Decision making is not always easy (citation needed), especially when moral judgements are at play. A lot of media creates great opportunities for us to watch why other people make decisions, and to understand their context and reasoning, but I’ve always thought gaming (video and table-top) provides unparalleled opportunities to let us explore others' lives. Gaming lets us express ourselves in ways that would be difficult or impossible in real life, creating catharsis and the exploration of identity; but it also pushes us to build empathy through making decisions we never normally would. Today, we’re going to focus (as we often do here) on the decisions. Empathy is a powerful word, and like all powerful words it is used to mean many things and co-opted to fit many needs. The way I think about these meanings sits on a scale - ranging from “physical” empathy on one end and “theoretical/conceptual” empathy on the other. On the physical side, we feel others’ emotions and mentally live ghosts of others experiences. When someone else (particularly someone we are close to) is in emotional turmoil, many of us not only feel sympathy for the person (i.e. feeling bad for them), but also feel our own, smaller, version of those emotions. Physiologically, our ability to empathise is thought to come from “mirror neurons” in the brain, systems that take our perceptions of others' actions and emotions, and process them in a way that correlates strongly with the systems that are active when we act or perceive ourselves. On the other end of the scale, we have a type of empathy that is more relevant to games. “Theoretical” empathy is an empathy of conscious decision making (for what i mean by this, please see this blog). If this empathy is present, we have a much stronger understanding of why people make the decisions they do. A fantastic example of this in gaming (and one I’m sure many of you will be thinking of), is the video game “Papers, Please”. In this, you play a border guard to a dictatorial state in an Eastern-bloc style country. Sometimes you help the resistance, letting through rebels and people who shouldn’t be there; but often you have to be selfish or cruel in your decisions, turning people away at the border, keeping them from loved ones or righteous causes, to enable you to stay employed and able to feed your family. The game offers a window into why people in real situations make the decisions they do. It replaces power fantasy with empathy exercise, whilst still being “fun”or at least interesting) ( to play. This differs from many games that offer “difficult moral choices”, because it not only presents the moral choice, but it gives you immediate and personal consequences. A video made recently by the fantastic people over at Cool Ghosts highlights this nicely; they talk about the decision making in the Mass Effect series (moral choices with limited personal consequences), contrasting it with King of Dragon Pass (moral choices, huge personal consequences); you can see the video here - the section I’m referring to starts at 26:10, but the whole video is incredible. Building empathy is not just about forcing a player to sit behind the eyes of a character through difficult situations and interactions, without understanding why these difficult decisions are being made - without understanding why they are logical. The systems and worlds designers build in these cases should leave players making the same “wrong” decisions that someone with a cooler head, or a different circumstance (or more privilege) wouldn’t have made. Recently, I’ve been collaborating on a card game with a friend of mine, that was inspired by creating a system that builds this kind of empathy. It came from a moment in my own life where I had a panic attack at work, collapsing on the office floor, unable to move. I wanted to make a game that not only helped people empathise with why I could work myself into such a state, but also empathise with the bosses and systems that led me to be in that situation. The game is a deck-builder, where players are either workers or a supervisor for a fictional fantasy sub-contracting company - fulfilling contracts such as running a mystical tea shop, or being bouncers at a vampire nightclub. The game casts all but one player as workers, trying to build a deck of cards that best manages their energy levels whilst getting their day-job tasks completed; whilst a manager has to assign tasks with the limited amount of information they have, trying to give players challenges that match their skill sets and capacity. I present this example to highlight the point. The systems of rules that games are built on can mirror reality in such ways as to build empathy for different situations; not just in video games, but also on the table-top. There are many games that outline this well, particularly in the indie-rpg and narrative video game spaces, but there is a lot more we can do by casting games as empathy devices. I’m not saying that every game must impart a different perspective or a new empathy onto its players, but instead that thinking about games in this way can lead to interesting designs and different ways of thinking. To finish, I leave you with a few questions to get your neurons firing on this topic:
I hope this has provided some useful ideas as you create experiences and theme in your games…. And that was where the first draft ended, not with a bang, but with some slightly pretentious food for thought. Then I spoke to some people, and they pointed out what I’d missed. “I think you need to be careful with this. I’m made uncomfortable at how this is done sometimes. Writing others’ experiences is something all fiction writers do, but often it can end up very unsubtle if that’s what it sets out to do” "Have you read this article? Stop Expecting Games to Build Empathy" "It's always...difficult to do this sort of thing without being in the situations you're writing about - it ends up a bit mansplain-y" And this one, contributed at three a.m. from the voices in my head: “You know this is actually a pro-appropriation/poverty tourism article? It should never be posted. You should probably give up on this ‘writing about games’ thing.” None of these points were levied as particular criticisms (well, except that last one), but more to pull the blinkers off a rash train of thought. I don’t want to take back any of the article I’ve written, but I do want to put the breaks on. The main way we’re going to create real understandable experiences is by talking to, and listening to the stories of, people from varied backgrounds, and helping them to get their own voices heard. If you’re making a game that helps to build empathy, then that is amazing, but please make sure that it is informed by those you are trying to build empathy for (also, don’t presume on those people’s time if it's not given freely, there is a lot of reading you can do before going out and bothering people). I suspect I only feel comfortable with the "empathy building" aspects of the burn-out game discussed earlier because it's an experience I've personally had, I've talked to quite a few people who have had similar experiences, and I've spent quite a bit of my professional life working on the "systems" that sit behind employment and culture. It may also be worth looking around and considering if there is someone’s work you can champion along the way who is designing or writing from the position you’re discussing. Empathy is important, but I think it’s also important that we are empathising with real nuanced people and situations, not the cardboard cut-outs our brains like to build. I’d like to end on an apology for the confused article, but I’m a big believer in providing complexity where it is relevant. If you enjoyed this article, please consider sharing it with others you think may find it interesting.
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Based!
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