Good Pizza, Great Pizza Understands the Best Ingredient is Kindness

In the wake of the coronavirus, some of the hardest hit people have been folks who were already experiencing homelessness and locally owned restaurants. With shelter in place orders going live, people experiencing homelessness are caught between a rock and a hard place as doing so requires stable shelter. Even taking basic precautions–like washing your hands–requires access to facilities to do so. And sleeping around other people is now exceptionally dangerous, as the virus can spread via the air. In mid-May, the New York death rate for homeless folks was 56% higher than the rest of the city’s population. 

Similarly, many non-chain restaurants have been put through the wringer, trying to support themselves on take-out or delivery while still paying for rent and supplies. In an effort to help both of these populations, some cities have partnered with local restaurants to provide meals for shelters. In March, the City of Cambridge partnered with local restaurants in Harvard and Central Square to pay them to deliver meals to the area’s homeless shelters. Other cities have since followed suit.

Now while this provides for some heartwarming news in the midst of a terrible pandemic, this isn’t necessarily a new practice. Back in 2017, attention was drawn to the Robin Hood restaurant in Madrid, which used the profits it generated from charging a bit more of paying customers for breakfast and lunch to cover the costs of serving three-course dinners to people who couldn’t afford to pay at night. Guests were happy to pay more, knowing that it would go towards helping others. 

Another restaurant in LA, Everytable, took a slightly different approach to making quality food more accessible. They instead focused on delivering high quality, healthy food at fast food prices, and adjusted their prices based on the income levels of different parts of the city. Prices were scaled to be competitive everywhere, and made it much more possible for folks to access healthy food without having to also take the time out of their day to cook. 

TapBlaze’s Good Pizza, Great Pizza incorporates both of these ideas into its gameplay, and puts you in charge. On the surface, Good Pizza, Great Pizza is a cooking/restaurant sim that looks like it’d be right at home on mobile. You earn money by completing orders correctly and in a timely fashion, and can use that money to upgrade your ingredients, equipment, and store decor. The guests who come in are often quirky, asking for “a pepperoni with no pepperoni” or a “wumbo combo” but they show off the wide variety of folks who live in the city, including those who are down on their luck.

At least as far as I’ve played on the Switch version, there are two homeless men who will come by the shop asking for a bit of help with food. You can agree, or tell them no, but I’m not sure what happens if you turn them down since I’m not a monster. In these moments, Good Pizza, Great Pizza presents a much more nuanced ethical quandary than most games. After all, giving out a free pizza will lose you money in the short term, and though it’s a game and games tend to be predictable in their depictions of morality, there’s no way to know that you’ll get any in-game benefit for helping these guys. In that moment you just have to look at the practical vs. the moral, and make your choice from there.

Occasionally, there will also be folks who come in, and while they do have some cash, it’s not quite enough. If you agree to let them buy a pizza anyway, the price just adjusts to whatever they have on them. Through these sequences, Good Pizza, Great Pizza allows you to embrace a community-focused mentality when it comes to running your business. You can be kind to others around you, help them when they’re in need, and in turn, the community will invest in you. 

While part of me does wish that there was no blatant reward for helping those in need, it does help to demonstrate how key mutual aid can be for helping to improve the lives of people around us. (Light spoilers ahead) If you choose to help the men who ask you for food repeatedly, you build a relationship with them. They know you, appreciate your kindness, and eventually reciprocate it. Both men are able to get back on their feet at least in part because you were willing to help them out when they needed it, and they both remember and deeply appreciate it. One is able to return to work and brings you some money as a thank you for your help. The other, in a series of zany events, ends up destroying your jerkhole of a rival’s shop and opens his own lucrative business, of which he gives you a cut. 

Of course, this is a game, so it’s not perfect in any way, shape or form. But I still found it really exciting to be given the opportunity to provide kindness and support to a community I was joining in-game, and have that support go on to really benefit those folks and make their lives better. A little help can go a long way in making someone’s path easier to walk, and Good Pizza, Great Pizza understands that better than most.