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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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Lockdown: A School Shooting Game
by Ian Bogost July 17, 2008

Lockdown is a "serious game for incident responses to school shootings." The game was created at the GamePipe Lab at USC Engineering with sponsorship from Sandia National Laboratories.

The game looks very polished, but I couldn't help but notice that Lockdown's apparent approach to "incident response" is: "do whatever you'd do in a First-Person Shooter. Oh yeah, and tell people to exit calmly." Watch the video on the page linked above to witness the myriad firearms available to the player's SWAT character, as well as his alarmingly comical, Counter-Strike style final firefight with the perpetrator.

(via Liz Losh)

Comments (1)

I've always wanted to see a school violence game that really deals with the social causes of said violence, probably not in this epoch...

Patrick Dugan on July 27, 2008 7:00 PM