Water Cooler Games served as the web's primary forum for "videogames with an agenda" — coverage of the uses of video games in advertising, politics, education, and other everyday activities, outside the sphere of entertainment.
The site was maintained at watercoolergames.org from 2003-2009, where it was edited by myself and Gonzalo Frasca. It is now archived here in full.
Exceptional Software Strategies and Media Edge offer Never Rest Game, a new counter-terrorism ARG in which players must "thwart terrorism by using their own methods against them when they least expect it."
The unusual thing about this ARG is that it bills itself as explicitly educational, and even tries to coin a new term for such a subgenre: the Instructional Alternate Reality Game, or I-ARG:
There's very little information on the website, but you can find more in the PDF brochure. Among the "learning elements" the creators say the game addresses are decision-making skills, after-action report generation, and adaptation to performance. It looks like they intend to sell the game as a sort of "kit" into corporate learning environments.
Update: As of Sunday 2 Sept., the website seems to be down for some reason. Also you can read some initial reaction, including thoughts about the business model of the creators, over at the Unfiction forums.
(thanks to Ben)
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