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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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Palin Generator, Chatterbot
by Ian Bogost October 2, 2008
categories: Political Games

Two similar Sarah Palin generators have burst onto the scene like a moose-bound shell from a shotgun.

The first, Interview Sarah Palin is a text generator that crafts answers to a few fixed interview questions, each varying slightly as it generates itself from the same base of Palin material. The second, PalinSpeak, is a simple Palin chatterbot that derives its materials from the now-infamous Katie Couric interview, and presents that situation as its scenario.

Both use Markov chain models for text generation, although as the chatterbot demands, PalinSpeak also deploys the typical inversions and defaults of that form.

PalinSpeak was created by Georgia Tech Digital Media PhD student Doug Wilson and Brendan O'Connor. Interview Sarah Palin offers no published credits.