Video games usually put players in a sexy role they will never actually have a shot at: a “High School Musical” dancer, a guitar hero or an auto thief.

Now, a new game created with the help of Dairy Queen, “DQ Tycoon,” lets players run their own fast-food franchise.

“Oh, come on, who hasn’t wanted to run and own a DQ?” said Michael Keller, the chief brand officer of Dairy Queen International. “Maybe everybody doesn’t, but so many Americans have grown up with the DQ brand, and have had that experience of stepping up to a DQ window on a hot summer day.”

“DQ Tycoon” is a time-management game, one of a genre of anxiety-inducing games requiring players to race against the clock to complete mundane tasks — in this case, preparing Peanut-Buster Parfaits, taking orders, restocking the refrigerator and dipping cones.

It is available for download at BigFishGames.com for $19.99, but can be played free for an hour. It is also sold at Target stores.

Other games in the category include “Cake Mania” (bake and ice all day); “Diner Dash” (run a greasy-spoon restaurant); “Turbo Pizza” (satisfy impatient pizzeria customers); and “Hospital Hustle” (administer medical treatments).

While these were not developed with corporations, others in this category were. They include “Top Chef,” based on the Bravo television program of the same name, and “The Office,” from the NBC show. The intended audience for these games is neither hard-core teenage male gamers, nor children, but adult women.

“My understanding is, it’s a lot of these stay-at-home moms who, when they put their kids down for a nap, like to go play,” said Jill Anderson, senior marketing manager for Dairy Queen. “We were kind of hypothesizing that if at one point they had worked, they were looking for that stimulus.”

Gary Miller, the owner of Game- Mill, said he had spent about $200,000 designing the game. Dairy Queen received an advance fee and will receive a percentage of sales if the game sells above a certain number of units. Keller said Dairy Queen will make “in the five figures” from the game, and the amount could be higher.

“We just thought, ‘Let’s try and figure out a fun brand we could put behind some of these casual games,’” Miller said. GameMill has also created a hunting game with the gun brand Remington, “Remington Big Buck Trophy Hunt.”

Miller said he did not expect all of his games to be hits. “We have titles we don’t recoup our investment on,” he said. “We keep on throwing darts at the board.”

Some of the early players of “DQ Tycoon” say they have the kind of frustrations they imagine real Dairy Queen managers face: Workers are not as speedy as managers would like.

“I was really excited to play a DQ game (although it makes me hungry),” a reviewer called tian games wrote at Gamezebo.com. But, the reviewer wrote, “the workers are so inefficient as to make the game unplayable after the first week.”

Another reviewer, stingstungme, wrote: “Slow workers just need to stay home.”