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Applied ethics zaniness, July 5, 2019When I read this game's competition blurb, I thought: it makes it sound as if the game is a mix of trolley-style ethical problems and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5. To my not inconsiderable surprise, that is exactly what Dilemma is. You are faced with a terrible accident about to happen, and you have either one or, depending on what you do, just a few moves to come up with a solution. Shades of Rematch, certainly, but instead of trying to find the right solution, you are exploring an extremely wide possibility space, so it ends up feeling more like Aisle.
Let me stress that the possibility space is really wide. You start out by thinking of clever ways to save an old man from being run over by a bus, but you can easily end up deciding whether living people should be used as life support for important artists, or whether to hand over the Earth to a race of benevolent aliens. The central enjoyment offered by the game is the exploration of this zany universe, where everything weird seems to be happening at once.
But this very zaniness sits somewhat uneasily with the game’s claim of serving up moral dilemmas – a claim that even determines the title of the piece. Most of the piece is just not about dilemmas. Sometimes this is because you know nothing about the consequences: the question of whether or not to shoot the front left tire of the bus is not a moral dilemma, since you don’t know what will happen. But often it is because of how bizarre the choices are. Should I surrender the world to paternalistic aliens, or should I embrace an anti-communist quote by C. S. Lewis? Of course, it’s a great and important moral principle to never embrace anything by Lewis, but... let’s just say that this choice is a bit too ‘out there’ to really count as a thought experiment in moral philosophy. It doesn’t help that the game regularly gives ethical interpretations of your choices that have nothing to do with what you were thinking when you made the choice, nor that the game actively encourages you to find every ending, which means that you end up not making choices, but just exploring all the possibilities.
All in all, it was enjoyable for a while, and made me laugh at some of its weirder twists. But there wasn’t enough substance to keep me motivated to find all the endings. I experienced about a third and then called it quits.