To Implement

Implemented

Anthropomorphic

“attribution of human qualities to non-human things”

This can be the apple running around having a “life of its own” (it could even conceivably eat the snake? though how would that make sense?) Could extend that to the walls and score too I guess… and the game over… no, too much.

The apple moves around on its own as well as the snake - you can still eat it, but it’s mobile

Apocalyptic

The game just abruptly ends after some (short) period of time… Maybe with some suitably spectacular ending… loud drones, screenshake, blackness

Game ends suddenly without warning and randomly at some set point

Ascetic

You aren’t supposed to eat the apple, it’s game over if you do, you just glide around not eating (and NOT getting any points either) until you die or eat the apple. Just GAME OVER on apple eat.

Points go up while not eating? But that’s a form of pleasure perhaps, so no points and don’t eat the apple…?

avoid the apple, you lose when you eat it (plausibly getting points to indicate the goal)

Capitalist

Maybe something with in-app purchases here? You have to buy it…? Bit simple, but might do the job… But it might be TOO simple

You start with money as your score ($ sign) and apples cost money (when you’re out, you can’t afford the apples anymore - popup when you hit them and you die ha ha)

This idea got changed for the first version so that you don’t die on collision with an apple you can’t afford, you just don’t eat it and have to die on your own sometime.

Casualist

“the belief that chance governs all things”

Which would be potentially very funny, but then how does one distinguish it from this constellation involving existential and absurdist? What’s the difference between meaninglessness and “chance governs” that can be communicated? Just “every frame a random action is taken by every object in the game from a shared pool”? Or every frame every element takes a random action from the pool of possible actions it has? Or every second or? e.g. the score would go up at random, the snake would turn or die at random, the apple would spawn or “be eaten” at random… so it would just look like a mess. How would this differ?

This has potential as the major insanity version? I kind of like it… Hard to determine what the specific behaviours are? A wall can’t really have a “random behaviour”? So yeah, as above it’ll be randomly choosing

everything behaves randomly according to its ‘nature’, maybe on some cycle

Ended up with: every tile is randomised every tick…

Conservative

Just Snake. I think the joke fits best here right?

“belief in maintaining political and social traditions”

just snake

Determinist

An easy one I think… a pre-mapped set of moves and outcomes that just plays itself each time you go through. No input from the player. Apple positioning needs to be determinist too.

no input, always the same sequence (though see anarchist…)

Dualism

Two snakes, one a ghostly mind snake, you control both

What happens when the mind snake hits a wall or an apple? (Maybe it wraps actually that would make some sense. Nice.

HOW can independent control work with swipes?! (Control the mind snake with… your mind?!?!?!?!?! OMG.) (Follow-up question: if you control it with your mind, should it move occasionally as if you did it, or just wrap forever, not changing because you can’t control it with your mind?)

Two snakes, a semi-transparent mind one, and a body one, mind snake wraps, independent control

Existentialist

"”the existential attitude”, or a sense of disorientation, confusion, or dread in the face of an apparently meaningless or absurd world.”

“The notion of the Absurd contains the idea that there is no meaning in the world beyond what meaning we give it. This meaninglessness also encompasses the amorality or “unfairness” of the world.”

"”the existential attitude”, or a sense of disorientation, confusion, or dread in the face of an apparently meaningless or absurd world.”

“existential dread, anxiety, or anguish, is a term that is common to many existentialist thinkers. It is generally held to be a negative feeling arising from the experience of human freedom and responsibility.”

Random point values, random assignment of controls. Randomness = meaninglessness. Random effect of controls? Don’t always die on impacts… how randomised can one get?

(Problematically similar to Casualist? I’ll move them together.) Not impossible to have this be the one with no walls - the freedom to do what you want and the weird fear of being outside the screen?

“This meaninglessness also encompasses the amorality or “unfairness” of the world.”

Could have a wall just suddenly appear in front of you (bad things just happen) - e.g. it’s just fundamentally unfair. And there are no points - it’s also meaningless even when you get the apple - and no ending just blackness. It is over

walls and apple randomly appear on screen, no points, no ending screen text

Holism

“doctrine that parts of any thing must be understood in relation to the whole”

I really like the potential to this… that you view Snake as a whole system and not as just distinct parts, but how could that be reflected in the actual experience of or implementation of the game… maybe everything reacts to your key presses? So the apple moves, the walls move, the score moves (or rotates or goes up and down or…)

There’s something here…

keys move everything (and turn the snake) so the world moves on the screen

Idealist

“In philosophy, idealism is the group of philosophies which assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial.”

