Water Cooler Games
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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New column: The little game that could + Barcelona this weekend
by Gonzalo Frasca October 18, 2006
categories: Newsgames

SeriousGamesSource just posted my new column. It's about how we all tend to glorify AAA games as the golden standard for quality, when actually such thing does not happen in other media such as film or print. Games with crappy graphics and less-than-great gameplay still play their role in our culture and, guess what, I argue that it's a role that something is equally or more important than WoW or Half-Life 2. Oh, well, you'll have to read the whole thing to see if you agree with me or not. Note: on the text I speculate that the Zidane Head Butt game had about 3 million players. Our sources at AddictingGames.com tells us that it was around 4, so my guess was about right. That is more than half the players of WoW. Not bad for a little game made with no budget...

Incidentally, for all of you serious gamers in Catalunya, I'll be moderating a panel between Chris Crawford and Marie-Laure Ryan in Barcelona this Saturday. Hope to see you there!

Comments (1)

Nice column. "Darfur is Dying" doesn't really work for me on either level--the difficult gameplay's "point," which Ian Bogost talked about in an earlier post, or the too-didactic and text-y messages it relays--but I'm happy for the attention that it is generating. It's kind of like the difference between "Syriana" and a Kiarostami movie--this game is kind of ham-fisted, but it's reaching a large audience, which is ultimately what matters. I just wish there were more humanist masterpieces in the world of video games. I think things are on the right track, though, and it's an exciting time.

Dan Reynolds on October 21, 2006 8:04 PM