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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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Tabloid Games

by Ian Bogost June 5, 2007

categories: Newsgames

The Game Show Network has released a few newsgames, which we've discussed before here (1, 2, 3). Their latest, The Prison Life: Paris, came out yesterday, in time with the start of Paris Hilton's 45 day jail sentence. The gameplay involves helping Paris press vanity license plates.

Over at Gameology, Zach Whalen makes a compelling argument about these games. He calls them Tabloid Games, suggesting that the GSN games are actually trying to do something different from, say, September 12 or the recent newsgames I've been working on. Quoth Zach:

Not only do most of these GSN games rely on celebrities and sex, but like tabloid news, they also revolve around a hook or punchline and are more concerned with framing a reaction to something having happened rather than reporting what actually did happen. ... So even though these games aren't all individually impressive or interesting, I think if we take them as the same kind of rhetoric that tabloid journalism produces, we can agree that they are generally rhetorically effective.

I find this line of thinking convincing, although I'd argue that the examples of good newsgames we have seen thusfar editorialize more than they report. I'm sure there are many more tabloid games out there on the web, probably more than their are newsgames of the editorial sort. That in mind, here's a question: is something like the Zidane Head Butt Game more a newsgame or more a tabloid game?

Comments (1)

In general I would say that the definition is up to the entity which takes on the game.

My gut tells me that I would see the Zidane H.B. Game on a site that considers itself a ''tabloid'' before I would see it offered on a site considering itself to be more ''news'' oriented.

But then again, I say to myself, news entities often have sections on sports. And is something like ESPN a source of news? I would think many would answer, 'yes.'

I'm not really among that many, but if more say 'yae' than 'nae,' well, let's make it democratic.

Anyway, I see the Zidane H.B. Game as a more comical section of sports news. Combining comedy and sports into something new: Corts (do I get credit for that word?)

michaelArteaga on June 6, 2007 1:08 PM

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