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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Social Issue Games Toolkit
by Ian Bogost January 28, 2009
Games for Change has announced the release of Let the Games Begin: A Toolkit 4 Making Social Issue Games, a multimedia resource for organizations interested in using games as a part of their outreach and communications efforts. Here's how they describe it:

The Toolkit guides organizations through the process of making a successful social issue game. It includes video presentations from experts in the field, original articles, and links to many other articles, books, websites, and game examples.

Comments (2)

The word "toolkit" threw me off here a bit. I was both intrigued and skeptical of the idea of a "social issue games toolkit", doing for social games something akin to what the RPG toolkit does for simple games. But it seems by "toolkit" they don't mean what everyone else in computing means by the word (a piece of software with reusable code and nice API hooks to ease implementation of a restricted class of software). Rather they seem to mean something like "tutorial", or perhaps "tutorial with videos and links to other resources".

Mark, yes, you're absolutely right. The thing you envision is probably impossible, whereas a tutorial and other resources is not... but I think they intend the toolkit to be used mostly by organizations considering building/commissioning games, rather than by developers.