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.
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:
"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.
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