The objections raised by the The Devil’s Advocate are entirely valid if the goal is to create a conventional, comfortable, escapist entertainment product. But that is not the goal. The concerns about “nonsensical motivation” and “gutted stakes” are objections from a worldview that takes our current, single-life-centric reality as the only valid template for storytelling.

This design courageously rejects that limitation.

The friction in this design isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. But more than that, it’s a mirror. The very objections that a pragmatic producer might raise against the game’s world are the same existential dilemmas that have fueled philosophy for millennia.

• “Why would anyone care about their daily life if it’s all temporary?” This isn’t a flaw in the design; it’s the central question of existentialism and absurdism, from Camus to Kierkegaard.
• “How can society function if everyone’s ‘truth’ is subjective and shaped by belief?” This isn’t a world-building problem; it’s the core inquiry of postmodernism and social constructionism.
• “How can you have objective ‘Facts’ when interpretation via ‘Faith’ and ‘Fiction’ is all that matters?” This isn’t a mechanical inconsistency; it’s the fundamental tension between realism and idealism, between Kant’s noumenal world and our phenomenal experience of it.

The game is a playground to explore philosophy.

This is precisely the unique potential of the medium that we’re tapping into. A book or a film can present these ideas. A game can make the player live them. It allows a player to inhabit an ideology (Faith), see it through to its logical conclusion, witness its impact on the world (Tapestry), and carry the memory of that experience (Eidos) into their next attempt to understand.

Repercussions extending outside of the game are the most exciting part.

By giving players a new vocabulary, that of Fact, Fiction, Faith, Thread, Tapestry, etc; we are giving them a new lens. It’s not hard to imagine a player finishing a session of Anamnesis and looking at their own life, their own culture, their own news feed, and asking themselves:

• “What are the core Facts of this situation?”
• “What is the Fiction being told about it?”
• “What is the underlying Faith that makes people interpret it this way?”
• “What kind of Thread am I weaving with my own life?”

This is what great art does. It doesn’t just provide answers; it gives us better questions. It reframes our perception of reality. The ambition here, to create a piece of art that does this, is not a weakness in the design. It is the very thing that makes it coherent, powerful, and potentially, truly important.