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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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More Foley Games
by Ian Bogost October 16, 2006
categories: Newsgames

Some of my students at Georgia Tech run a little game jam every Sunday called 4 second games (4sg). They spend four hours making games on a particular theme, with the requirement that each game be played in four seconds (or have a round that lasts four seconds, etc.). Last week they chose Mark Foley as the theme (a topic we've covered before), and a couple amusing specimens emerged. Click through for the details.

The first is Pedophilia! The Mark Foley Game by Kurt Margenau. The player must close IM windows with inappropriate messages as fast as possible. I think Kurt generated the actual messages from reports of the ones Foley sent.

The second is Messenger, by Max Anderson. The player fires messages to pages, but must avoid their interception by "interlopers."

These are both simple games, but given the time constraints I think they came out pretty well. The IM window game is technically a variant of the all too familiar whack-a-mole newsgame, but I actually think it's an appropriate mechanic in this case.

Comments (2)

I should mention that it's unclear if the game is played with a dance pad or other physical interface, but one can only assume that some such of affordance will be offered, even if optionally...

Dang, I put that under the wrong entry. You'd think I could use my own blog.