Boxing Politician Games. Again.
May 5, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

It happens every election cycle, it seems. Games that allow players to make their favorite candidate box against their least favorite candidate, or some variation on a theme of same. We had Kerry vs. Kerry back in 2004, as well as the mobile game Bush vs. Kerry Boxing that same year. Not to mention the Osama vs. Bush boxing toy puppets. Here's the salvo for this year so far. Kewlbox released Hillary vs. Obama. "The faster you click, the more punches you throw!" Then the New York Post offers 2008 Democratic Fight Night (via Kotaku). Both of these are clickfests ...

Libery City Satire
April 30, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

In case you didn't notice, Grand Theft Auto IV was released yesterday. The coverage is predictably overwhelming, although standing out among the noise about sales records and politicians is Heather Chaplin's piece on NPR's All Things Considered, which includes a series of interviews with GTAIV writer Lazlow Jones. I've criticized Rockstar before for failing to put people in front of the media to discuss their games, so this is a welcome change of pace. Jones's thesis about the game is summed up in the call-out quote near the top, "It's a satire of not only New York, but of American ...

Our Article on the Dean Game Goes Online
April 16, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

A couple years ago, Gonzalo and I wrote an article, Videogames Go To Washington, about the creation of the Howard Dean for Iowa Game. The article appeared in Pat Harrigam amd Noah Wardrip-Fruin's collection Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media, which was published last year. Pat and Noah have arranged to publish the articles from the book online at the Electronic Book Review, and our piece just went up there. Happy reading: Video Games Go to Washington: The Story Behind The Howard Dean for Iowa Game ...

Wark on Debord
April 15, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

Following our coverage of the legal flap around Alex Galloway's digital adaptation of Guy Debord's Game of War, McKenzie Wark (author of the excellent book Gamer Theory) has published a short, thoughtful essay on Debord's original. The piece is forthcoming in Wark's new book project, 50 Years of Recuperation: The Situationist International 1957-1972. ...

The Revolution will be Litigated
April 5, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

Friend, theorist, and author Alex Galloway, working with several collaborators under his software art shingle RSG, recently created a cracking digital version of Guy Debord's Kriegspiel, a little-known board game created by this famous Marxist and key figure in the Situationist International. Debord is best-known for his influential book Society of the Spectacle, about the intersection of capitalism and mass media. But Debord also became interested in games in the 1970s. During this time he designed Kriegspiel, a strategy wargame, and wrote a book about the game, recently translated into English as A Game of War. The book focuses ...

Play the News Game
April 3, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

ImpactGames, creators of PeaceMaker, have just soft-launched a public version of their title Play the News. new web-based news prediction game. It's a bit like fantasy sports, in that you play by predicting future performance, but instead of assembling a custom news docket, you play smaller mini-games for each story. These smaller games cover the gamut of news coverage, from politics to entertainment. Here's some of their boilerplate on the game. Impact Games developed a web-based platform to bring interactive gaming elements to the online news media industry: "Play the News" is an engaging, community-driven experience - imagine fantasy sports ...

Out Overfishin'
April 1, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

Ocean Survivor is an advocacy game created by Conserve Our Ocean Legacy, a nonprofit campaign to reduce the rate of bluefin tuna decline in US waters. The game is simple but well done. The player takes the role of a swimming bluefin tuna. The core mechanic is borrowed from the web-classic Helicopter Game: hold the mouse button to make the fish swim up, release it to let the fish fall. Instead of avoiding abstract obstacles, you must avoid the hooks and nets of various types and sizes lowered by trawlers at the surface of the water. The topology of nets ...

Eurogamer on Wafaa Bilaal
March 27, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

I've been following but not yet writing about the controversy at RPI regarding Wafaa Bilaal and his hacked version of Night of Bush Capturing. (If you need to catch up on the project, check out GamePolitics' extensive coverage). Eurogamer just published an article, including an interview with the creator, which offers both a summary and a set of new material on the controversy. One of the observations reminds me of a point I made about America's Army in Persuasive Games: That Night of Bush Capturing had only to change some textures to turn the message against the original creator reveals ...

