The Bait-And-Switch of ‘Thought Experiment Simulator’
I don’t often write about my Philosophy undergraduate studies, mostly because they have predictably left career doors unopened, but also because mentioning Nietzsche and Epistemology in the same sentence often makes people’s eyes glaze over. To my delight, I discovered Thought Experiment Simulator one wintry afternoon, which is a mostly hand-drawn effort to gamify some of the classic thought experiments in philosophy like the proverbial Trolley Problem and the Myth of Sisyphus. I breezed through this quick indie in an afternoon, and despite going out of my way to get the 100% achievement on Steam, feel like Thought Experiment Simulator barely left an impression.
To the uninitiated, philosophical thought experiments are often famous logical problems in analytic philosophy – a branch of thinking that concerns itself with “cases,” or particularities that, if you follow them to their technical conclusions, most everyday people will reach strange or unintuitive conclusions. These thought experiments are most commonly found in anthologies discussing the evolution of epistemic or metaphysical reasoning, but are also common in ethics and even some continental (which is to say, a more literary and holistic approach) realms of philosophy.
Some of the most famous (or infamous, depending on your predisposition to analytical philosophy) cases are addressed in Thought Experiment Simulator. Thanks to the social internet, I think just about everyone is familiar at least cursorily with the “Trolley Problem,” a classic ethical dilemma that involves pulling a lever on a train track. By pulling this lever, so the thought experiment goes, you have to vicariously imagine choosing between two sets of train tracks: on one side is a single person, on the other are several (usually five) people, all tied to the tracks with rope for some strange reason. The basic moral intuition people have when presented with this problem is that they want to pull the lever to save five people instead of sacrificing all five to save the one person on the other tracks.
What’s fun about philosophical thought experiments is how they challenge your basic reasoning with seemingly simple problems. Immediately, most people seem correct – sacrifice one person to save the five, but then immediately the analytic philosopher will call your participation into question. That is, by pulling the lever yourself, even if you just happened to stumble upon this bizarre locomotive dilemma by no fault of your own, taking an action somehow implicates you with responsibility for this decision. By pulling the lever, you are acting as a moral arbiter – god, if you will – and therefore share at least some of the responsibility for the one person who the trolley runs over. Given the thought experiment, because of the outlandish nature of the example, most people think in a simple consequentialist framework; that is, they think that something is right or wrong based on the consequences, or how many people are negatively impacted by this decision. Most people do not stop to think about how their own involvement changes things.
As you go deeper into a trolley problem, you will encounter progressively more complicated iterations – like a trolley problem where you can run over a doctor who will one day cure cancer and four other people, and yet if you divert the track you save Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust happens. Or a truly problematic one that still targets interesting intuitions involves pushing someone off a bridge above the train; by sacrificing this innocent bystander, you save all six of the innocent people tied to the tracks, therefore saving six lives in total instead of the original maximum of five. Here is where people get really uncomfortable, however, because the act of physically pushing someone feels like murder in a way that the original trolley problem somehow escaped – for most people considering this problem for the first time, at least.
Philosophical thought experiments work in granularities, and what’s cool about Thought Experiment Simulator is the way in which these sometimes tedious and dull problems in philosophy are recast with a whimsical lens. By gamifying these problems, like the trolley, you not only try your hand at simulating your own decision making in a painless way, but the designers of the game are clearly tuned into internet culture, meaning that the absurd “trolley drift” becomes an option. Each thought experiment in the game iterates on itself in a self-aware manner for intended comedic effect. In my experience, however, the comedy more often than not falls completely flat.
One such moment where the comedy in Thought Experiment Simulator did not work for me was the Myth of Sisyphus – a classic Nietzschean problem in which a deceitful king is punished by the gods by forcibly pushing a boulder up a steep hill over and over again. The thought experiment goes that Sisyphus would never be able to reach his goal – the boulder atop the hill – for it was fated that the boulder would roll back down to the bottom of the hill for eternity. Without overexplaining, suffice it to say that Albert Camus later iterated on Nietzsche’s initial retelling of Sisyphus, famously writing “One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” declaring that human meaning in all its absurdity is to be found in the process rather than the outcome. It doesn’t matter that Sisyphus will never finish his task, the joy and the meaning of life arises out of the effort he puts in.
Thought Experiment Simulator’s iteration of The Myth of Sisyphus is unoriginal and unamusing, to put it bluntly. You encounter Sisyphus at the bottom of his steep hill, proverbial boulder ready to ascend. Erratically across the screen, you receive button prompts to “push” the boulder up the hill. A dozen or so button presses and the screen resets, with Sisyphus having reached the top, now returned to the ground below. To keep this interesting, the developer introduces “hats” for Sisyphus to wear as he reascends. Since Thought Experiment Simulator tasks you with obtaining various “stars” in each level, you are required to push this boulder up the hill at least ten times to secure the final star.
