I See Your Existentialist and Raise You A Stoic

Patrick tossed out a design challenge on King Lud IC yesterday (link).

How do you design a game about competing philosophies? Re-skinning Street Fighter is probably one way to do it, but there have got to be more interesting ways. Make your case. It doesn’t have to be a power-point, just an insightful comment, or a blog post of your own.

I’m never one to back down from an interesting challenge, so here goes:

You Don’t Know Zeno The obvious choice would be a trivia game. Philosophers sexual preferences, theories, and quotes would all be laid bare in an effort to test the esoteric knowledge of the audience. Philosophy majors would quickly turn it into a drinking game and set a trend which would suit them well throughout their careers.

Foucault’s Pendulum This rhythm/karaoke game for the Wii would require the audience to play the Wiimote and nunchuck like maracas while they sang along to peppy, philosophically-themed parodies of popular tunes. On screen, caricatures of the leading philosophers from the school featured in the tune would leap about, with the winner becoming the premier scholar.

Angstville This DRPG challenges the player to fully embrace an existential philosophy and to interact with the town’s inhabitants in a thematically appropriate manner. Unlike other DRPGs which reward problem resolution and at least some measure of skill diversity, Angstville rewards philosophical consistency and specialization. Philosophical roles range from Sartrean Existentialism to Neitzschian. As Angstville utilizes NLP, bonus XP is rewarded to quoting the founder of your existentialist class in the appropriate context!

Philo This metaphoric, abstract, casual game takes its cue from Rod Humble and has no explicate explanation of it’s central themes or gameplay. Players subtly interact with fogs of various colors which react dynamically to the presence of other fogs, either growing denser, covering more area, either pushing aside or subsuming adjacent fogs, co-mingling with other fogs, or giving rise to fogs of a new color. Eventually, no matter how hard they try to avoid it, the player find themselves with a dense fog of a metallic gold color covering the entire screen.