The philosopher Stefano Gualeni isn’t your grandmother’s intellectual. Sure, he produces papers, gives lectures and mentors students. But he also builds things. His creations, which he believes can fulfill the ultimate goal of the humanities, are a far cry from the traditional output of philosophers. Gualeni’s ultimate tool to trigger people to become better thinkers is a video game about soup. 

The game, called Something Something Soup Something, asks players to imagine that it is the year 2078, and their job is to oversee the output of alien workers on a planet colonized by Earth. Being aliens, though, they don’t always understand the task at hand. The player’s job is to categorize individual items the aliens produce—from “a foamy liquid with batteries and croutons serv...