This article aims to prove that Ace Attorney is possibly the first rationalist game in the lesswrongian sense, or at least a remarkable proto-example, and that it subliminally works to raise the sanity waterline in the general population, and might provide a template on which to base future works that aim to achieve a similar effect.

The Ace Attorney series of games for the Nintendo DS console puts you in the shoes of Phoenix Wright, an attorney who, in the vein of Perry Mason, takes on difficult cases to defend his clients from a judicial system that is heavily inspired by that of Japan, in which the odds are so stacked against the defense it's practically a Kangaroo Court where your clients are guilty until proven innocent.

For those unfamiliar with the game, and those who want to explore the "social criticism" aspect of the game, I wholeheartedly recommend this most excellent article from The Escapist. Now that that's out of the way, we can move on to what makes this relevant for Less Wrong. What makes this game uniquely interesting from a Rationalist POV is that the entire game mechanics are based on

• gathering material evidence

• finding the factual contradictions in the witnesses' testimonies

• using the evidence to bust the lies open and force the truth out