Developing an Empathy Spectrum for Games

Games often encourage players to feel empathy for characters or scenarios by design. However, the term ‘empathy’ is often misunderstood and used in a variety of contexts as a substitute for feelings of sympathy, pity and compassion. This article defines a distinction between these similar terms and...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inGames and culture Vol. 16; no. 6; pp. 635 - 659
Main Authors Jerrett, Adam, Howell, Peter, Dansey, Neil
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Los Angeles, CA SAGE Publications 01.09.2021
Subjects
games
empathy
empathy games
reflection
sustainability
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Summary:Games often encourage players to feel empathy for characters or scenarios by design. However, the term ‘empathy’ is often misunderstood and used in a variety of contexts as a substitute for feelings of sympathy, pity and compassion. This article defines a distinction between these similar terms and uses their definitions to describe how players emotionally engage with a game. This helps define an empathy spectrum, ranging from pity to compassion, that can be used to subjectively classify different games. To show the spectrum in use, the article discusses a variety of video games that can be placed at the spectrum’s key points, before discussing how games might reach the spectrum’s furthest point: compassion. The research hopes that modelling these abstract psychological concepts on this spectrum can help game designers, players and scholars better understand the range of emotional responses present in games.
ISSN:1555-4120
1555-4139
DOI:10.1177/1555412020954019