Ian Bogost - Water Cooler Games - Right to Bore Arms (and new columns)

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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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Right to Bore Arms (and new columns)

by Ian Bogost September 26, 2006

categories: Advergames , Console & PC Games , Public Policy Games

Gonzalo and I each have a new column at Serious Games Source, the serious games arm of CMP's popular website Gamasutra. The first installment in my "Persuasive Games" column is up now, titled The Right To Bore Arms, about a new NRA-licenced game.

... By making firearms boring, slow, and arduous, NRA Gun Club might actually perform the rhetoric many people, including myself, have previously laughed-off as politicking and fabrication: the responsible handling of firearms. One might even go so far as to say that NRA Gun Club owes most of its rhetorical power to the commercial FPS. The very obsession with the fantasy of gunplay common to commercial videogames creates an empty space in which the fantasy of responsible gunhandling takes more coherent form than it might do in any other medium. ...

Read the whole thing over at Serious Games Source. And stay tuned next week for Gonzalo's new column.

Comments (1)

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gero on October 10, 2006 10:08 AM