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Latest blog posts from Water Cooler Games

Today and Tomorrow: Living Game Worlds IV at Georgia Tech
Georgia Tech is hosting the fourth iteration of our Living Game Worlds conference today and tomorrow, December 1-2. This year's theme is "Interplay: Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds"; speakers include Raph Koster, Chris Klaus, Richard Bartle, Randy Farmer and more. The program is online,...
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Published

Thanksgiving Special! PETA's Cooking Mama: Mama Kills Animals
As those of us in the States gluttonize on Thanksgiving turkey, those of you who haven't seen it might want to try out PETA's "unauthorized" Cooking Mama satire Cooking Mama: Mama Kills Animals, which hit the web a week or so ago. Like PETA's KFC attack game Super Chick Sisters,...
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Published

Make a Flood Management Game
One of the interesting things about serious games development is the opportunities to create titles about unusual subjects, topics that might not otherwise find their way into games. Here's such an opportunity. The Association of State Floodplain Managers has issued a RFP for "FloodManager,"...
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Published

My New Column: Disjunctive Play
Gamasutra has published my latest "Persuasive Games" column, Disjunctive Play. The column mostly discusses Jason Rohrer's new game Between, but also tries to extrapolate a different kind of multiplayer experience from that title. When we talk about games, we normally use the language of...
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Missile in the HASTAC
The HASTAC consortium has just announced a forum hosted by their HASTAC Scholars fellows on digital games, entitled Participatory Play: Digital Games From Spacewar! to Virtual Peace to "explore game innovations that surpass violent first-person shooters and military training simulations."...
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Pekid Oil
Molleindustria has released a new game about the history and hypothetical future of oil, called Oiligarchy. The game feature's M's characteristic attention to detail in simulation, blended with satire and abstract cartoonishness. In some ways, the collision of procedurality and cartoon...
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Announcing the Journalism & Games Research Project
I'm excited to announce the first public materials from a research project on Journalism and Videogames, which I've been pursuing with a small cabal of devoted students since the start of the term. Here's a brief explanation: What lies at the intersection of videogames and...
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Politics and Games at Harvard
It's been quiet around here! Next week I'll share the cause of it. Until then, I did a talk at Nicco Mele's seminar at the Harvard Kennedy School this week, which Gene Koo cs/">liveblogged over at his Valuable Games site.... (read more)
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Click Archaeology
To promote a week of programming about expeditions, from the pyramids to outer space, National Geographic has created an expedition game in which players are tasked to find artifacts which they can exchange for virtual cash. Each night during the week of November 16-23, a different show will air...
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One More Election Game
As the final days of the US election wind down, there's one more election game to report. Debate Smash 2008 was created by students at the ITU Copenhagen. Yes, it's "another" Presidential debate game, one that also borrows the core mechanic of the classic coin-op Pong. But in Debate...
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My New Column: The Birth and Death of the Election Game
Gamasutra has published my latest "Persuasive Games" column, this one on the decline of election videogames in the 2008 cycle. Drunk on such video game election elation, I remember making a prediction in a press interview that year: in 2008, I foolishly divined, every major candidate would have...
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Truth Invaders
From Tax Invaders to Pork Invaders, the classic coin-op Space Invaders has been a popular source for political game reskinning. Here's yet another one, but with a twist. Truth Invaders refashions the game's aliens as factually inaccurate statements from both Presidential campaigns. As...
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