We pwn free games
March 26, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

PC World's new list of "101 Fantastic Freebies" is out in the forthcoming May 2008 print issue, also available online now. There's a category for games, and I'm happy to say that two of the nine on the list are Persuasive Games titles. One is our send-up of the TSA, Airport Security, and the other our satire of Kinko's, Disaffected. Woo! ...

Knowledge is Nothing. Tenure is Everything.
March 21, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

Thanks to David Wessman on the IGDA Education SIG mailing list for pointing out Survival of the Witless, a card game about the academic tenure process. The title above was the game's tagline. It’s a brutal game, where the most common card is "ass-kissing" (to simulate the most common action in academia). Three to eight players try to collect enough writing cards and a contract to finish their book, and enough influence with committee members to win a tenure decision. In addition to Ass Kissing, other cards you could play in the game included Seduction, Bold New Theory, Student Boycott, ...

Review of I Can End Deportation
March 17, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

Last month a human rights organization called Breakthrough released a videogame that makes claims about the lack of equity in today's U.S. immigration laws. The game, called I Can End Deportation (or just ICED, which is also the acronym for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Department) is a free PC/Mac download. The result is a missed opportunity, demonstrating both the promise and problems with social issues games in general. ...

World Without Oil wins at SXSW
March 10, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

The Alternate Reality Game World Without Oil, in which thousands of people simulated their lives after a major oil crisis, won in the "activism" category at the SXSW Web Awards. Congrats to friends/colleagues Jane McGonigal and Cathy Fischer, and comrades-in-spirit Ken Eklund, Dee Cook, and others who were involved in the project. ...

Politics Online Conference
February 26, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

Next week I'll be running a panel at the 2008 Politics Online Conference hosted by the Institute for Policy Democracy and the Internet. The Panel, Designing Outreach in Virtual Worlds, will include me, Ben Sawyer from the Serious Games Initiative, and Sue Singer from Linden Lab. The conference is March 4-5, and the panel is Tuesday, March 4 from 3:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. Description after the jump, and you can register here. ...

GDC 2008: Out of the Box, EA Fuels New Ideas with Madden and Sims Titles
February 18, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

Presentation by Rob Moore, Steve Seabolt (EA) at the Serious Games Summit, Game Developers Conference 2008. Moore got stuck in bad weather but sent along some materials about A number of EA Sports titles are used by athletes, including by NASCAR drivers to get used to tracks, by pro basketball and football players to memorize. These were just unexpected uses of the ordinary commercial versions of games. More recently, sports training professionals have become interested in using versions of these games for their purposes. One such company went to EA with this idea. The result is Madden Play Action Simulator, ...

My new column: Videogame Vignette
February 12, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

Gamasutra has published my latest "Persuasive Games" column, this one on a student game from USC Interactive Media called Hush, an unusual game about an unusual historical and political moment. The article uses Hush as and the idea of adapting the vignette style to videogames. In literature, poetry, and film, a vignette is a brief, indefinite, evocative description or account of a person or situation. Vignettes are usually meant to give a sense of a character rather than to advance a narrative. ... Hush offers a glimpse, as it were, of how vignette might be used successfully in games. You ...

How Wrong I Was about Political Games in 2008
February 6, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

During the height of the 2004 election, when Persuasive Games had released a few officially endorsed games about various issues and candidates, and after this website was scarcely six months old and everything about mainstream political games seemed new and shiny, I remember making a prediction in a press interview. In 2008, I divined, every major candidate will have their own PlayStation 3 game. I was very wrong about that. I can't find the quote -- it may not have made it to print, mercifully -- but I did find other similar sentiments. Here's one from an article late in ...

CNN Political Market
February 4, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

I've been a bit out of it thanks to new projects taking the place of completed ones, but I just noticed that CNN has launched CNN Political Market, "where you get a chance to predict the future of 2008 presidential politics." After logging in you get $5,000 virtual dollars to invest in election markets. It's a pretty straightforward idea, similar to the old Hollywood Stock Exchange. I know we live in a society that thrives on exchange value, but I've always found these virtual markets to be offensive. If there's anything we don't need, it's collapsing the already broken electoral ...

