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 in Paris for the last week judging the game development category of the Imagine Cup. I'll write a full account later, but I wanted to report that the winners were announced today. The games needed to appeal to the competition theme of "imagine how technology can enable a sustainable environment."
The first place winner was City Rain, a fantastic game from Brazil that's a sort of blend of SimCity and Tetris, in which the player must complete environmentally themed challenges. The game design, visual design, and sound design are all fantastic yet simple, and the game tightly couples the theme and the gameplay.
Second and third place winners were Future Flow from Belgium and Clean Up from Korea, respectively.
More on my impressions of all the games and the event in general shortly. There's also a Microsoft press release with all the winners in every category.
Information is Beautiful
The Art History of Games
The Art History of Games
Objects & Things
Object-Oriented Ontology Symposium
Comments
Shane on Information is Beautiful
Jeff Medcalf on Information is Beautiful
Shane on Object-Oriented Ontology Symposium
Ian Bogost on Object-Oriented Ontology Symposium
Shane on Object-Oriented Ontology Symposium






