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.
The game is not online anymore, so we won't be able to judge it by ourselves. According to this report from BBC (dated last May), it was conceived as a tool for awareness about the asylum situation in Switzerland. However, it was pulled down because ""It works with stereotypes. These are figures which don't have free will". It is possible that the game sucked, but this complaint is probably the most frequent response that you'll encounter if you build political games. I would dare to claim that games could be doomed to only work with stereotypes, because their potential is made of generalization, behaviors, the big picture (yes, I know, there are tons of counterexamples to this claim. Don't bother posting them, I am well aware of them. I am thinking aloud, but I still believe what I just said. I guess I don't have enough time right now to fully explain what I mean, but if you are interested, I wrote about this same subject on my chapter at the recently published Video Game Theory Reader).
Making videogames is an extremely complicated task. Making political videogames is almost insanely complex, basically because there are so few examples and you are likely to burn yourself unless you are very careful (obviously, if you are very careful the game will suck, so it's a catch-22 situation). Same people argue that non-entertaining games are an oxymoron. I have spent many years claiming that so-called interactive narrative is a contradiction, but I am convinced that there is a future (actually, there is a present, too) for political games. Is it going to be easy? You bet it won't.
Making Books
Academic Professional Job Opening
Slashdot Q&A
The Bulldog and the Pegasus
Speculative Realism Aggregator Update
Comments
Ian Bogost on Making Books
NeMutluTürkümDiyene on Where in the World was Middle Earth?
Christopher Schaberg on Making Books
Jose Zagal on Making Books
Ian Bogost on Making Books
The Curse of Cow Clicker
Beyond the Elbow-Patched Playground
Low-Earth Lamentation
Shit Crayons
Aerotropolis
Against Aca-Fandom
There are no Blown Calls in Football
We Think in Public
What is Object-Oriented Ontology?
The Metaphysics Videogame
Cascading Failure
Top Ten Reasons I Returned My Kindle
Carrying On Over Carry-Ons
Reading Online Sucks







