Attention Hog
August 13, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

San Francisco artist Chris Basmajian has created Attention Hog, A casual game about attention-driven social network culture. In Basmajian's words, "the game reflects some of the social and psychological trends present in social-networking communities. Eating its own hog feed, the game also offers extensive (almost 20) automated social network integrations, from Bebo to Xanga. In the game, the player pilots a cute pig toward people wandering around. If they face you for enough time, a heart fills up and turns gold, earning points. Each level has a target, and failing to meet it ends the game. Power-ups that improve your ...

Slim Jim's Virtual World of Meat Stick
July 3, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

Slim Jim, makers of fine dry meat snacks, have a launched virtual world for "people who want to explore their spicy side." This inspired locus, dubbed Spicy Town, is a "wild place where people can create a unique alter ego that’s a little aggressive, insane, adventurous, and mischievous." So say Slim Jim's PR agency, which encourages me to let you all know that, once you've created your Spicy Side avatar, you can "challenge other users to real-time rumbles, talk smack, or just hang out in the immersive digital Spicy Town where you can cruise around and break mailboxes, spray paint ...

Parents: Sex is Worse than Severed Heads
July 2, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

USA Today is known for their daily infographics. Yesterday's covered "Video game offenders: What parents say they would find most offensive in a video game." You can see the results at right (click to make it bigger). It's nice that gay smooching just barely edged out "graphically severed human head" in terms of offensiveness, but we should all be relieved to see that heterosexual sex tops both of those by a whopping ten percentage points. Because, man, when I think of things more repulsive and depraved than severed human heads, the first thing that pops into my head is human ...

My latest colum: Performative Play
June 27, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

Gamasutra has published my latest "Persuasive Games" column, this one on how gameplay can literally alter the real world, not through changes in attitude but via gameplay actions themselves. "Performative" is a name for speech acts that do things themselves when they are uttered. The classic example of the performative is the cleric or magistrate's declaration, "I now pronounce you man and wife." In this case, the utterance itself performs the action of initiating the marriage union. Other examples are promises and apologies, christenings and wagers, firing and sentencing. "I promise to come home by midnight"; "I dub thee Sir ...

Simulating disease is nothing to sneeze at
June 23, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

Liz Losh mentions and critiques a new Facebook app called Patient Zero, from VisualDXHealth. It takes the concept of viral spread literally rather than figuratively, allowing users to create a new virus, "power it up," and spread it to friends. Seems like a decent idea at first blush. The problem, as Liz points out, is the implementation. Viruses are created, and immunities are granted, by answering quiz questions, no doubt a hat-tip to some idiot stakeholder at the sponsor who wanted to assure "knowledge transfer" by bludgeoning people with textbook learning. Despite the whole ideavirus metaphor, representations of actual infective ...

Rohrer sketches on Police Brutality, Immortality
June 16, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

Last year I wrote briefly about Jason Rohrer's excellent game Passage. Since then, in addition to a couple more small games, Rohrer has been writing a monthly column at The Escapist called Game Design Sketchbook. Among them, two are of particular interest to readers here. The first is Police Brutality, a game about resisting police in the wake of a University of Florida student who was tased at a John Kerry rally in 2007. The game starts from the premise that inaction is cowardice, and then offers a suggestion of a process participants might have enacted. This process, the enacting ...

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, ...

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. ...

Dating Violence Game Contest
February 16, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

Brian Crecente reports that his brother has launched a flash game design contest for games on the topic of dating violence prevention. First prize is $1,000, and entires are due April 15, 2008. More information here. ...

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. ...

Will there ever be politics in Second Life?
December 30, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

Those of you who keep up with game industry news already know that Cory Ondrejka has left his post as CTO of Linden Lab, creators of Second Life. Cory is a respected friend, and I will be interested to see what he does next. On Friday, Cory mused on his last day on his new blog, Collapsing Geography. That may be one you want to add to your readers. More directly related to our interests on this site, however, is Cory's discussion of one of his 2007 predictions, which have become a Terra Nova tradition. ...