Molleindustria's Faith Fighter
January 23, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

Molleindustria's at it again, this time taking on religion. Faith Fighter aims "to push gamers to reflect on how... sacred representations are often instrumentally used to fuel or justify conflicts." In other words, a critique of the exchange value of religious figures and icons. It's a much less controversial topic than their last title about religion, Operation Pedopriest, but perhaps also less direct and biting in its commentary. Remembering controversy over the Danish muhammad cartoon controversy, Faith Fighter offers "Normal" and "Censored" mode, the latter with Muhammad's visage blocked out. ...

Harpooned, an anti-whaling game
January 18, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

As a statement against and satire of Japanese whaling, three Australians have created Harpooned: Japanese Cetacean Research Simulator. The tongue-in-cheek creator's statement amounts to a sentence: "You play the role of a Japanese scientist performing research on whales around Antarctica." It's probably one that will . Additional coverage at NineMSN. The game is a shmup in which the player controls a whaling vessel that fires harpoons at whiles while avoiding protesters. Some gameplay footage appears below. The adaptation of shmup to whaling is pretty effective. Like the recent Mega Man-themed game-like video about Robert Dziekánksi The sarcastic commentary may be ...

White House Joust 2008
January 17, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

Blockdot/Kewlbox have dusted off their four year-old concept White House Joust and renewed it for this election cycle. You guessed it, White House Joust 2008. Sigh. ...

Fat Monday
January 14, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

As mentioned last week, today Fatworld lives. Trailer below. Press release here. ...

Prepare to Fatten
January 11, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

The same week McDonald's is blaming videogames for obesity, we're preparing to release a videogame about that topic. On Monday January 14, Fatworld will be released. It's a game about the politics of nutrition created at my studio, Persuasive Games, published by ITVS Interactive, and funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting . We don't blame McDonald's for it, at least we don't believe it's that simple. The whole idea behind the game is to complicate the issue. As we explain in our creator's statement, Fatworld explores the relationships between obesity, nutrition, and socioeconomics in the contemporary U.S.. The game’s ...

Center for Social Media Event
January 7, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

The Center for Social Media is hosting an event, Making your Media Matter, on February 7-8 2008 at the American University in Washington DC. Among the panels is Games for Social Change: How Games and Video are Playing Well Together, which will be held the 7th at 5:30pm and moderated by Suzanne Seggerman of Games for Change. Panelists include Heidi Boisvert (ICED! I Can End Deportation), Eric Brown (PeaceMaker), Ivan Marovic (A Force More Powerful), Dennis Palmieri, (World Without Oil). Registration is a fairly modest $100 for the whole event. ...

Mega Man-styled Video is not Game nor Parody
January 3, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

As reported at Game Politics, a Vancouver man has created a video based on the popular Mega Man series that comments on the tragic taser killing of Polish immigrant Robert Dziekánski at the Vancouver airport. You can watch the video over on YouTube. It depicts a classic Mega Man boss scene, with Dzekánski as the boss. When Mega Man approaches, a menu pops up with three options, "Use restraint," "Call a translator," or "Tazer mercilessly." The video shows the hypothetical player choosing the last option. One shot kills Dziekánski, but Mega Man fires a few more just for good measure, ...

DC Smackdown
December 8, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

DC Smackdown is the latest vaguely political PC game out on the market. It's a satirical fighting game, in which players pit Presidential candidates and political pundits against one another in Street Fighter-style battles. Each character has a special move, of course, from Hillary Clinton's "Intern Trample" to Bill O'Reilly's "No Spin Zone". Even though I too have created games with this theme, I'm always a little disappointed to see yet another political game that's just a cute nod to the idea of politics rather than taking on political issues or personalities directly. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the ...

Playing Columbine Screening, Rejection
December 5, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

While I was in Montreal at MIGS last week, the IGDA hosted a special screening of Danny Ledonne's documentary Playing Columbine, which tells the story of Super Columbine Massacre RPG!'s creation and subsequent controversy, including the now infamous pulling of the game from the Slamdance Guerilla Gamemaker competition. The version I saw wasn't the final cut, and while I think a number of changes could improve the final version, the film is very good (disclaimer: I make more than one appearance in the film). So when will you, our loyal readers, get to see it? Well, not at Slamdance 2008, ...

