Ian Bogost - Water Cooler Games

my affiliations

Ian Bogost - videogame theory, criticism, design

about me

contact

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.

You are reading an archived version of this article. The original URL was (loading...)

Slamdance recap

by Ian Bogost January 31, 2007

categories: General

Patrick Dugan has written a recap of the Slamdance festival, which you can now read over on Gamasutra. He covers the games that presented their work. Go read it, but here are a couple interesting tidbits:

Ledonne ... was a bit annoyed at Baxter's lauding of Cloud as an ideal example of an indie game; he felt it implied that games should be oriented towards positive messages only.

If the ESA had been called in the wake of the game's nomination and asked to cover Slamdance Inc. should any legal issues arise, it could have allowed a precedent to be set for games to be recognized as an art form, rather than simply as "free speech" which is a subtly different classification.

Dugan ends on a bullish note, arguing "The Slamdance Games competition is not a shambles, it is very much alive in cocktail conversations between game and film creators, in people playing, in the lessons each culture can teach the other." I guess we'll have to wait and see if he's right.