I wonder if this game will become scientific (spoiler alert, to be on the safe side)

[Adun]

Other games have found their way into dissertations, essays and the likes. I can imagine Clair Obscur very easily to find a place in sociology classes, or even psychology. How do the people of Lumière deal with watching their loved ones die every year? How do they approach the person they see being responsible for these deaths? What other strategies might people have developed? How is Verso's fate handled by those who survive him?

I'm sure fan fiction will abound regarding other expeditions (and worse), but I hope there'll also be more serious discussions about the whole game premise. It's so very fascinating!

[C1REX]

I wonder how their history is handled. How they can be an advanced civilisation from the get go without any ancestors. Without history books. No science records. Are people painted with fake memories as well? Or they know it was blank a month ago?

[Shin Happens]

We already have something like that: the trolley problem :-D

Do you pull the switch to save the many people even if it means the one will suffer?

The endings are exactly that, a somewhat jazzed up trolley problem. With some added complications, like in "are those other people on the other track even real?".

More spoilers follow...

But the themes in the game are not new at all, books and even movies have dealed with these things long, long before CO came around.
CO will certainly leave its mark on pop culture and the gaming scene, but I do not think it will be heavily discussed in more serious dissertations or essays.

We also kind of had a lot of similar debates after The Matrix, this popularized the simulation argument and CO is a version of that.

If anyone wants to read the granddaddy of all this read the novel Simulacron-3 by Daniel F. Galouye from 1964. He may not have been the first to do this (indeed he wasn't, some earlier works by Philip K ♥♥♥♥ or Frederick Pohl explore similar themes), but he certainly was one of the very first to do this in a proper longform scifi setting, in fact, Simulacron-3 was a major inspiration for The Matrix some 30+ years later. And after that Hollywood turned the book into a movie of its own, the pretty mediocre The 13th Floor which of course mostly butchers the story.

CO stands on the shoulder of giants, like basically everything else, all that can be said and done has already been said and done. The super granddaddy of all that is really Plato's Cave. CO might be used as a more modern day example here and there.

CO will certainly create its fair share of memes, pop culture references etc, but in a more scientific context I can't see it adding anything that wasn't already talked about years or decades ago.

[Shin Happens]

Originally posted by C1REX:

I wonder how their history is handled. How they can be an advanced civilisation from the get go without any ancestors. Without history books. No science records. Are people painted with fake memories as well? Or they know it was blank a month ago?

This is just a guess! Since the game never ever mentions it. It appears Aline created Lumière from scratch, that would include their prior history, their books maybe even, their memories maybe. But after this initial creation Lumiére truly had a life of its own, new people were born, they wrote their own books, created their own buildings, invented their own things, composed their own music, loved, grieved, lived through their own joy and sadness.

So the initial Lumière may have been somehwhat of a deux es machina, only for it to take on a life of its own after that.

If we talk in biblical terms: Aline created Adam and Eve. Everything that follows is created by humanity.

Also, the canvas was created decades ago, And time in the canvas is very much accelerated. So in subjective Lumière time they were around for much longer than 67 years (when the fracture occured), probably more than 100 years, maybe even 200 years. It's never explained to us how much faster time is passing in the canvas or how long Renoir waited before he went after his wife.

The 67 years in subjective canvas time are probably just a few days or weeks (at best a few months) in real world time.