Grade: D+
A simple thought puzzler where you’re deciding who to save or not.
Dr. Trolley’s Problem presents the players with a wide variety of ethical scenarios and asks them whether or not they want to affect the outcome. The classic “Trolley Problem” scenario is where the game starts. Soon though, Dr. Trolley’s Problem expands beyond the simple starter scenario and into many other areas. After each scene ends, you are presented with statistics about who chose option A or option B. Overall, the game felt unreal, and the statistics you see of the player’s choice ended up being fake. These two factors detracted from the overall gameplay and experience.
What is the trolley problem, anyway?
The Good Place made the trolley problem famous outside of philosophy and psychology circles, and they have a wonderfully colorful (and gory) hands-on explanation of the scenario.
The Good Place is why I clicked into “Dr. Trolley’s Problem” in the first place. Overall, there were a few compelling questions that the game asked.
- Do you save a group of people who love you or those who you love?
- Do you save the visible people or the people hidden inside a veil?
- Do you save a progressive or a conservative?
- Do you save a sentient AI or a person?
I ended having a eureka moment deciding that people shouldn’t be on the trolley tracks at all. Anyone stupid enough to be on trolley tracks is asking for an accident to occur. It’s better to stay off the main trolley track and also good to stay off the spur trolley track. Trolley tracks are not places for people, sentient AI, clowns, drug addicts, business people, et cetera, to hang out.
It isn’t an innovative thought process, but I concluded that I could reasonably hold people responsible for staying away from trolley tracks. If people choose to stand on trolley tracks, I’m just left in a situation where I’m making the best of bad options. The Trolley Problem focuses on making an impossible decision instead of focusing on preventing the need for an impossible decision. As I reflected on why I thought I felt this game was so pointless, this lack of prevention discussion is what rubbed me the wrong way. There’s probably some pretentious highfalutin philosophy name for this approach, but I’m all Trolley’ed out at this point.
The statistics are a lie!!!
I wondered about the statistics presented after each scenario. There’s one scene where you can do nothing, and no one gets hurt, OR, you can switch the tracks, and someone can die. The statistics on the screen said that 30% of people would choose to run over someone just for fun. I thought, “whoa,” what’s that say about human nature?!”
This left me wondering how the game developer pulled off this fascinating statistic collection, and the answers were incredibly disappointing. It turns out that the developer ran out of time to implement a cloud-hosted statistics database of player choices for these Trolley Problem scenarios. So instead of removing the statistics or just being honest about them, the game presents you with a lie. You get different statistics every time you play. I tried to understand whether there was some higher meta-philosophical purpose to this deception, but it seems the author just ran out of time, which they confirmed in their blog post wrapping up the game.
Overall Impression
Dr. Trolley’s Problem was produced by Wero Creative, an indie game studio in Toronto. I thought the idea for the game was interesting, and I had high hopes. For me, though, thinking about our own biases and how we make difficult decisions starts from a place of brutal honesty with ourselves. For the game to be deceitful about the statistics presented, this runs directly counter to the kind of reflection it was hoping to achieve and cheapens the experience to the level of pointlessness.
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