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.
After the World Cup Final, we pointed readers to the Zidane Headbutt game. Since then, Atom Entertainment's Addicting Games site has published a revised version, with more Materazzi's and a scoring system. Another nice feature of the new version is that you are awarded more points for a chestbutt than a headbutt, an accurate interpretation of the event itself.
More interestingly, Addicting Games is offering the source code for the Zidane game for modification. They are encouraging modders to upload their new creations to Addicting Games, which is a good way to save bandwidth costs and get more traffic back to one's own site.
Here's how to get the source code:
- Go to http://extranet.shockwave.com/games/developers/AG_DevStuff/
- Login with Username: AGdev, Password: 2fling
- The file you want is Open_Zidane_Source.zip
The main modification the instructions suggest are changing out the graphics for new characters, but the Flash source is there too in case you want to modify the original Zidane concept. There's certainly more that can be done with it, more than just a whack-a-mole skin. Addicting Games added their branding to the pitch in the Zidane game, and they're encouraging modders to keep that in if they upload back to their site, but what you do with the source code is ultimately up to you.
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