Maybe this could involve the game just telling you to imagine that you are playing a game of snake? Maybe it even supports this somehow?

“Imagine you are playing a game of snake.”

Monist

“belief that all things can be placed in one category”

You can eat absolutely everything, from the score to the apples to the walls (it’s all within the same category)

everything is essentially an apple

Narcissism

Heavily branded as being about me and my work?

Quotes about me appear on the screen as the “apples” and can be consumed for points. The snake probably gets longer and thus over time being such a “monster” consuming my praise gets out of hand and you die?

praise appears on screen as text, you eat the text, no apple

Nihilist

“denial of all reality; extreme scepticism”

Plausibly this could involve absolutely NOTHING on the screen at all or it could just be the snake in a black void and eventually it could just go off the screen

It’s most of all that life is meaningless, right? So what creates meaning in Snake? The points mostly… just is it just no points? And the apple, so no apple… and then what? There is still death presumable.

Technically Nihilism is usually just a denial of meaning, but it can be believe in absolutely nothing being real at all (metaphysical)

So the options are:

absolutely nothing at all on the screen (probably the funniest)
just the snake I guess… or just no points (the ‘meaning’)…

Ultimately it’ll be the nothing right?

there is nothing at all

Optimist

“doctrine that we live in the best of all possible worlds”

It’s all apples and you never get any longer (or at least cannot hit yourself?)

Apples regenerate quickly, you just get many many points

(Maybe you can still die though? You don’t have to believe in non-death to be an optimist?)

apples everywhere, you don’t get bigger, you get lots of points, can still die

Pessimist

“doctrine that the universe is essentially evil”

Poisoned apples? Struck by lightning? Falling blocks that kill you? A wall? The apple is outside the walls? You are stuck in a tiny space and the apple moves around outside the walls

you are in a smaller space and the apple is outside the walls

Post-apocalyptic

Some kind of joke about the popularity of this theme in videogames? Everything is grey…

No apple in such a wasteland? If a wasteland then maybe it’s a bit terrain rather than an enclosed space?

Be kind of fun if the landscape was infinite? Or at least really big? If there’s no apple, then you don’t need to worry about the snake getting too big and you could wrap at some point without them noticing…

“Infinite” (wrapping) grey landscape and grey snake, no apples

Positivist

“doctrine that that which is not observable is not knowable”

Have it so that the snake has a cone of vision and you can’t see anything outside it, it effectively stops existing for that period of time? Or rather just that you can’t see it and thus don’t “know” it? But it still exists, right? It’s not about what exists or not, just what is known… really it’s a poor interpretation of the philosophy in the end, but maybe kind of funny. Like a mishearing.

only tiles “viewable” by the snake are visible

Romanticism

“belief in sentimental feeling in artistic expression”

Expressive music? Poetry coming up as you play in little titles in cursive… the pain and beauty of being alive, of death…

emotional music, title appear with emotional story of snake’s life, joy, and eventual death

Stoic

“the endurance of pain or hardship without a display of feelings and without complaint.”

When you die (by colliding with yourself), you just kind of stay there, not actually dying of it…

So no flashing body for example, just a stoic acceptance of collision… no acknowledgment that something bad happened (not even an acknowledgment of death?) (or just continual flashing and “hurt” sound but no end?) Probably better with the sound and flash because otherwise you won’t really understand what’s happening

when you die you just flash and have dying sound forever as you “put up with it”

Or should it be that you hit the thing and then it just waits until you’re ready move in an available direction?

Utilitarian

You have two branches (defined with walls) and as a utilitarian you should go down the one with the most apples because it’s the greatest “good”… So you can WIN or LOSE this version of the game, rather than just have a GAME OVER

“You WIN, you ate FIVE APPLES”
“You LOSE, you only ate ONE APPLE”

two branches, choose to eat one apple (lose) or three apples (win) (or die, which would lose too)

Rejected / Questionable

Libertarian

“doctrine that personal liberty is the highest value”

Consumerist

“Consumerism is a social and economic order and ideology that encourages the acquisition of goods and services in ever-increasing amounts.”

