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.
For those of you bemoaning the lack of red reviews available, you can now read Maoist Game Reviews. Most interestingly, as Clockwork Grue points out over on Game Girl Advance, the maoist reviews focus almost entirely on content and story, while most western reviews focus almost entirely on technical aspects (Maoists on Fallout vs. Gamespot on Fallout). Clockwork Grue segues into a discussion on games journalism, but I'm more interested in what this sort of example suggests about a topic of ongoing research for me: game criticism. It's not surprising that a communist perspective on any videogame would attempt to expose the "ruling class propaganda" inherent in those games. Of course, we've been arguing for a long time that games -- even commercial games -- carry ideological bias. One could argue that the Maoist perspective is just one frame on that bias.
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