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Water Cooler Games

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.

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Free Culture Game

by Ian Bogost September 17, 2008

categories: Activism Games , Political Games

Take a look at Molleindustria's fascinating Free Culture Game. The game bills itself as "a playable theory," and the theory in question is a loose amalgam of critiques of knowledge capitalism, the principle that ideas are owned and subject to control. Through its rules, the game advances the idea that the complete privatization of knowledge is impossible, however without active opposition the market will coopt new ideas for its own sake.

Apart from being an interesting abstract specimen, Free Culture Game also promotes the Spanish activist collective exgae, which advances principles of free culture. This in mind, Molleindustria's Paolo Pedercini told me that the game could be considered a "poster-game," an an interesting concept in its own right.

Comments (1)

This had just enough "game" to make it feel like a challenging, compelling experience. At the same time, the underlying discourse the game presents is very interesting. It is literally about the marketplace of ideas - not an easy concept to present in a coherent game space.

While I myself am a strong supporter of the creative commons and the idea landscape of free culture, the factor least present in the game is the need for free culture (the "green people") to have some marketplace incentive. While they are bound up in the marketplace as mindless consumers, (the "gray people") at least have the opportunity to do things not presented in the game - rather important things such as buying groceries or paying the rent. These are variables that The Free Culture Game does not account for and as a result it does not lend itself to striking some balance between marketplace incentives for generating ideas and sharing those ideas to foster creative culture.

If Paolo ever decides that designing videogames would be a good way to pay for his groceries or his rent, I would be more than happy to pay a little bit of capital for that Free Culture.

DannyLedonne on September 21, 2008 10:45 PM