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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.

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Tobacco Baron (Norwegian)
by Ian Bogost November 20, 2003

Jill Walker points out a rhetorical game that simulates a tobacco empire, Tobakkbaronen.

The game seems elaborate and high in production value, but it's all in Norwegian, so I'll just quote from Jill's commentary on it:

It's a strategy game, done in Flash, where you play a tobacco baron and win the game by choosing how to develop and market your cigarettes. Target children, poor people or stupid people? How much nicotine, how many other awful substances? What do you want your ads to look like? How many lobbyists will you buy to convince the WHO not to ban smoking?

Comments (2)

It's too bad this is in Norweigan. It looks like it's exactly the sort of project you discussed in your "Sim vs. Narrative" article.

Have you ever played Bullfrog's "Syndicate" line of games? Also, the "Fallout" series had some political content sprinkled throughout.

Nuclear War was another great one; I remember the Spitting Image puppets used to create "ronnie raygun" and so on.

Just thinking you really ought to read up that Nuclear War game I was talking about in this comment. Here's a few sites with info about the game:

http://screenmania.retrogames.com/amiga/01/amiga_0009.html

Good screenshots.

Here's a review of the game in German:

http://www.classicgaming.nl/reviews/nuclearwar.html

I played this game a lot in my youth...