Pippin Barr’s Snakisms is a version of the classic game Snake, but with a selection of philosophical viewpoints to choose from at the outset.
SNAKISMS was begun on the strength of the idea of “Ascetic Snake”, a game of Snake in which the snake isn’t meant to eat the apple (or whatever that thing is in Snake). That basic reversal of the standard form of the game struck me as funny because those sorts of things always strike me as funny, but on turning to actually make the game it seemed pretty clear it was too much of a throw-away idea all on its own.
And so it came to pass that I decided I needed to make a whole set of Snake games based (loosely) on different philosophies, eventually settling on the idea of “isms” because SNAKISMS is really a pretty great title for a game, I think you’ll agree. The design process took a surprisingly long time in terms of coming up with a set of “reasonable” interpretations of philosophies/isms that could be translated in some way to the mechanics of the original Snake game.
The creator’s Comp Sci PhD thesis concerns the moral dimensions of gameplay.