the register at a McDonalds in local chat.
I didn’t really get what was happening at first, as evidenced by my attempt to join in and tell my clanmate how much his order was, only to be corrected by the guy behind the glass. In my defense, I haven’t really been to McDonalds much since the 2000s, so my sense of how much things cost has yet to catch up to inflation.
Gradually, we all converged on the window, as the guy running the fictional McD’s ran back and forth from the counter to the door at the back of the room to pick up the imaginary orders, aided presumably in his task by the maintenance frames lingering about. Things turned bad, however, when Juan found a “worm” in his food.
From there, things quickly degenerated as I threw up a red card for a worm-related violation and we skedaddled to run our Grandmaster. (Proving Grounds is a pain in the ass, by the way.)
Now, it’s possible our restaurant roleplayer might have been doing all of this for a YouTube video, but I like to imagine that he just had a wild hair to hop into local chat and roleplay like he was working at a McDonalds.
Why? Why do people do anything? To bridge the gap between human beings, to feel a connection with another person. To paraphrase Caiatl from earlier in the season, one of the most important things is to be seen as you are. Well, I see you, McDonalds roleplayer. I see you.
