Socrates Jones: Pro Philosopher (Connor Fallon, Val Reznitskaya, et al.)

Posted by on September 16, 2013

jones
The game should teach the fundamentals of Critical Thinking. – [Author’s Post-mortem]

[Play online (Flash)]

Games, Highly Recommended

6 Comments.

  1. David T. Marchand September 16, 2013 at 5:22 pm

    It starts out feeling somewhat naive, yet it takes itself so fucking serious that by the time I finished it I came to respect it very much.

  2. prunescholar September 16, 2013 at 6:57 pm

    Ah, lovely! Thank you for posting this; it will be interesting to see how it develops the PW formula, and if it can get over some of the series’ biggest flaws.

    • Aquin September 16, 2013 at 8:45 pm

      I think it has the same flaws, since it does nothing to change the Trial formula. But, it’s a nice first dip into the concept and history of morality for young students.

      (Now you got me thinking about the new PW; I wonder how it mixes things up.)

      • prunescholar September 16, 2013 at 9:27 pm

        Heya! Thank you for the reply – just played this to completion now and can think of a couple of things that I think this does better – the health bar is a lot more forgiving (though I wish it was excised entirely) and the lack of investigation segments and general swiftness was appreciated. Also, there’s limited redundancy of items (as you only get a handful of entries into the ideas slate, and the slate is wiped clean each round). But yeah, I’d agree with you that it keeps some of PW’s flaws.

        I liked the theme of this one a lot though, and getting to debate philosophy with my partner as we played through this really made it for me 😀

  3. Radiatoryang September 17, 2013 at 4:48 am

    Great treatment / riff on PW.

    Dev process sounds arduous — constant testing, constant re-writes, constant fact-checking — I’m not sure I could ever put that much narrative work into something. I think this works because they brute forced so much design like that, to make sure all the writing and logic matched up.

    (Although there were a few times where I was just challenging random stages of an argument because I wasn’t sure which stage I was supposed to challenge with my point…)

  4. Andrew Shouldice September 21, 2013 at 4:59 pm

    This could have so easily been a quickly-made gag of a game, and is instead fully fleshed out and super thoughtful. Impressive work!