Another Political Whack-a-Mole Clone
November 26, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

Matt Blunt: Document Destroyer is a simple game about Missouri Governor Matt Blunt's alleged destruction of official documents. It's another -- yes ANOTHER Whack-a-Mole clone. Go ahead, search this site for more. I thought that Whack-a-Mole was a stepping stone for political games, but it seems that its the one mechanic that applies to all circumstances. "Find", "catch", and "hit" are verbs that seem particularly suited to simplistic gripes with candidates or issues. Check out how deftly the Missouri Republicans shifted the frame on the game though. A great example of how deftly the GOP can respond to the Dems ...

Right-Wing Swiss Political Games
October 30, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

The Swiss Volkspartei (Swiss People's Party, abbreviated SVP or UDC) has created some truly unbelievable political games. Help Zottel the goat keep Swiss passports out of the brown and yellow hands of immigrants, or help him kick "black sheep" foreigners over the border. And there are more (thanks to Marie-Laure Ryan for bringing them to my attention). To understand the games, though, you have to first know something about the party itself. It was once a centrist agricultural party, but took on right-wing populist interests in the last twenty years. Since 2003, the party has been very strong in the ...

Game Installation about Northern Ireland
October 1, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

An interesting installation from Northern Ireland, called Block H. It features a FPS game built as a Counter-Strike mod, which uses environmental cues from Northern Ireland, including the sectarian murals that are fast disappearing from that landscape. The installation also hopes to ask questions about media, memory, and "militainment." Here's how the game works: via local network or Internet connectivity, teams are split into Loyalists and Nationalists. Players wear Celtic and Rangers jerseys, denim jackets and anoraks. The game is set in a housing estate split by a peaceline and watchtower. Each side has its own versions of sectarian symbols: ...

Terrorist Attack Disasters
September 16, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

University of Colorado student Devin Monnens sometimes sends around thoughts by email about topics of interest to a few of us. Recently he brought up New York Defender. In a part of that discussion, Josh Fishburn asked if you could conjure a terrorist attack in new versions of Sim City. There are aliens and monsters, but as far as I know, there are no terrorist attacks available. It would be an interesting addition both from a cultural and a planning perspective; one of the things I talk about in Persuasive Games is how government emergency response simulations fail to take ...

Army of Two's Political Agenda
September 9, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

There's a good interview up at Gamasutra with Chris Ferriera, lead designer of the forthcoming EA Montreal shooter Army of Two. Fans might know the game for its innovations in collaborative play, but Ferriera discusses the title's political content and inspiration -- private military contractors (PMCs) -- in encouraging detail. We take [the characters] from their days in Delta Force, and their days as Navy SEALs, and their start as PMCs and how they get trained. We unveil the corruption behind the military privatization, and we explain the problems that poses to society and to America, and the world, when ...

Strong Speech in Film and Games
August 27, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

Just as Take Two announces that Manhunt 2 has been "revised" and ESRB rated at M, news comes that Brokeback Mountain director Ang Lee's new film Lust, Caution has been rated NC-17 by the MPAA, for graphic sexuality. The difference is, film studio Focus Features is going to release the film uncut, with the rating, while Take Two will release a crippled version of the game to meet financial pressures. ...

PETA's KFC Anti-Advergame
August 24, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

I've previously suggested the term anti-advergames, games that critique a company's products or business practices rather than promoting them. Disaffected! is one, as is Molleindustria's McDonald's Videogame. Here's a new anti-advergame from PETA, the animal rights organization, created as a part of their ongoing campaign against KFC's breeding and slaughtering practices. The game is Super Chick Sisters, and it's a detailed, high production-value platform game that copies not only its premise but even its characters from Super Mario Bros. The plumbers are replaced by chicks, and the princess is Pam Anderson (who serves as a spokeswoman for the campaign in ...

Tactical Iraqi's Wikipedia Spin
August 15, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

A year and a half ago, Gonzalo ignited a debate here on WCG about Tactical Iraqi, a game funded by DARPA and created at USC ISI. Gonzalo's took the position that there is no moral way to support U.S. military aggression, even if it seems Sometimes I follow referral links into the site, and today I noticed that we were getting some clicks from the Wikipedia page about the game (officially titled, Tactical Language & Culture Training System). Imagine my surprise upon reading how it concludes: There has been little controversy about the use of the software in the serious ...

