When discussing emotion-driven design and thematic transportation-driven design, we are mostly looking at how players feel while playing. For our third category, the focus shifts to designs whose goal is to change players attitudes after the game is over.
Empathy-driven designs are focused on widening the players’ perspective by providing experiences that are both outside of what players normally experience and using those experiences to broaden players’ emotional intelligence. Empathy-driven experiences broaden players’ understanding of the interior lives and struggles of people who may not be similar to them.
There are two kinds of empathy, cognitive and emotional. Cognitive empathy creates an understanding of an outside experience; emotional empathy creates feelings in the viewer that mirror that outside experience. Elizabeth Sampat, in her book Empathy Engines, summarizes the two: "telling someone a story creates cognitive empathy, whereas putting someone into a situation creates emotional empathy." (p63)
Cognitive empathy cannot be created through abstraction. Emotional empathy can, but this leaves players to interpret their emotions without any guidance. The result will usually be that players will relate the emotions in a game to their own experiences, which does little to widen the emotional perspective of players. The ability to see oneself as a character is different from the ability to empathize with someone whose experiences are totally different from your own.
Creating empathy in games requires the designer to be comfortable with making people uncomfortable. Discomfort is a sign of cognitive dissonance. The presence of cognitive dissonance means the experiences you are creating are having an effect on your players. To achieve this, prioritize detailed experience over abstraction or stereotypes in your theme. This impacts playtesting, because players will often encourage you to stuff your theme back into the boxes they recognize. You must be prepared to lean in to the cognitive dissonance as much as your players can handle while not going so far that your game is not commercially viable (if that is a concern). Playing with people who are represented by the game can help you sort out which elements may need to change and which are merely doing their job of creating dissonance.
Echoing what I have previously written about empathy in games, if you want to create (cognitive) empathy you must make games with human characters who behave like real people. Once you drift too far into fantasy, the narrative becomes "not real" and thus easier for players to discount. However, fantasy elements that are included for purposes of cultural empathy such as mythological creatures or obscure folk tales, if done well, can add to the cultural appreciation players gain by playing. The important point here is that player characters should be rooted in the experiences of real people. Studio Ghibli films are a great example of this dynamic.
Having diverse characters can help create empathy, but representation by itself does not make a design empathy-driven. To be empathy-driven a design must represent the emotional struggles/experiences of the characters, which in turn must mirror the experiences of real people in order for the empathy created to be of much use.
Sampat describes the process needed to generate emotions in games, "Artistic expression has always evoked emotion in an audience, but games are interactive; there is no audience, because players are participants. Instead of looking at techniques other artists have used to create an emotional response in others, it is more useful to look at techniques artists have used to embody emotional reactions in themselves." (Empathy Engines, p41) There is a reason most 'straight' (non-musical) plays are about families or small communities. Everyone relates to these types of interpersonal dynamics, which creates a way into the story for audiences. When audiences (or players) have a way to buy into a story, they are more open to accepting the elements of the story that are 'foreign' to them. Actors also perform this process, finding ways to relate to characters, even 'evil' ones, in order to perform them well. For trained actors, playing more than one character really well is a challenge which is why I advocate for players to identify as only one character in board games if your goal is emotional empathy.
Closely aligning theme and mechanics helps produce emotional empathy. The emotional/empathetic content of a theme is undermined if mechanics produce emotions that are counter to the intended experience. The effect is like singing an upbeat song about a terrible tragedy or a dirge-like "Happy Birthday." Aligning game actions with a character's narrative goals also helps players connect to their characters. I discussed this in the Thematic Transportation post.
Empathy-driven games require clear design goals about what players should feel while playing and how they should feel after the game is over. Themes should be accessible but do not need to be comfortable. Characters should feel real even if the narrative contains fantastic elements.
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