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.
Last year, Jane McGonigal, Mia Consalvo, and I hosted the Game Studies Download at the Game Developers Conference. We attempted to assemble the top 10 research findings from the previous year and rapidly summarize them for what turned out to be a totally packed room of game developers.
This year, we've been invited back to do it again. As Jane notes over on Avant Game, we could use your help! I'm just going to cite her for the details:
We can consider any published scholarly work in the area of videogames, computer games, or mobile games. The work can be in the form of an article, a book chapter, a book, or even a white paper if it has a strong research bent. We are especially interested in research about console games and non-MMORPG PC games. (But we're open to ANY digital games research.)
To be eligible for our list, the work must have been published for the first time between March 2006 and March 2007.
Feel free to email me any suggestions you have, within the next couple weeks. Note that I'm particularly interested in good, relevant humanistic research to present, as we didn't cover a lot of that last year and the audience actually asked for more of it.
Exergames, Microtalks, Nuovo Sessions, and More
Exhaust Objects
We Have Never Been Threshing
Shell Games
Philosopher Slab Poems, in Pixels and Letters
Comments
Robert Jackson on Exhaust Objects
anxiousmodernman on Exergames, Microtalks, Nuovo Sessions, and More
Alvaro Cavalcanti on How to Turn Heavy Rain into a Restroom Simulator
Carl on Philosopher Slab Poems, in Pixels and Letters
Michael Austin on Philosopher Slab Poems, in Pixels and Letters