Ian Bogost - Water Cooler Games - The Bush/Cheney Accidental Poster Generator

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You are reading an archived version of this article.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...)

The Bush/Cheney Accidental Poster Generator

by Ian Bogost March 13, 2004

categories: Political Games

Bush/Cheney '04: But not if you're gay! The Bush/Cheney campaign launched a neat poster generator that allowed you to type in your own headline and generate a nice PDF poster suitable for printing. The problem is, they didn't -- and couldn't -- filter for all the editorial statements poster creators might make...

The folks over at Wonkette managed to test and exploit these holes, including creating the poster depicted at right (incidentally, the text at the bottom that's illegible in reproduction reads "Paid for by BUSH-CHENEY '04, Inc"). Here's part of Wonkette's report:

And, yes, we tried the obvious ones but someone thought to block those. You can't make a poster that says "Penis," or "Poo-Poo," or "Prince of Darkness." Sadly, you also can't produce propaganda that asserts badly needed pro-Bush sentiments. We tried, and failed, to make a poster reading: "Not Hitler!" Thinking that perhaps wasn't strong enough, we also tried "It's not like he's Hitler." No go. Even the more emphatic "Not at all like Hitler in the least!" was rejected. Disturbingly, we did get away with "Lebensraum!"

The campaign caught on and seems to have pulled down the free-form generator. Now you're limited to their stock entries. The app isn't really a game, but creating, printing, and posting your unintentionally-endorsed posters would have been.