Everyday Philosophers

YHU2314 Philosophy of Games has been conducted once thus far at Yale-NUS College. In that iteration of the course, the game designer for the TTRPG campaign was Isa Foong. The game masters were Sherice Ngaserin, Isa Foong (Lore Obscure), and Maximillian Tadashii (Lore Obscure). 

The weekly TTRPG section of the course began with a briefing about TTRPGs and safety tools by Isa. This was followed by a character creation and proposal process where students were grouped into parties of six based on character and player affinities. Then, the class broke out into different gaming spaces across Yale-NUS Library to meet with their GMs for their respective Session Zeros. The week after, the campaigns began and students were thrust into roleplaying as characters in a modern-day Singapore setting... with a surprise magical twist.

While each table's storyline necessarily diverged because of differences in player choices and party dynamics, there were also several planned philosophical encounters that all tables hit at specific moments in the semester. In this iteration of the course, the encounters were: 

Encounter 1. Schrödinger's Cat and the Problem of Quantum Superposition

Encounter 2. Zhuangzi's Butterfly Dream and Distinguishing Between Illusion and Reality

Encounter 3. Laplace's Demon and the Problem of Causal Determinism

The Schrödinger's Cat Paradox is a thought experiment that highlights the bizzareness of quantum superposition, especially when projected to to macro-sized everyday objects like cats. In this encounter, player characters materialise inside the box with the famed cat of the experiment. They are able to spend time getting to know the cat, who explains the throught experiment to them. If they choose to leave the box, they materialise in an observation laboratory with a closed box where the cat resides. 

But in order to escape the observation laboratory, they have to open the box and directly observe the cat. This, however, would have the moral repercussion of making the characters potentially responsible for the cat's death. Based the views that each character is subscribed to, students are tasked to roleplay each character's response to this dilemma and agree on a solution within the experiment's time limit. 

Zhuangzi dreams about being a butterfly, then awakens to being himself again. He realizes that that the dream-experience of being a butterfly felt entirely real to him until the moment he woke up as Zhuangzi. "Now I don't know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly; or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man."

To explore the relationship between illusion and reality, students role-played entering a magical garden that would pull their characters into dream or nightmare versions of their lives. In some, characters experienced alternate lives where all their past regrets never occurred and every wish they had for their future had been realised. In others, they are living their worst nightmares, with all their insecurities about themselves turning into truths and all their fears becoming facts of existence. In both cases, two questions were posed: (1) This feels real, but is it? (2) Even if it's not real, do you want to go back to your real life?