[This post contains spoilers of both things listed in the title]
What is the meaning of life? How does it change if everything is predetermined, or if there is no afterlife, or if there are countless parallel universes? These are the questions that philosophers love, and yet they're fairly unapproachable to those among us who don't specialize in it.
Recent advances in media have started to change that. NBC's The Good Place has used comedy and narrative to teach philosophy in a memorable, approachable way. The dating sim Save the Date allows players to experience dozens of moral dilemmas in an hour and a half.
What starts out as a simple dating sim quickly evolves into a videogame bloodbath. With each decision, the player makes it more and more likely that Felicia, the main character, will be killed in some strange and unlikely way. More options appear with each playthrough, but each only leads to its own unique and terrible death. The only way to spare Felicia's life (short of hacking the game) is to explicitly disobey the title, and sacrifice the date, calling it off.
The gameplay poses question implicitly (and sometimes explicitly). Felicia asks "What's going on?" Suddenly, you are placed in the position of doctors and first-responders throughout time, deciding whether it is more moral to be honest about a doomed life, or to express unjustified optimism.
As players continue deeper into the game, deeper questions about the morality of the player come to light. Felicia challenges the player: Why do we keep killing her? Are we playing to save her life, to complete the game, or just to see what happens?
The "hacker ending" takes on the classic Robinhood Dilemma. Do the ends (saving Felicia's life) justify the means (subverting the "rules" of the game)?
Save the Date's strength is in its demonstrative power. By playing the game, players experience the moral dilemmas, rather than simply reading about them (or watching them, in the case of The Good Place's amazing episode on "the trolly problem" (clip below).
Save the Date's weakness is in its unwillingness to draw conclusions for players, and connect gameplay with ideology. In an online forum, the developer commented " I'm not pretending that my interpretation is any BETTER than the ones people come up with on their own. (As you might guess from the game, I'm tend to think that what the viewer feels is more important than what the artist intended) ". That's an understandable point of view, but it detracts from the usefulness of the game as an educational tool. In contrast, The Good Place characters will name the philosophers they're quoting, and often even define the theory.
Save the Date is thought-provoking, and I wouldn't go so far as to suggest that the developer should update it to explicitly call out every named moral dilemma in the game, but an optional commentary mode might be a strong addition.