Perhaps just an accelerating number of apples appear on the screen over time so that you eat more and more (perhaps doesn’t lengthen your body so you can get lots of points without dying? (Or perhaps it just ends up being that you body never really moves, just consumes until it dies…)

(I guess this points out that even within using the game as a simple kind of metaphor on one level, the game will end up saying something else potentially through the mechanics…?)

(But this is pretty weird because it might be the same as optimist?)

Pantheist

“belief in many gods”

Really unclear what this would be… Pascal’s wager could be a reference here, but I don’t know

Socialist

“doctrine of centralized state control of wealth and property”

Not sure how this would work out, but it could be funny? The political ones are tough because Snake is so inherently individual and isolated…

Solipsist

“theory that self-existence is the only certainty”

Just the snake alone?

The snake and everything else is ghostly?

Platonic

There’s only one apple because it’s the platonic apple Does this mean you can’t eat it? Or that once you’ve eaten it it’s gone forever? — the philosophy of this is… kind of hard.

Can the Platonic Snake eat the Platonic Apple?
Can the Platonic Snake die?

These questions are too goddamn fucking hard. Or would the whole thing be a frozen image of the elements (snake, apple, walls) which don’t change because they don’t “exist in time”? So weird.

Consequentialist

This one seems too abstract to really be of much use?

Absolutist

“doctrine of government by a single absolute ruler; autocracy”

Seems like there’s something nice here about a kind of totalitarian regime ruling the snake universe? But where would it fit in?

Agnostic

A little difficult to see how this one can fit… it would require some kind of idea around the existence of god to be implicit or reflected in the game, and even then representing the idea of uncertainty about that seems very difficult indeed…

Atheist

This would require some sense of life after death perhaps, or the idea maybe that it is “god” who determines the value of apples, say? Or some relationship to religion via the allusion to the garden of eden story kind of implicit in snakes and apples…

Animist

The apple runs around?

But this doesn’t actually fit very well with the idea of Animism, which is more about all elements having a “soul”, which it’s not clear we’d be able to fit…

If an apple had a soul, what would that mean?

Absurdist

Could be too close to the current interpretation of existentialism above, unless I chance the focus of existentialism to be on some other aspect…

Skeptic

“doctrine that true knowledge is always uncertain”

Some kind of use of the random function here?

Everything kind of wavering in and out of existence? Random points values? Random controls?

Very similar to another constellation of chance stuff though, like anarchy, absurdism, existentialism, casualism,

Collectivist

How do you make a collectivist snake without a group?

I guess you add other snakes right. In which case I guess it needs to be multiplayer with a collectivist mechanic?

Any one snake eating is good for all the snakes? How do they not just crash and burn? Snakes can’t harm each other? But it’s super confusing? Almost sounds too much like a proper game…

Individualist

Snake probably already is individualist? How could it possibly be more individualist? There’s just one snake pursuing its personal interests… I guess it would have to be multiplayer again except that it’s just “first to the apple wins” and possible TRONy in terms of the trails so that it’s just kind of a doggy dog nightmare?

Communist

Thinking about ideas around the “means of production” I could imagine the Snake somehow having to grow and tend tot he apple tree these apples presumably come from? So that there’s some idea of labour involved… but it’s very unclear what in the hell this would entail, and whether it would be at all satisfying to make just for a joke…

Anarchist

“anarchism entails opposing authority or hierarchical organisation in the conduct of all human relations, including, but not limited to, the state system”

Could imply the idea of not having any points in the game.. no sense of organisation… no sense of levels, just the snake eating apples (or not) as time goes by…

Hedonist

“belief that pleasure is the highest good”

Maybe rewarding every single thing you do? Every button, every apple, every death garner points?

Does that even make sense?

What is pleasure in the world of Snake? seems like it’s eating the apple (for the snake) or getting points (for the player), so one should give one or both of these things in abundance? Make it impossible to die?

(Again we’re seeing this idea of distinguishing the “location” of the philosophical/idea… like is it for the snake, for the player, in the “nature” of the game…)