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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Please play Jason Rohrer's Passage
by Ian Bogost December 1, 2007
categories: Game Design , Social Games
I am back from Montreal, where I attended the Montreal International Games Summit and spent some time with the folks at Concordia and also attended Kokoromi's Gamma 256 show. There's lots to say about all of these, but for now I want to point you to one of the games from the Gamma show. The constraint of the contest was 256 pixels square or less. All the games were very good, but the standout for me was Jason Rohrer's superb specimen, Passage. I don't even want to say too much about it here, but I think it's a terrific example of how simple approaches to traditionally difficult themes can work. Just go download and play. It might be a slightly different experience without the large projection and the open exhibition space and the DJ, but I think it will be remarkable nonetheless.

Comments (4)

I'm dying to play this game, but sadly it crashes on startup.. nooooooo!

What a touching game.

The first time I played it, I didn't realise that you could walk north/south and I just spent all my time moving to the right.

I think I like it better that way.

Yeah, it was nice! Thanks for posting about it.

Beautiful.