Skinning Politics
August 6, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

There are a number of forthcoming mainstream commercial games that seem to contain meaningful political commentary. One is Midway Austin's forthcoming BlackSite, lead designed by Harvey Smith, formerly of Ion Storm. Another is the forthcoming Sim City Societies, which promises social simulation that will change the way your city operates. There are lots of other examples from games recent and long past, from Grand Theft Auto to Balance of Power. All of these games incorporate political commentary in some way. As someone who is strongly, perhaps primarily, interested in political commentary in games, I was intrigued by the email I ...

Playing Columbine Trailer, Reactions
July 31, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

As several other sources have already noted, Danny Ledonne has launched a website for his forthcoming documentary Playing Columbine, along with a new trailer for the film. Kotaku's Brian Crecente, who published the first mainstream press coverage of the game, makes an interesting observation: "it feels like the documentary is a little too much about Ledonne and not enough about the very real and complicated issues involving both the shooting and the idea of tacking serious subject matters with video games." A number of readers at Game Politics seem to agree. A trailer is just a trailer of course, but ...

A Taste of Our Own Rhetoric
July 19, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

The big story this week in political games is Rescue the Nuke Scientist, the Union of Students Islamic Association's videogame response to Kuma\War's Assault on Iran. Most of the coverage I could find described the game's basic premise: In "Rescue the Nuke Scientist," U.S. troops capture a husband-and-wife team of nuclear engineers during a pilgrimage to Karbala, a holy site for Shiite Muslims, in central Iraq. Game players take on the role of Iranian security forces carrying out a mission code-named "The Special Operation," which involves penetrating fortified locations to free the nuclear scientists, who are moved from Iraq to ...

Italian Government bans Operation Pedopriest as child porn
July 1, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

Recently we covered Molleindustria's Operation Pedopriest, a game we suspected would cause controversy. And it has. Molleindustria has removed the game from their website after a point of order in the Italian Parliament move to call the game "virtual pedo-pornography" under an Italian law that makes it illegal to depict sexual acts with children. Molleindustria offers more on this, with links to the laws in question. As they said in an email to us, who says that Italian government is slow and bureaucratic? The game itself is still available on Newgrounds. Meanwhile, WCG friend Liz Losh has written an extensive ...

Molleindustria's Operation: Pedopriest
June 25, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

Molleindustria, one of the only outfits that has devoted their entire artistic practice to videogames with an agenda, has released a new game, and this one's a doozy, bound to be either hated or mildly appreciated, but maybe never loved -- and that's by design. Operation: Pedopriest is a game about child sex abuse in the Catholic church. Paolo tells us that the game is based loosely on the BBC documentary Sex Crimes and the Vatican, which you can watch on YouTube if you want the backgrounder. The documentary is about a secret procedure for dealing with child sex abuse. ...

Denver Police Test Racial Bias with Videogame
June 20, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

The Denver Police recently conducted a study of racial bias using a videogame. The idea was to determine if officers were more likely to fire on assailants with firearms if they were black or white. The game itself is rudimentary and somewhat disturbing. Here's how it works: +5 points for holstering your gun on an unarmed man +10 points for shooting an armed man -20 points for shooting an unarmed man -40 points for being shot The game clearly and weirdly encourages shooting rather than holstering. A Denver radio news program covered the study, and you can read the full ...

Click to Gerrymander
June 18, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

My colleagues at the USC EA Game Innovation Lab and the USC Annenberg Center released The Redistricting Game last week, not just at the Games for Change Festival but also on Capitol Hill (via NPR). Comments on GamePolitics, as well as in an article from last Sunday's Washington Post (in which I am also quoted). Redistricting is a great example of a political issue that's wonderfully gameable. It's an underdiscussed, probably largely unknown topic that significantly affects the way legislation works, and it's a complex system of interrelated conditions. ...

My new column: Designing for Tragedy
June 14, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

Gamasutra has published my latest "Persuasive Games" column, Designing for Tragedy, about V-Tech Rampage and making games about profoundly tragic events. Today, a month after Lambourn first released the game, discussion of it has all but disappeared. Some might point to this fact in an argument for the game’s insignificance; it spurred little reaction save shock and disapproval. A web forum set up by a third party to discuss the game has logged no more than five total posts. But I do not believe we ought to forget, or hide, or disavow this game. Read the whole thing over at ...

