Progress

The list has been narrowed to four philosophers whose philosophies will star in the game:

1.  Ayn Rand/Objectivism 
2. John Stuart Mill/Utilitarianism
3. Immanuel Kant/Kantianism
4. Confucius/ Confucianism      

The team is still working on how exactly to educate the players on each philosophy. What we know for sure is that we want the education to be subtle. We are working on prototypes and discussing ways to educate the player.                    

Philosophers

I have narrowed down the list from every philosopher ever, to eleven philosophers and philosophies that could work in the game. I will take the list and create a brief summary of each and consider how they could work in the game. I will update on that progress soon.

1. Socrates
2. Aristotle
3. Descartes
4. Hume
5. Kant
6. Confucius 
7. John Stuart Mill
8. Ayn Rand
9. Alan Turing
10. Saul Kripke
11. Gettier 

In the beginning

Last semester I worked on making an educational game. The objective of creating the game was to teach simple math. The result of a semester worth of work was Chomp Chomp Yum Yum. 

My new quest is to create a game to teach people about philosophy. I was challenged to create a game to teach people about philosophy by my game design mentor Dr. Gordon Erlebacher (hold for applause.) 

Ideally I will update this regularly with all of the new things I am excited about for the game. As of right now the game is nameless and has no specifics other than it is educational. 

 Without further ado, here are some ideas that have come up thus far:

• at the beginning of the game you choose a class and each class represents a different philosophical view such as
• Objectivism  
• Consequentialism 
• Utilitarianism 
• and others!
• when you are looking at the screen to choose your class there is a 1-2 description of each class 
• then throughout the game you receive and lose points depending on whether or not your actions are consistent with those of your class 
• in order to have information about the philosophers who created these views there could be portraits of them in the game 
• or the philosopher could be your mentor

OR

• a game where you change between two different philosophers 
• each has strengths and weaknesses 
• each has a different agenda
• you dont control when you change 
• main goal of the game is to find the philosopher that is changing you back and forth 
• the game has different endings depending on which philosopher you are at the end 
• it is possible that these ideas could be fused together, so we will see 

the next set of tasks is as follows

1. pick the philosophers/philosophies that are going to be used
2. list their attributes 
3. and axioms 
4. assumptions the philosophies are based on 
5. dilemmas of each philosophy 
6. what kind of questions will each philosopher ask?
7. what do we want the player to learn?
8. what is the genre of this game?