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.
Game designer (and friend and collaborator) Jane McGonigal's new game Superstruct, created at the Institute for the Future, is about to go online. IFTF is casting Superstruct as a "massively multiplayer forecasting game," and uses the following rhetoric to set up the scenario:
The links above houses preliminary videos about the game's five future disaster scenarios (disease, famine, energy, civil rights, and population). There's also a Facebook group. As Liz Losh notes, the site's mood is pretty cheery given its apocalyptic subject matter, but that tone also underscores the game's hope that players might be able to construct possible solutions for the problems presented, thus constructing an alternate future than the one suggested by the scenarios that comprise its theme.
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