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 wanted to give our readers a few useful updates on the state of Disaffected!.
First and most importantly, we've rev'd the game to v. 1.0.3 on both PC and Mac. The update fixes several bugs, changes some awkward joystick controls (not the intentionally awkward ones), and corrects a few smaller issues. Some Mac users may not have been able to play at all for various reasons, and this update should fix that. If you've already got D! on your machine, I strongly recommend reinstalling this new version. And if you haven't yet endured the trials of our simulated copy store, why wait any longer?
Next, you can now buy Disaffected! T-shirts to show your disaffection on the street, in your local Kinko's store, or even from the comfort of your own sofa. The excellent Guardian Gamesblog pointed to a recent Cnet story about anti-advergames (see below), noting that while some compare games like these to documentary, experimental satire games like Disaffected! and McDonald's Game have no distribution. That means we don't make any money, alas. This may change with new online sales channels opening up (1, 2), but for now there's always merchandising right?
Finally, a quick press update for those of you who care to follow public coverage of the game. CNet ran Games that stick it to 'The Man' on Disaffected, Molleindustria's McDonald's videogame, and the concept of anti-advergames. They even interviewed someone from Kinko's ad agency, and the quote is worth a huge laugh. French paper Libération ran an article (in French), as did Canada's Globe and Mail, Austria's Der Standard (in German), Business Online (in Italian), El País (in Spanish). But most interesting for us has been watching the response from unofficial Kinko's employee groups like this Livejournal community and the pro-labor group Kinko's Workers Unite.
Making Books
Academic Professional Job Opening
Slashdot Q&A
The Bulldog and the Pegasus
Speculative Realism Aggregator Update
Comments
NeMutluTürkümDiyene on Where in the World was Middle Earth?
Algogedaummam on Object-Oriented Ontology Symposium
Christopher Schaberg on Making Books
Jose Zagal on Making Books
Ian Bogost on Making Books
The Curse of Cow Clicker
Beyond the Elbow-Patched Playground
Low-Earth Lamentation
Shit Crayons
Aerotropolis
Against Aca-Fandom
There are no Blown Calls in Football
We Think in Public
What is Object-Oriented Ontology?
The Metaphysics Videogame
Cascading Failure
Top Ten Reasons I Returned My Kindle
Carrying On Over Carry-Ons
Reading Online Sucks







