User:Maplestrip/Socrates Jones: Pro Philosopher

.....This draft has been moved to the mainspace January 2015.....

Socrates Jones: Pro Philosopher is a browser game and visual novel developed by a group of students and faculty at Carnegie Mellon University and released on Kongregate. In the game, the eponymous player character Socrates Jones debates various historical philosophers to unravel the nature of morality.

Plot
The game starts with Accountant Socrates Jones describing how his entire family is interested in philosophy, except for himself, stating "Why should I care about the nature of right and wrong?" In the first scene, his daughter Ari teaches Socrates the basics of debating during a discussion with a door-to-door salesman who was trying to sell a logically useless product: deer repellent.

After this scene, Socrates and his daughter end up in a car accident by driving into a deer and find themselves trapped in "The Intelligible Realm," an afterlife for philosophers. According to the Arbiter, the discussion moderator, the only way back to world of the living is by finding the nature of morality, a key topic in philosophy. What follows are five discussions with deceased philosophers Euthyphro, Protagoras, Thomas Hobbes, John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant, none of which having an impervious solution.

At the end of the game, Socrates makes the offhand statement that the nature of morality might be impossible to find. The arbiter takes this statement as his answer and declared it to be wrong, resulting in a final debate between Socrates and the Arbiter about whether the nature of morality could be found. In the end, impressed by Socrates arguments, the Arbiter lets both him and his daughter leave The Intelligible Realm.

Gameplay
The gameplay of Socrates Jones: Pro Philosopher heavily borrows from that of the Ace Attorney series, going as far as to modify the catchphrase "Objection!" to "Nonsense!" to fit the games topic. In the game, the player has the opportunity to carefully examine each sentence of their opponent and ask for clarification, ask for the sentence' relevance or press the opponent to back up his statement. Furthermore, the player can challenge any claim their opponent makes by bringing up a counter-argument collected earlier in the argument.

Claims by the opponents are either drawn from the "common ground" of what both the player character Socrates and the opponent agree to be true. "Grass is green" would be an example of this. The opponent then builds on his claims in order to draw a conclusion. If a claim is vague, irrelevant or not build up from the common ground, the player can question it. The player wins a round when they challenge a statement made by their opponent with a counter-argument. For example, if the opponent would now claim that "there are no green things," the player could counter this claim by selecting "Grass is green."

Lastly, if the player makes too many mistakes, their credibility meter depletes. When Socrates loses all of his credibility, a game over screen appear and he has to restart the round.

Reception
Jay Is Games was very positive about the game, stating that it is "all about teaching you how to debate people in every day life" while still being "fun and engaging." Furthermore, according to the editor, the characters in Socrates Jones are "interesting, and the topics they discuss doubly so." However, they also state that it is by design a "wordy" game, and that players looking for more adventure-like aspects might find it too linear.

Matt Kodner of The Gameological Society was less positive about the game, stating that "much of the game boils down to you responding with, 'Nope, you’re wrong, and here’s why,'" which according to him gets old fast. Kodner describes the game as a "novel introduction to philosophy, but it never goes beyond that."