Games for Change 2007 (day 2)
June 12, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

Continuing coverage of Games for Change Festival 2007. Yesterday's coverage is here Funding Perspectives Connie Yowell, MacArthur Foundation Diana Rhoten, NSF Allyson Knox, Microsoft Lucy Bernholz (moderator) Games, Civic Education, and Engagement Joseph Kahne, Mills College Doug Thomas, Tiltfactor Angela [did not get her last name, sorry], Hunter College/Tiltfactor Ben Stokes (moderator) Gaming 21st Century Play - Are Games Rewiring Our Culture and Vice Versa? Frank Lantz, Area Code Karen Sideman, Parsons Strategies for an Ecology of Change Greg Costikyan, Manifesto Games Katie Salen, gameLab institute of Play Ken Wark, New School, Eugene Lang College Carl Goodman (moderator) ...

Games for Change 2007 (day 1)
June 11, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

I'm in New York at Games for Change Festival 2007. I'm going to attempt to liveblog some of it here. Keynote Conversation with Chris Melissinos and Alan Gershenfeld Alan Gershenfeld, CEO of Netomat and former head of Activision Chris Melissinos, Chief Gaming Officer, Sun Microsystems Virtual Activism: Exploring Nonprofits in Second Life Susan Tenby, Tech Soup Evonne Heyning, Amoration Jeska Dzwigalski, Linden Lab Beth Kanter, moderator Market Sector Impact Alex Chisholm, ICE3, MIT, NBC Eric Brown, ImpactGames Stephen Friedman, mtvU Heather Chaplin (moderator) Serious Games & Games for Change: Then and Now Ben Sawyer (out of power for a while, ...

Shoot an Iraqi over the Internet
May 21, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

No, it's not what it sounds like. In this unusual exhibition by Iraqi artist Wafaa Bilal, called Domestic Tension, website visitors can shoot a paintball gun at the artist. From his statement: Bilal's objective is to raise awareness of virtual war and privacy, or lack thereof, in the digital age. During the course of the exhibition, Bilal will confine himself to the gallery space. During the installation, people will have 24-hour virtual access to the space via the Internet. ... Domestic Tension will depict the suffering of war not through human displays of dramatic emotion, but through engaging people in ...

Playing with Oil
May 10, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

Gas prices are back up in the States, and with them more predictions of just how high they might rise. CNN/Money published an article a few days ago, Get ready for $4 gasoline, predicts that prices will rise above that psychologically significant figure. The culprits include the ongoing geopolitics of oil producing regions, but more subtle factors like low refinery output that can be traced all the way back to hurricanes Rita and Katrina two years ago. We explored the relationship between gas prices and factors like refining and distribution (as well as geopolitics) in Oil God, a newsgame released ...

World Without Oil
May 1, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

A new Alternate Reality Game called World Without Oil has launched, taking on the end of oil. As described in a recent article on the game, in the game's fictional world, "gas prices will skyrocket, a dwindling food supply will rot, and the oil crisis literally will stop Americans in their tracks. How can you and your loved ones survive a crippling breakdown?" The game is created by Ken Eklund and is a part of PBS's Independent Lens and its Electric Shadows programming, which in turn are presented by iTVS, the same group that funded our forthcoming game Fatworld, about ...

Art does not take exit surveys
April 16, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

I should be frank: I'm actually a bit tired of hearing about Super Columbine Massacre RPG. That's not because I don't support the game -- I was one of its earliest supporters, and I remain impressed and intrigued by the way the game attempts to put the player in the disturbing shoes of Harris and Klebold. Rather, I'm tired of seeing conversations sparked by SCMRPG that only advance theories about games in general, instead of making actual critiques of this particular game itself. The latest volley is from Will Interactive CEO Sharon Sloane, who recently wrote an opinion piece about ...

