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.
We've been a bit lax on covering games lately, and I'm planning to make up for that this week.
For starters, here's the 1E Energy Awareness Campaign game about how you can save energy at work. Turn It All Off is a cute, well-produced game that does more than many similar games I have seen over the years. The principle is familiar enough: move a character around an office and find the objects that are using energy unnecessarily. But Turn It All Off actually ads some gameplay for once: there's a time limit, and there are both obstacles and simple puzzles to overcome. I'll give away the puzzle in the first level to give you an example: turn the coffee pot on to lure the late-nite worker away from her workstation, which you can then turn off.
There's also a good deal of humor in the game, which I'll let you discover on your own.
(thanks to Liz)
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