This challenge, if you can call it that, wears thin incredibly quickly. With no variation to speak of, only a few hand-drawn hats to keep your attention long enough to obtain the star, I was disappointed that the game offers nothing substantial in the way of gameplay variation or conceptual challenge. Sure, the game offers wry commentary as you continue to repeat Sisyphus’ ascent, but that, too, runs out of steam. Climb after climb, Sisyphus wears a plunger, an anime mask, even some Goku hair – the ideas are there, but the execution feels hollow.
Other puzzles in Thought Experiment Simulator worked much better for me, like the Infinite Monkey Theorem typewriter level. This famous theorem derives itself from the mathematical proof that monkeys hitting random keys on a typewriter would, if given functionally infinite time, eventually and inevitably write any given text – even the works of William Shakespeare, a writer known for his immense complexity and precision of language. Simple in execution, Thought Experiment Simulator adds an auto-clicking element to the level that reminds me of gag games like Universal Paperclips. There is also a bizarre element of taking the “monkey” element of to the logical extreme, involving a CD that causes literal bananas to fall from the sky, strangely adjoining themselves into larger sizes until a final star for the level is unlocked.
The Infinite Monkey Theorem level works much better for me than The Myth of Sisyphus because the quirkiness of the game works in tandem with the interactions you are making as a player. Sure, with Sisyphus, you can foil the narrator’s script by clicking on Sisyphus’ hat thereby making it fall off the screen; this element of game design doesn’t change how you interact with the bare task of pushing the boulder up the hill, however. I’m no game designer, but maybe something as simple as having the boulder fall apart as you push it, or even pushing up a giant yarn ball that unravels and gets caught on the environment as it ascends – things like this would feel more organic to the level and the thought experiment from which each level inherits its design. The bananas in Thought Experiment Simulator add nothing to the actual thought experiment, it’s not just a variation of a trolley problem so-to-speak, but instead serve as a gag that makes you spend a little more time with the level than you initially would have. To me, that’s compelling game design, simple as a distinction as that may seem, and I would have wanted more of that with levels like Sisyphus.
Thought Experiment Simulator is at its conceptual best when it leans into tangential and unrelated weirdness like the bananas. In that sense, my favorite moments of Thought Experiment Simulator are, ironically, when the philosophical thought experiments which drew me into the game become abandoned entirely. For instance, the game takes a surprising amount of feline turns towards the end of the main 15 levels, some of which manifest as 2D pixel platformers, others as literal footage of a cat jumping inside a box. In other moments, you find yourself running what looks like a cat cafe – to the point where I find myself forgetting what initial thought experiment led me down this rabbit hole in the first place.
Another blessing and curse of this delightful series of ludic digressions involves a prolonged bit involving the aforementioned box. This comedic commitment to the bit is something I can creatively respect, but it drags on a little longer than feels necessary. In a moment of disbelief, I found myself at the bottom of an iconic hill, cat ensconced in a cauldron, sledgehammer in hand – wait, is this Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy?! And, apparently with explicit permission from the creator, it is. There is also a psychedelic floating sequence that inescapably reminds me of Deux Ex Machina 2’s cradle-to-grave sequence. But for me, as a player, that’s the rub. Most of what delights me about this game is how it reminds me of, or explicitly references, other works.
This realization shouldn’t be particularly profound, since Thought Experiment Simulator is, by definition, derivative of a famous body of philosophical writing. But in moments where this game truly succeeds, I notice that these moments are often in moments that abandon the premise entirely, like with the bananas, or moments that crib other works, which unfortunately means that these digressions are often more amusing than the core game itself.
One final note on Thought Experiment Simulator involves the challenge mode, which is required for the 100% achievement on Steam. This challenge mode is not particularly grueling, taking me three tries to successfully complete, but I found it to be a nice way to tie everything in this package together before uninstalling it. Instead of the initial 15 rounds of reading, simulation, and achievement hunting, the challenge mode requires you to finish with a specific number of hearts, with one lost for every challenge you fail to complete within the ever-decreasing time limit. This final gauntlet tests your luck and intuition, revealing how I never quite understood the gameplay for Buridan’s Ass, but was able to earn my hearts back for reliable challenges like Prisoner’s Dilemma.
Ultimately, Thought Experiment Simulator feels like it’s between a rock and a hard place in terms of the reasons someone would want to play it. If you, like me, already have a studied penchant for philosophy, you will find yourself skipping the text portions of the game and occasionally muting the narration as you push forward through the familiar-feeling mini games. For people who don’t care about philosophy already, however, it’s hard to motivate why someone would want to play this game. If anything, Thought Experiment Simulator feels like a game that would best work in a livestream setting, where the quick turnaround on gameplay and the sometimes-funny bits of absurdity could make for imminently clippable content. Don’t get me wrong: it’s undeniably exciting when Mickey Mouse floats across the screen once or twice. But I guess I want Thought Experiment Simulator to say something more than shallow quips, even though the reason I began playing this game was for a gag involving philosophical problems that I debated throughout college.
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