The Fake Conference

Great Idea!

Last week my sibling and I decided to hold a fake conference so we could discuss our projects, so I created this presentation to inform her about philosophy game. (Special thanks for Ann for listening to my talk!)

Click Me

After the presentation and some discussion, I got some interesting ideas about how to deal with the problems I had been having. I am going to start the trolley car levels at the most basic scenario and work to more complicated situations, but the first one is going to be soo soo so simple. I have also decided to just make things and see how they turn out rather then obsessing over one decision, because the obsessing is not productive and it would be better if i decided and then ended up remaking something if I changed my mind. 

The last interesting-game related thing was that I went to the philosophy department at my university and got my old ethical theory professor excited about this game! It is a giant victory to have his interest! 

The Trolley Car Level 

• I read a long article that gave me some insight into the trolley car problem and how each philosopher would react 
• and how each philosopher would act to several modified versions 
• so the idea behind this level will be the very classic example of the trolley car problem 
• a trolley car going on a track that will kill 5 people, or you can make the trolley switch tracks and kill 1 person 
• I am working on the sketch of the level, trying to incorporate coins and level mechanics and things that make the game fun  
• hopefully next week we can do another of those sketch to modeled level posts 

Indecision and Lenses

This week has been all about indecision. We skipped level 2 and went straight to working on level 3, the first trolley car level(recall that every couple of levels we build a philosophical thought experiment-aka a trolley car level). but there are so many possibilities and variations for this level that it seemed impossible to decide. When I tried  to ask people they got all excited and gave me 100 new ideas, so I wasn't making much progress. At some point during the week I considered remaking the game entirely, but it was a bit extreme.
In the end we tried to figure out the micro/macro aspects of the story, but that is also difficult so there isn't much new stuff to report on this week.
A few days later we thought we had finally figured out what each philosopher would do in trolley car 1, until we stumbled across an article that threw a wrench in the whole business of the objectivist. We are taking it under consideration.

Lens 4- The Lens of Curiosity

• what questions does my game put into the player's mind?
• what is the correct thing to do in a variety of situations? 
• what would the objectivist/kantian/utilitarian do in this situation? and is that the correct thing to do?
• 
  
• what am I doing to make them care about these questions?
• their score depends on how well they understand these questions
• what can I do to make them invent more questions?
• include more puzzling situations 
• introduce more philosophers 

Lens 5- The Lens of Endogenous Value

• what is valuable to the players in my game?
• gold, minions and score
• how can i make it more valuable to them?
• in addition to getting minions for good score, the player could also lose minions for bad score 
• score is based on consistency to the philosophy 
• I am not sure how to make it more valuable, yet
• what is the relationship between value in the game and the player's motivations?
• the puzzles will be easier to complete with more minions, which the player will get from doing the earlier levels well enough to score high 
• the player will see his/her score out of the total possible score, so not wanting to feel lame is motivation  

Lens 6- The Lens of Problem Solving

• what problems does my game ask the player to solve?
• this game is full of problems to be solved (trolley car problems)
• it also asks the player to solve them from different perspectives 
• are there hidden problems to solve that arise as part of gameplay?
• yes
• as the story develops problems arise from the philosophies that the player did not choose at the beginning
• but I am not sure of what they will actually be, or how the player can overcome them yet
• how can my game generate new problems so that players keep coming back?
• there are oodles of trolley car problems and different variations that will make the player pause and reconsider what they thought they knew about each philosophy