PeaceMaker
March 20, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

We've been remiss in failing to mention the release of PeaceMaker, the game about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict created by former Carnegie Mellon ETC students under their new shingle ImpactGames. I want to write a more detailed review of the game, but I haven't yet played it enough to be prepared to do so. Until then, you can read a lengthy review from Ernest Adams over on Gamasutra. It's also a very positive review. ...

Take a survey on videogames and political engagement
March 1, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

University of Amsterdam Masters student Joyce Neys is working on a master thesis about online political games. You can help by participating in a survey that will become a part of the research. From Joyce: My research focuses on online computer games that are not made by commercial companies but by "ordinary people." More specifically I am looking at online computer games that are not just concerned with the entertaining element of this medium, but also want to put forward a message to fellow citizens. Such a message can be diverse. For example, it can be informative (i.e. to tell ...

Serious Games book for Japan
February 27, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

Toru Fujimoto let me know that his new book Serious Games: Transforming Education and Society Through Digital Games has just been published by Tokyo Denki University Press. If you don't know Toru already, he's the source for serious games related material in Japan. So it's not surprising that he wrote the book on it! Here's a (bad) Babelfish translation of the book webpage (my favorite mistranslationism is "Dull fool is dyeing"). The book is in Japanese and written for the Japanese market, but Toru also knows everything about what's going on in serious games in Japan. ...

Politics in Commercial Games
February 26, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

MTV News games reporter Stephen Totilo is one of the best and most prolific game journalists out in the field. He recently write two stories about politically-charged themes in commercial games, a welcome topic. The first is an interview with Harvey Smith of Midway Austin about giving political teeth to the forthcoming FPS Black Site: Area 51 The second is an interview with Criterion's Alex Ward, which includes a meditation on the difficulties of getting gamers to care about the political narrative in Black. ...

Enemy dolls: my new column at SGS
February 16, 2007 - by Gonzalo Frasca

A big part of my upcoming PhD dissertation (I'm working hard to remove the "upcoming" part from that sentence) deals with toys. I'm convinced that there is a lot of knowledge and design wisdom in toys that can be extremely useful for videogame design. This also applies to issues of rhetoric and ideology and that's exactly the topic from my latest Playing with Fire column. It deals with a bin Laden doll that I found for sale on a street market in Singapore a couple of years ago. ...

The Watergate Game
February 1, 2007 - by Gonzalo Frasca

This is just too pretty. An old arcade machine called the "Watergate Caper" which, according to its brochure, "stimulates the larceny in all of us to see if we can break in and not get caught". The machine is from 1973 and according to KLOV it's very rare. Here are Watercoolergames we are very fond of any cool water-related games. ...

Article on the Dean Game in a New Anthology
January 23, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip Fruin recently announced the availability of a new anthology, Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media. The table of contents demonstrates the richness and variety of the book, covering topics from tabletop role-playing games to improvisational theater. Contributors include Greg Costikyan, Chris Crawford, Nick Fortugno, Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern, Jane McGonigal, Talan Memmott, Nick Montfort, Jill Walker, Eric Zimmerman and many more. The contribution Gonzalo and I wrote for the volume might be of particular interest to our readers. "Video Games Go to Washington" is a detailed look at the design ...

President Forever updated for 2008
January 22, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

If you've been reading Water Cooler Games since the beginning, then you may remember the bevvy of election games from the 2004 election cycle (to wit, Frontrunner, The Political Machine, President Forever: 2004, and Power Politics). President Forever has been updated for 2008, and now you can buy President Forever + Primaries to try your hand at a Hillary Clinton or Bill Richardson prexy campaign. I'll make the same statement here that I've made before: these games are excellent simulators of campaigning, but they are not simulators of politics. That is to say, they demonstrate just how divorced from policy ...

Slamdance Panel Discussion
January 21, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

As Kotaku reported a couple days ago, Slamdance updated their official statement on the controversy surrounding their removal of Super Columbine Massacre RPG! from the festival. Today at 5pm MT, they'll hold a panel discussion about the issue. I'm not sure who is participating, but Slamdance president Peter Baxter and games competition head Sam Roberts will be a part of the discussion. My friend Ed Cunningham, who produced a film premiering at Slamdance next week (King of Kong, about competitive Donkey Kong), will also join the panel. Here's the vague summary from the Slamdance website: And now this decision must ...