The Holidays In-World
December 26, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

I hope everyone had a happy Christmas yesterday. I dug out of Jell-O and constructed Transformers pies. As Christmas recedes into memory, here's one more post on the topic. One of the genres I didn't discuss at all in my recent column on holiday games are MMOs and virtual worlds. On Christmas Eve, Robert Cox published a detailed article, The Holidays in the MMO Universe. Definitely worth a read if you're interested in the topic of games and the holidays. ...

Parking Wars on Facebook
December 22, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

This isn't the first Facebook advergame, but it's the first I've seen that really tries to take advantage of the service's social graph. There is a new A&E television series called Parking Wars, which starts in January. The subject of the show is probably the only division of the police force not yet to have their own reality/documentary series: metermaids and parking enforcers. Parking Wars the game is a Facebook game built to promote the show. It's very simple. When you add the app you get your own street with a handful of spaces. Some have special rules, like only ...

Please play Jason Rohrer's Passage
December 1, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

I am back from Montreal, where I attended the Montreal International Games Summit and spent some time with the folks at Concordia and also attended Kokoromi's Gamma 256 show. There's lots to say about all of these, but for now I want to point you to one of the games from the Gamma show. The constraint of the contest was 256 pixels square or less. All the games were very good, but the standout for me was Jason Rohrer's superb specimen, Passage. I don't even want to say too much about it here, but I think it's a terrific example ...

Alternate Reality Games Seminar
September 24, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

Despite their interesting features, Alternate Reality Games like The Beast and ilovebees really got their start as marketing campaigns. Since World Without Oil, there has been growing interest in using ARGs for serious purposes. Game community Unfiction is sponsoring a one-day event, Embrace the Chaos, to help people understand how to use these games. The cost is $175 before Sept 30 and $200 thereafter. I think it's a bit unfortunate that the organizers have positioned the event toward marketers ("Alternate Reality Games and online experience marketing when done correctly create a powerful connection between the audience and you"), but I ...

Persuasive Games: The Reverence of Resistance
September 11, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

Gamasutra has published my latest "Persuasive Games" column, this one on the Manchester Cathedral controversy in popular PS3 shooter Resistance: Fall of Man. I take a fairly different position than A cynic, unbeliever, or Internet troll might point out the irony of the church pointing the finger, given the millennia-old history of church-sponsored violence. A gamer might rely on the title's status as fantasy fiction to nullify the validity of affront. Such impressions are merely instrumental attempts to foil the church’s parry rather than reasoned attempts to justify the expressive ends served by depicting the cathedral in the game. And ...

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. ...

Intimate Controllers
May 4, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

Think you've seen every kind of alternate interface? NYU ITP student Jenny Chowdhury has devoted her masters thesis work to making a videogame controller out of a bra and undershorts. She calls it Intimate Controllers. Players have to touch each other in intimate places to play games created for the device. There's a video of one of the prototypes on her website, which seems to be a rhythm matching type of game tied to an abstract fiction about compatibility with one's partner. Great stuff. (thanks to Nico) ...

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 ...

No Marriage, Gay or Otherwise, in Middle Earth
April 28, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

One of our more popular posts here on Water Cooler Games is a mention three years ago about gay marriage in The Sims 2. Just last week, Turbine and Midway released The Lord of the Rings Online, sure to become an absurdly over-discussed and possibly popular massively multi-player game. The debate seems to have begun around the very topic of gay marriage. Today, Salon published a story by Katherine Glover: Why can't gay dwarves get married in Middle-earth?. Apparently Turbine's solution to the quandary was just to pull marriage from the game entirely. The article covers many themes, including social ...

ID the Creep
April 25, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

Liz Losh recently introduced me to ID The Creep, a game that purports to help young girls practice identifying pedophiles online. The game is sponsored by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and The Ad Council. As Liz argues, the player really isn't forced to make any hard decisions in the game; for example, there's no actual socialization or learning or interaction that takes place in the simulated chat space, so there's little motivation to treat the simulated interlocutors as . Liz found that the best strategy was just to identify everyone as a pedophile. Perhaps this is ...

