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.
I've been too busy to notice, but The Sims 2 has been out for about 10 days now. Mia Consalvo points to an MSNBC report that claims the game has sold 1 million units already.
We started a discussion here on WCG back in July about gay marriage in the Sims 2, and WCG reader "gay simmer" has made some interesting discoveries in the actual game (versus the hypothetical game we discussed this summer), which seem worth sharing here.
First you create your two sims (same gender) once that is done, go back and edit one, changing it to the opposite sex. once that is done, you can then create a baby between the two sims in create a family. After you have created the baby, go back and edit the sim whose gender you changed, and change it back.
this is what I did so that my sim-self and my sim-husband could have a bio-sim baby.
Much going on here, but I found one item of particular interest. First, even though this appears to be a kind of "work around" for gay offspring, the fact remains that same-sex couples can't actually bear children anyway. So in real life, you'd have to adopt, find a surrogate, etc. Adoption doesn't let you carry your own genes to your offspring of course. In that sense, does the representation of gay families in the Sims 2 mirror, pervert, or amend the real world?
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