Week 9 - Empathy Games: Life, Death and Digital Narratives

Video games have come a long way since the days of Paperboy and Pitfall, and so have those who play them. Walking side by side with computing technology, today’s games offer photorealistic graphics and simulate our world to a degree which is astonishing in different, and sometimes even odd, ways. In this blog post we are going to explore how game designers are involving players in new narratives in which they have to deal with emotional conflicts that seem real - and reality often comes with sadness, emptiness and representations of death.

We are living in a golden age of video games. According to the ESRB, responsible for assigning rates related to age-appropriateness and content in the United States, games are leading the entertainment industry revenues and earned 46.5 billion dollars in 2014. So gamers are faced with a proliferation of options that continue to expand, fueled not only by the increasing number of devices on which video games can be played, but also by the diverse production of titles (ESRB, 2015).

In this dynamic market though, breakaways are common. Developers often leave their current studios to start individual projects, giving more poetic treatments to their narratives (Wolverton, 2005). As a result, the stories of video games are becoming more complex and experimental, expanding the logic of their inceptions. Thus, games are getting to the point where providing 'fun' isn’t the reason for its production as designers are interested in creating experiences that make people uncomfortable, allowing them to empathise with situations they otherwise couldn’t understand. It is the emerging genre of 'empathy games'.

Brian Albert once published in the Game Informer Magazine that "while big-budget titles strap you into iron-clad boots and decorate your torso with rifles and grenades, a game like 'Cart Life', for example, hands you divorce papers and a small sum of cash and asks you to provide for a daughter." Another household drama is addressed in the game 'A Song For Viggo', which revolves around a terrible situation: could a family stick together after the father kills his son by accident? The delicate subject requires the player to perform tasks that are not usually seen in other games, as to prepare the child's funeral. The sensitive plot is also represented graphically, using paper scenery and stop-motion animation technique.

Therefore, through intelligent writing and aesthetic choices, these creators have decided that expression using video games was the most powerful way for them to tell their authorial stories. One can say that games like 'That Dragon, Cancer', dealing with a child who is terminally ill, are more 'interactive art' rather than 'games' in the traditional sense, as they make a deeper connection to the characters inside these narratives and situations they are in. Make no mistake, though. Art or not, these producers are chiseling their names into this industry as fervently as others by bringing to light such touching initiatives (Albert, 2013).

There are also games that raise criticism of political systems and portray what living the misery of war and dictatorship is like. This is the case of 'Papers, Please', which puts players in the role of an immigration inspector in order to control the flow of people entering the border. At the same time, 'This War of Mine' tells how shortages of basic supplies can make the lives of ordinary people a real nightmare. Early in this year Maddy Myers, an editor of Paste Magazine, made a review about 'This War of Mine': "I’m not sure if this game is accessible. The depth of its sadness renders it unplayable, at least for me. [...] It made me angry and frustrated, and then I felt guilty about feeling angry and frustrated. The characters were going through so much, and there was nothing I could do to help them. The worst part was knowing that was exactly the point" (Myers, 2015).

It is still a new concept for games to explore the emotional spectrum of death, and we’ve got a couple of examples digging deep into this idea from totally different angles. As a medium, video games have storytelling opportunities that film and TV don’t have, as they use different structures when it comes to tell their stories. However, we can't come to a consensus about what video games even are anymore as the examples we mentioned suggests they're quickly becoming something else (Klepek, 2015). As possible pieces of art, they don't have to be accessible or fun, but we sure do seem to lack the vocabulary, as consumers, to talk about games that do not play by ordinary rules.
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If we consider these experiences as merely games in the most literal sense of the word, even transcending the boundaries of shallow shoot-em-ups, it begs the question: do we want to play these games? What makes them 'good' games? What price-point would be fair to put on a completely miserable experience? Patrick Klepek (2015) raised these questions in his article 'When Games Make Us Feel Sad, Disgusted, and Empty' in the Kotaku Magazine. Yet, he came up with the answer that we are in the beginning stages of understanding the long term impact of technologies such as emotional games and virtual reality in our daily lives.

But if the intentions of the developers were not to make a 'good' game with high-enjoyable value, what are they trying to do then? We can look for a reasonable explanation in the article Beyond Polemics in the Media Violence Debate by David Trend (2007). According to him, a title like 'This War of Mine' makes you think about what happened during that time (Sarajevo, for instance) and what the hard decisions were that someone would have had to make in order to survive. In that sense, it is a 'good' game because it keeps a memory and a political reflection alive. "Sometimes people need to be activated to certain facts" like the ethics of war, Trend asserts.

Therefore, the appropriation of the immersive aspects offered by games for commenting terrible things that happened is a very important characteristic of this new genre. Especially in a moment when the speed of transmission and reception of information on media is tremendous and people tend to forget facts far more than they can remember them (Trend, 2007). Thus, still according to Trend, memory plays an important role in "guarding against the repetition of human failure and atrocity", made possible at this time by the learning process that game playing can offer us.

There are other empathy titles that are equally important as it requires you to look at sad aspects of life and reflect about what those experiences suggests. In 'That Dragon, Cancer', - which is probably the most devastating interactive drama because it is autobiographical - Ryan Green started developing the game whereas Joel, his son, was still fighting against his disease. Unfortunately, he died in March 2014 by the age of five. It makes us think if the process of creating and playing games like 'That Dragon, Cancer' impacts grieving behaviour and how it could fit in the category of 'memorial games', in analogy with the concept of 'memorial sites' suggested by Folker Hanusch in his text Representing Death in the Online Age (2010). He mentions that, in our days, the relatively private expression of grief has moved further into the public sphere, giving people an opportunity to enrich the collective memory by linking it to news stories (Hanusch, 2010).

Every single aspect described in this post is a brilliant subversion of what we think of entertainment and recreation: something that can only be conveyed through an interactive medium. The discomfort of these narratives is given by the confrontation with the dark side of the human experience. But instead of fight (and win) a war to become a hero, these games affect players differently by dealing with issues on a more personal level, susceptible to mistakes, or simply beyond our control. Yet, they deserve a closer look for their unique way of representing the pain of the other.

Thesis: Can empathy games play a new role within our society by presenting narratives that we don't want to deal with?

AH - SH - MS - GV - MW

Hanusch, Folker. Representing Death in the Online Age (2010).

Trend, David. Beyond Polemics in the Media Violence Debate (2007).

Myers, Maddy. Romanticizing Tragedy: Should Disaster Games Be Fun? (2015).

Klepek, Patrik. When Games Make Us Feel Sad, Disgusted, And Empty (2015).

Albert, Brian. Empathy Games: Life Meet Play (2013).

Wolverton, Troy. Activision Aims for Sweet Spot (2005).

ESRB. How Much Do You Know About Video Games? (2015).