Water Cooler Games is a site about videogames with an agenda. It is about games that go beyond entertainment. Water Cooler Games explores the emerging field of games want to do more than simply being fun: they want to make a point, share knowledge, change opinions. This includes new genres such as advergaming, newsgaming, political games, simulations and edutainment. If you think that video games have a strong potential for communication, persuasion and education, come and join our discussion by the Water Cooler.

Water Cooler Games is edited by Ian Bogost and Gonzalo Frasca, two of the world's leading videogame researchers and designers of videogames with an agenda.

Dr. Ian Bogost is a videogame designer, critic, and researcher. He is Associate Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC. His research and writing considers videogames as an expressive medium, and his creative practice focuses on games about social and political issues.

Bogost is author of Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism (MIT Press 2006), recently listed among “50 books for everyone in the game industry,” of Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (MIT Press 2007), and co-author of Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System. He is a popular writer and speaker and widely considered an influential thinker and doer in the videogame industry and research community.

Bogost’s videogames about social and political issues cover topics as varied as airport security, disaffected workers, the petroleum industry, suburban errands, and tort reform. His games have been played by millions of people and exhibited internationally at venues including Laboral Centro de Arte (Madrid), Fournos Centre for Digital Culture (Athens), Eyebeam Center (New York), Slamdance Guerilla Game Festival (Park City), the Israeli Center for Digital Art (Holon) and The Australian Centre for the Moving Image (Melbourne).

Bogost holds a Bachelors degree in Philosophy and Comparative Literature from the University of Southern California, and a Masters and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UCLA. He lives in Atlanta with his wife and two children.

Ian can be contacted at . His website is http://www.bogost.com.

Gonzalo Frasca is both a game designer and academic game researcher (balancing those two aspects of his life is harder than most RTS games). He has been working in videogame theory for almost a decade now. He publishes Ludology.org, an online resource for academic game research and he is Editor at Game Studies, the international academic journal. A former head of game production at Cartoon Network LA, he later co-founded an independent game development studio: Powerful Robot Games. He launched Newsgaming.com, an independent project examining the boundaries between journalism and videogames. Frasca also has extensive experience working in media (CNN) and advertising.

Gonzalo can be contacted at .