American Idol Mii's
March 23, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

I have no idea why I did this. I was writing all day, and my brain started to fry, and I went downstairs to play some Wii Play billiards. I must have been reeling still from the Life of a Mii segment, and I started creating Mii's. Somehow I ended up creating one of the remaining American Idol contestants. And then it started to seem like a good idea to make all of them. So, here you go, here's the ten remaining: I'm not sure how I'll lord my god-like power over them. I could delete one each week. Or ...

Turn It All Off, an energy savings game
March 19, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

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 ...

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. ...

Super Columbine Massacre RPG Trailer
December 27, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

In preparation for its appearance as a finalist at Slamdance 2007 (more on that in a future post), SCMRPG creator Danny Ledonne has created a game trailer, which you can now view on YouTube. If you haven't been reading WCG for the last six months or so, you can catch up on our coverage of the game (1, 2, 3, 4), and some of my words and voice also appear in Danny's trailer. Danny is a filmmaker by trade, and I think the trailer he made effectively presents the game, particularly the range of responses the title has elicited and ...

Raph Koster announces Areae
December 16, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

Today Raph finally announced his new company, Areae. Click over to Raph's blog or the corporate site for links to a bunch of news stories. Raph isn't saying much yet, but... this is definitely something our readers will want to keep an eye on... ...

SCMRPG creator Danny LeDonne on violent games
December 5, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

Danny LeDonne, creator of Super Columbine Massacre RPG (previously discussed on WCG: 1, 2, 3) was on KPBS public radio (San Diego) recently, where he discussed the game, as well as violent videogames in general. Danny's explanation of the game is thoughtful as usual. You can listen to it here. A number of other games come up in caller discussions, including Postal and America's Army. Dr. Karen Dill from Lenoir-Rhyne College and the Committee on Violence in Video Games and Interactive Media weighs in in the second half of the program, repeating the old, tired idea that games lead to ...

Cruel 2 B Kind update
November 7, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

Do you live or work in San Francisco? Do you need something to do on your lunch hour tomorrow? There is a game of Cruel 2 B Kind, the game Jane McGonigal and I designed/built earlier this year, running tomorrow (the 8th) at noon in SF. Sign up here. Don't live in the Bay? No problem, play one of the other scheduled games, in Cleveland, Washington, London, or Tel Aviv. Or host your own. ...

Want to make a Safer Sex Video Game?
September 19, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

IGDA Sex Sig chair and author of the just-released Sex in Games, Brenda Brathwaite points us to a call for proposals from the University of Connecticut for a Safer Sex Video Game. If you're interested, act fast: there's a mandatory bid meeting Wednesday Sept 20 at 2pm ET. ...

Play (and code) the Munch Museum heist
September 18, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

Recently I wrote about documentary games, games that depict an account of a real-life event. Silence Variations is a new one from Overdog. The game reenacts the 2004 armed robbery of the Munch Museum in Oslo, in which "Scream" and "Madonna" were stolen. The game was commissioned by Bergen Kunsthall for an exhibition in Norway, so it only exists in multiuser installation form. However, the team has released all the code for the game under a Creative Commons license. So, you build your own variations, or use it as a basis for another work. ...

Play Cruel 2 B Kind next weekend in NYC
September 16, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

Earlier this month I mentioned that Jane McGonigal and I have been playtesting our new public game Cruel 2 B Kind in San Francisco. The two live playtests we ran (well, Jane really ran them on the ground, while I stared obsessively at our server) were tremendously useful and we've made a bunch of changes, updated the rules, taken some things out, put new things in. Jane liveblogged both playtests (1, 2) and collected some public reaction. You can also see photos from the playtests on the game website, and more on Flickr. By the way, Jane was just named ...

Montreal Gunman Aftermath
September 14, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

If you've seen the news in the past 24 hours, you've probably heard that a gunman, Kimveer Gill, opened fire at a Montreal college yesterday, killing one person and injuring 19 others. If you've read the headlines this morning, you may also have seen that the press has been highlighting the fact that the man posted on websites that he played Super Columbine Massacre RPG, a game I have discussed (positively) here before (1, 2). I feel compelled to say something about what this shooting says about the game and our response to it. ...

