Gnosis

You stand before the temple gates. Five long years you have studied and polished your Thesis, all to defend it on this day, before your teacher and the fellow students.
Step over the threshold and let the smoke of the incense take you into the realm of Ideas.

Gnosis is a short single-player game produced to accompany the Master's thesis Towards Aporistic Games (attached as a pdf; here's a shortened postmortem). 

In Gnosis you play as a student in an esoteric temple to knowledge: today is your Thesis Defense. Manipulate colors and shapes to convince your examiners!

Controls
Mouse + Keyboard
Arrowkeys supported for dragging and wheel scrolling

Development status
The game was designed in under seven months, starting in November '23. It is content-complete, and no future patches are expected.

The Point
Gnosis is developed to illustrate the design principle I discuss in my Master's thesis: structuring the gameplay and narrative as a thought experiment, framing a central question. 

The games designed this way challenge the player to interpret the complex and strange contents of the game, producing a conceptual framework. Then, the game would attempt to challenge this framework with new information, subversion, or plainly different dilemmas that require more thinking. 

If all is done correctly, this exchange of player's proposals and game's objections would look like a Socratic dialogue, focused on one central question. This design hopes to bring the player to a difficult and possibly unsolvable problem, then help them think it through. From the Greek word ἀπορία meaning 'impasse', it hopes to produce an aporia.

The goal of the aporistic game is to make the player puzzled and to push them to continually rethink their beliefs.

Gnosis attempts to do that with the process of academic dispute: what is its point? truth? domination of one's own theory? can we ever defeat skepticism, and can we ever hope to reach final conclusions?
I find these questions to be genuine aporias. I hope that you, the player, will find satisfactory answers.

Credits

Design and programming　　　　Seva Khusid

Art and ambience　　　　　　　　　metastar

Music　　　　　　　　　　　　　NettieY2K

I am grateful to Ashlyn Sparrow for letting this project happen in the first place;
Chris Carloy for enduring my ramblings throughout the design process;
my playtesters for putting up with a half-baked product for so long.