The Junction

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The Junction the moral dilemma game that finds your rule

One flood. Nine hard questions. How far does your rule hold?

One night, one road, and then three weeks of flood: every hard call in the valley is yours. The first comes from the trolley problem: a runaway wagon at the Silo Yard, five people on the line, one on the side track, and your hand on the lever.

Before each journey the game asks for your rule, in one sentence. Then it tests it. After a call that bears on your rule, it tells you whether you kept the rule or left it. Neither is marked right.

Then you take the river road, and the same question keeps arriving as a different thing. Flood water, and a child on the stones. Logs in a flume, and a large man beside you. A cask loose in a cellar, and a man who says yes, or no. Someone asks what you would do if it were you. Each time, the game looks at what your answer does.

There is no clock and no score, and no answer is marked right. After a call the game asks you one question about the turn you just made. Where a call leaves the result to chance, you flip the coin yourself. At the end of the first journey it gives you back the rule you followed, in one sentence.

Three weeks after the flood, an inquiry opens the record. It reads your rule back to you. It puts two of your own calls side by side, two that point opposite ways, and asks which one is your rule. You may stand by both, and when you say why, it asks you one question back. Then it asks you to bet on what a real study found, and shows you the study.

When all nine journeys are done, the inquiry sits a last time. It shows the valley as you left it, sets each of your rules beside the calls that tested it, and asks which rule comes first. Its report is the last page.

Beyond the valley are three rooms of real cases: the Archive, the Lab and the Bench. A Soviet officer with five missiles on his screen. Engineers the night before a launch. A court asked whether a starving man may kill. You make the call, bet on what was done or on what came of it, and then read what happened, with its source. A new file opens every week.

Nine journeys, 60 decisions

  1. The Junction Whom would you sacrifice?
  2. The Rescue Where does your circle end?
  3. The Distribution What does fairness require?
  4. The Hospital What risks will you accept?
  5. The Radio When is a lie right?
  6. The Gate Who decides for them?
  7. The Reconstruction When should you obey?
  8. The Court What do people deserve?
  9. The Review What would change your mind?

Three rooms of real cases

What is behind it

Many scenes adapt well-known questions from moral philosophy and the study of judgment: the trolley problem, the ultimatum game, the framing effect, obedience, conformity. The evidence pages say what each study found, with its source.

About the gameThe nine journeysThe case filesThe evidenceHow this was made