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