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.
Remember playing The Incredible Machine? It was one of the only good educational games of the early 90s -- maybe all of the 90s.
The UK Science Museum has created a set of online games to support their Launchpad installation of physics topics. The games, dubbed Launchball, play like a more abstract version of The Incredible Machine. You use electricity, wind, magnetism, circuits, and other paraphernalia to lead a ball from start to goal. The production value is very high, although it did take me a while to figure out that I had to mouseover the different colored blocks to figure out what they represented. Maybe a bit too modernist for the kiddies, but it's always such a pleasant surprise to find an educational game that doesn't suck.
And for you rogueish user generated content fans, there's also a mode that lets players create and share their own levels.
(via Adverblog)
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