Playtesters needed for Cruel 2 B Kind
August 30, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

Ubiquitous game designer and researcher Jane McGonigal and I have a new game and we need your help playtesting it. Cruel 2 B Kind is a new game of benevolent assassination Jane and I designed for the Come Out and Play Festival in New York. Real world games are hard to test in a vacuum, and we need your help to get it right. If you will be in the San Francisco area Sunday September 3 or Sunday September 10, please sign up for one or both of the San Francisco playtests. Read on for the full details. ...

Have a Paris Riot
August 17, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

I've been increasingly interested in so-called documentary games (or docu-games), such as JFK Reloaded and Escape from Woomera and Waco Resurrection. In fact, Cindy Poremba and I wrote an article on documentary games that should be out in the coming months (click over to her blog for more links on the topic, to which she is devoting her Ph.D. research) So, I was excited to learn about a new game that sounded documentarian in nature. Paris Riots is a mod of Medal of Honor: Allied Assault in which the player takes the role of police mustered to respond to rioting ...

Top 10 Disaffections
July 4, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

Since we launched Disaffected! back in January, we've enjoyed a continuous stream of feedback, some good, some bad, all interesting. I've shared portions of it in private presentations, but when I showed the game at the Games for Change Exhibition last week in New York, I reminded myself to write about it here. For those of you just tuning in, this January my studio Persuasive Games released Disaffected!, a videogame parody of the Kinko's copy store. Probably the fastest way to read up on the game is in this MTV News article, by Stephen Totilo. I'll spare listing the press ...

McDonald's Interactive Sticks it to McDo... or do they?
June 7, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

This post has been updated, please see below. This story has also been updated, please read here According to their website, McDonald's Interactive was founded to help the parent company strategize about future markets. Yesterday, they announced their "intention to split from McDonalds." Why? Said co-director Andrew Shimery-Wolf: "We can no longer stand by while McDonald's corporate policies help lead the planet to ruin." According to Shimery-Wolf, the group had created McMarketplace, a simulation of the global effects of the burger business. It worked well for training, but in long-term predictions, business ended in 2050, when everyone died due to ...

Columbine, Videogames as Expression, and Ineffability
May 21, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

A few weeks ago I wrote about Super Columbine Massacre RPG. The game puts the player in the shoes of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold and attempts to paint a picture of their motivations, plans, and actions on that terrible day. It's a controversial topic to be sure, but exactly the kind of subject we should be taking on in videogames: hard problems for which there are no easy answers. I knew that public reaction to the game would be largely negative. I've received plenty of hate mail just for talking about the game. But I don't think I was ...

Columbine RPG
May 3, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

I've just learned about the Super Columbine Massacre RPG. It's a deep and complex account of the 1999 Columbine High School massacre interpreted in the style of 2D role-playing games. The game has been out for at least a year, but this is the first I've seen it. After Gonzalo's recent mention of Border Patrol, I can imagine that our readers might have strong reaction to this game. While it is a challenging subject, I think the effort is brave, sophisticated, and worthy of praise from those of us interested in videogames with an agenda. The purpose of this game ...

Calderoids - a different kind of mobile game
April 17, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

Almost two years ago, we covered Pac Mondrian, an interpretation of Pac-Man through the lens of modernist painter Piet Mondrian. The arts collective Prize Budget for Boys is back with another videogame/art mashup. Calderoids is am interpretation of the classic arcade game Asteroids through the lens of American sculptor Alexander Calder. Calder is best known for inventing the mobile, kinetic sculptures that use equilibrium to counterbalance. This may come as a surprise to many of us today, who associate the mobile with baby nurseries. But it started out as an abstract art form. Here's what Prize Budget for Boys has ...

Accordion Hero - Leben Sie Der Traum!
March 4, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

Bavarian videogame satirists Schadenfreude Interactive have announced their most recent parodic homage, Accordion Hero! Polka your way up from Der Rathskeller to Oktoberfest in Munich! From the amusing "product page": Hit all the right notes and get the crowd on their feet waving their beer steins in unison - you are an accordion hero! Includes all the great accordion melodies you've ever gotten really, really drunk to...from Ein Munchen Steht Ein Hofbrauhaus to Rock You Like A Hurricane. Accordion Hero follows in the long line of absurdities showcased at Schadenfreude, including Nazgul Thunder 2003, Grand Theft Ottoman, and Secret Weapons ...

