Ian Bogost - Water Cooler Games - Video Game Evangelism

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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.

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Video Game Evangelism

by Ian Bogost July 19, 2006

categories: Console & PC Games , Religious Games

Brian Crecente of Kotaku and the Rocky Mountain News just wrote an article on Left Behind: Eternal Forces, which we've discussed here before (and he also blogs it at Kotaku). Brian asks if the game might be "the first mainstream PC agenda game," and also offers a preview of the gameplay in the article. I played the game at E3 and wrote about it in my forthcoming book, Persuasive Games: Videogames and Procedural Rhetoric. But, you can get a preview of my opinion in Brian's article:

The prayer, he points out, is completely generic.

"It could be Islamic or Judaic," he said. "Why didn’t they make a game where you live that life (of an unbeliever) and then you discover at the Rapture what side you end up on?
"The fear that I have is that they are confused about whether they are making a game about this perspective or if it's a game with a Christian skin."

In other words, he asks, is Left Behind: Eternal Forces just another real-time strategy title with prayer in it?

That said, I do praise the group's attempt to represent religion in a more interesting way than just killing demons... after all, you could do that in Doom.