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.
The Centers for Disease Control, which is located just a few clicks down the road from where I live, has a new ad campaign to encourage more active lifestyles. As printed in AdCritic, one of these ads depicts a bunch of overweight baseballers in stained uniforms idle and cookout on a sullied, overgrown infield. The image is intricately created to resemble an in-game render; for example, the stands are simple primitives with textures to make them appear to have seats. The ad (and presumably the campaign) tagline reads, "Give your thumbs a rest. Play for real." Click the thumbnail at top right to see a larger version. AdCritic doesn't tell us much about the campaign, save that Saatchi & Saatchi NY is running it. I'm assuming this is a print/outdoor ad that might find its way into magazines or billboards.
What a foolish move on the part of the CDC. Who do they think they're communicating with? If the goal was to replicate the shock value of, say the "truth" anti-smoking campaign, they'd do well to start with the social and class issues that produce the problem in the first place. If the goal was to create empathy with videogame-playing youth and to use that empathy to start a conversation, there's no chance of it happening now; the ad is too vilifying. If the goal was to startle parents into intervening in their kids play habits, chances are that the families with stable, structured two-parent homes invest in a wide range of activities for their kids. Don't get me wrong, I don't want my kids playing videogames all the time either. But they don't. Not even close. And neither do the kids who eat at McDonald's three nights a week because it's cheaper than buying fresh produce, or who drink soda every day because Coca Cola paid their school district millions of dollars in subsidies to place vending machines in their elementary schools.
So, chalk this up as more anti-videogame discourse from our anti-videogame government's rhetoric: obesity and health are always caused by moral failings, never by the intersection of myriad social and political situations.
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