A Live-Action Philosophy Game at the End of the World

"Resurrecting reason. Exhuming ethics." 

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Philo-calypse Now! is a large-scale live-action role-playing game (LARP) that drops participants into a zombie-ravaged world where survival depends not on firepower, but on ideas. Drawing on classic debates in moral and political philosophy, the game asks a simple question with devastating consequences:

How should we live—when the world is ending?

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Blending immersive storytelling, guided deliberation, and collective decision-making, Philo-calypse Now! turns philosophy into something you don’t just read or argue about—you live it.

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What Is This Game?

Philo-calypse Now! is a facilitated, discussion-driven LARP designed for classrooms, conferences, public humanities events, and large audiences (25–150+ participants). Players take on roles as survivors in a post-apocalyptic world, divided into rival communities facing impossible moral choices under pressure from scarcity, fear, and the undead.

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Each participant is assigned a philosophical role inspired by real thinkers—Jane Addams, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, Ayn Rand, Friedrich Nietzsche, Augustine—reimagined as leaders, agitators, and moral exemplars in a collapsing society.

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The outcome of the game is not scripted.
 

What happens depends entirely on what players argue, choose, and vote to do.

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How It Works

A World on the Brink

Five years after a zombie outbreak, the Syringa Safe Zone stands as one of the last fortified cities. Two neighboring survivor communities—each shaped by competing ethical visions—must decide whether to cooperate, defect, sacrifice others, or gamble everything on their own principles as massive undead hordes approach.

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Philosophy in Action

Rather than lectures or debates, players engage in:

• Moderated deliberation

• Public argument and persuasion

• Collective votes (“voting with your feet”)

• Consequences determined by dice, scarcity, and prior choices

 

Each round stages a classic philosophical conflict:

• Social ethics vs. ethical egoism

• Utilitarianism vs. deontology

• Pacifism vs. just war

• Faith vs. reason

• Self-preservation vs. human dignity

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Roles with Stakes

Some players act as faction leaders or philosophers-in-character. Others are ordinary survivors whose votes decide the fate of entire communities. Death is not the end—fallen players return in new roles, shaping the final decisions that determine who, if anyone, survives.

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Why a LARP?

Philosophy often asks what we ought to do—but rarely lets us feel what it’s like to make those choices under pressure.

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Philo-calypse Now! uses role-play to:

• Disrupt passive learning

• Expose hidden assumptions

• Reveal the emotional weight of ethical theory

• Show how values collide when resources, lives, and futures are on the line

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Participants don’t just defend ideas—they watch those ideas succeed, fail, or backfire in real time.

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Who Is It For?

• Philosophy and humanities courses

• Ethics, political theory, and AI-ethics programs

• Public philosophy events and festivals

• Faculty workshops and conferences

• Anyone curious what happens when ideas meet apocalypse

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No prior philosophy background is required—just a willingness to think, argue, and choose.

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What Will You Learn?

By the end of the game, players will have:

• Experienced philosophical theories as lived commitments

• Seen how moral reasoning shapes institutions and power

• Confronted the tension between survival and justice

• Discovered that reasonable people can still doom each other

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And perhaps most unsettling of all: There is a path to survival for everyone—just not one that everyone can agree on.

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Welcome to the Philo-calypse..

The dead are rising. The river is drying. The walls are crumbling. The question is no longer what is right—
but what are you willing to live with?

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Download game PDF (requires permission)