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.
Gamasutra has published a postmortem of Stardock's political campaign game The Political Machine.
As with most of these features, it's a good read for any developer. I took special interest as someone interested in a different kind of political game. The following excerpt, from near the end of the article, was most fascinating for me.
This game notwithstanding, let me make some provocations. Is an unbiased political strategy game possible? Moreover, is it even desirable? Yes or no, would a publisher like Ubi Soft be comfortable publishing any other kind? Is a "political strategy game" really just a game bereft of politics? An apolitical game? A game about the machinations of a system, fodder for the indefatigable systems hackers rather than budding politicos?
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