Molleindustria's McDonald's Game
February 2, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

Just two weeks after we released Disaffected!, WCG amici italiani Molleindustria have released another specimen in the now-rapidly-growing anti-advergame subgenre, this one a scathing critique of the McDonald's corporation. Visit the "official" website to play. The game requires the player to learn and master all the complex techniques of a big international corporation like McDo. You'll bribe South American officials for the rights to clear rainforests for cattle and soy; you'll plump up cattle with additives; you'll coerce and influence government and scientific interests back home; and you'll manipulate your employees to achieve the highest profits. From the game: Making ...

What worries the Virtual Magic Kingdom? Impropriety, but mostly sex.
January 30, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

A little more than a year ago, I mused open-mouthed at Disney's intention to create a Habbo Hotel-like virtual world. Then back in May we announced the launch of the beta of Virtual Magic Kingdom (I was so disappointed they didn't call it Marketingland). We logged over 100 comments on that entry, some interesting but most inane -- users scrounging for cheat codes or mistaking WCG for a forum where empty chatter goes without notice. I got tired of the recent comments filling up with such things, so I turned off comments at the start of this month. Then, a ...

Is your PC ready for the Rapture?
December 30, 2005 - by Ian Bogost

For those of you who don't know it, Tim F. LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins have penned some 14 novels about life on earth after the rapture. Taken together with the associated kids books, graphic novels, audio books, fresh poultry, armored cars, vacation timeshares, and dutch ovens, the series has sold over 600 gazillion copies. A few years back, the group behind these tales of post-apocalyptic end of the world goodness created Left Behind Games, a division that promised to allow the 30 million billion people who had bought the books and dutch ovens to take on the role of ...

Sex, Violence, and Videogames on Nerve
December 15, 2005 - by Ian Bogost

Nerve magazine is running a special video games issue this week, which includes, among other things, a review of Façade and a "panel of experts" discussion on sex and violence in games. I'm one of the participants in the panel, along with Steven Johnson, Eric Zimmerman, Henry Jenkins, Brenda Brathwaite, Rob Levine, and Katie Salen. Followers of our previous discussions on sex and games might be interested in the conversation. There are five questions: Question 1: Is the sex-and-violence content of video games a legitimate social concern? Or are Hillary Clinton et. al. criticizing games for easy political points? And ...

Amazon.com Wishlist Game
December 12, 2005 - by Ian Bogost

Here's a new game I just invented that you can play this holiday season, or anytime. All you need is a web browser and an Amazon.com account. It's part gift economy critique, part Oulipian writing. How to play: Go to the Amazon.com Wishlist page. Under "Find a wishlist," enter a name. Any name will do, forename or surname, and it's better if it's not someone you know. Browse the search results for a wishlist that actually has items in it (a lot of people don't add to their wishlist). Based solely on the contents of the wishlist, write a story, ...

iBelieve - social commentary goes meta
November 7, 2005 - by Ian Bogost

I'm breaking the rules a little with this post. It has very little to do with videogames. But it's too good to pass up, and it does relate to the broader themes of our project. In a brilliant move, artist Scott Wilson created iBelieve, a cross-shaped lanyard and cap for iPod shuffle. Its purpose was social commentary: Inspired by the world's obsession and devotion to the iPod, ... [iBelieve] is a social commentary on the fastest growing religion in the world. But much to Wilson's surprise, religious organizations have started buying the iBelieve in bulk! Incredible! I've been thinking and ...

Why the IGDA's new Sex & Games SIG goes limp
August 18, 2005 - by Ian Bogost

Gamespot reports that the IGDA has launched a special interest group (SIG) for sex in games. The SIG even has it's own blog, Sex & Games, which strikes me as a great idea. Here's what they have to say about their goals: The Sex SIG welcomes everyone interested in the topic of sexual content in video games, from developers actively creating such content to parents to those working in or with organizations that seek to restrict such content. The Sex SIG hopes this "Sex & Games" blog will serve as an informational clearinghouse for such content, helping us to connect ...

Farming, Gender, Narcotics, and other related things
August 2, 2005 - by Ian Bogost