Ethical Considerations in “Empathy” Interactive Media
In this article, I will describe and analyze ethical considerations of consent and integrity in “Empathy” Interactive Media, in which I include the trending pseudo-genre “Empathy Games.”
Emotion researchers generally define empathy as the ability to sense other people’s emotions, coupled with the ability to imagine what someone else might be thinking or feeling. Merriam Webster defines empathy as the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another without having these things explicitly communicated.
Regarding “Empathy Games,” Georgia Tech professor Ian Bogost simultaneously validates the initiative while acknowledging that the genre may be redundant.
Empathy is at play anytime someone feels for the perspective of a character, whether in a book, movie, or game. Rather than in a book of film, empathy in games is “about the decisions you can make and what if feels like to be inside the logic of that other individual’s life.” This cognitive attention to the requisite mundane in a character’s life is of special interest to Bogost.
However, while segmenting Empathy Games off from other games may point to a gap in the current market, it may not be helpful in the long run:
"You don’t turn on the television and go to the empathy channel so you can watch the empathy shows. It’s just assumed that empathy is baked in to these media. Good works would provide empathy, and bad works would fail to. We’re trying so hard to respond to this trivialization of games that perhaps we’re overcorrecting in a way."
Selling “Empathy Games” alongside mainstream games in online marketplaces diversifies the voices represented and validates all of these forms of gameplay.
The genre Empathy Games is, hopefully, a short-term tag for the earliest trend towards diversifying voices in games.
I lump Empathy Games in with Empathy Experiences, because all of these are geared towards the player understanding the perspective of someone else on an emotional level in a number of ways:
1. See through the protagonist’s eyes rather than seeing the whole system. (This is the distinguishing point between Empathy Games and Serious Games).
2. Adapt a real-life experience to the digital realm, through autobiography, biography, research and adaptation, journalism, intervention, and/or co-creation.
3. Fidelity is to the authenticity of this experience (not to be confused with accuracy - e.g. a fictional adaptation could prove more authentic than an accurate first-person account) rather than pandering to perceived player pleasure-seeking behavior. (This point is where “Serious Games” got their name).
There is no question that diversifying the voices present in mainstream media is important. Whether or not compartmentalizing “Empathy” Games and Interactive Media is helpful to that remains to be seen. In the meantime, I will outline some of the pros and cons of the following approaches to Empathy Interactive Media: Autobiographical, Biographical, Immersive Journalism, and Intervention / Co-Creation.
In that order, these approached progress away from a primary source (first-person, autobiographical account). Curiously, the examples I’ve chosen to analyze exemplify a correlating trend towards social action in the real world (as opposed to simply the digital interactive media / game). Both of these progressions require an ethical component:
1. Consent: As the storyteller progresses away from the subject of the story, consent becomes increasingly important.
2. Integrity: As the designers increase claims for social action, the quality and follow-through of this action becomes increasingly important, not just to the aesthetic value of the digital media work, but to it’s ethical worth as well.
The works I happened to study turned out to be, in my opinion, exemplary. My critique is more along the lines of pointing out best practices rather than policing.
Autobiographical
The following examples have been cited in the news as Empathy Games. They are autobiographical: created by teams of 1-5 people, about experiences that the core creator(s) went through or were going through at the time.
Anna Anthropy created Dys4ia as a journal game about the six months of her life when she began hormone replacement therapy.
Nicky Case created Coming Out Simulator about his journey of coming out to his conservative parents.
Ryan and Amy Green created That Dragon, Cancer about loving their young son Joel through his heartbreaking battle with cancer.
Llaura dreamfeeel created Curtain about her own experience with the complexities of an emotionally abusive relationship.
One could argue that consent in autobiographical works is carte blanche, yielding the most intimate and truthful account of a story. One caveat to that is that not all storytellers are necessarily in the position to give themselves consent to tell their own story. For example, minors or the mentally ill may consent to autobiographical disclosure and regret it later. Additionally, each person has a blind spot. You may notice that, in autobiographical works, especially by young voices, the storytellers present the worst version of themselves. I believe that this is because humans more easily remember the bad, and they forget the virtues they called upon to carry themselves through.
That said, all of these examples have achieved consent in my eyes. The case of That Dragon, Cancer is a unique one, with central character Joel being an infant. Creators Ryan and Amy Green delve into this question of consent in their documentary, Thank You For Playing. Amongst the countless micro-decisions this couple made to love and honor their son Joel was the decision to include his laugh in the game, but not his cry.
Across the board, these works emulate integrity, notably because the bar the creators have set is a modest one: self-expression. These creators are artists before they are activists.
Of her experience with an abusive relationship, Llaura dreamfeeel tells Polygon, “Making Curtain helped me process a lot of that." In their documentary, Ryan and Amy Green poignantly relate that upon learning of their infant’s cancer, they didn’t know how to process it. They didn’t know what to do other than what they do, which is make games.
In the case of autobiographical works, the press-created title “Empathy Games” may actually do more harm than good by giving gamers a false sense of social action that balloons past their actions within the digital game itself. Anna Anthropy is outspoken about how players of her game have not walked in her shoes, and do not know what it feels like to be her. Nicky Case chalks his game up to expression and narcism, but he does not self-identify as making empathy games. Green says that "games, of all mediums, should reflect life,” but does not identify with forging a new genre.
Llaura dreamfeeel tells Hunt & Gather that Empathy Games are problematic. “You can’t play a game and understand totally what it means to be somebody, like ‘I’ve ticked off the box, like a bucket list of things, like you don’t have to consider their point of view anymore.’ [But] it’s definitely a very powerful way of expressing stuff, and it does help people to consider other people’s experiences.”
I personally feel that autobiographic works are the ideal path to diversifying voices in games. Time and again, the uniqueness of the perspective, the level of detail, the emotional acuity to complex situations, the passion to follow-through - all of these contribute to making truly remarkable works of art. Not just that, but the works serve as a transformative agent for the creators to grow, and create more remarkable works. But the personal investment in these works is a precious metal, and like a well-meaning alloy, the term “Empathy Games” degrades them by overcomplicating their moment of resonance victimizing their performance in the marketplace, as if these games need to be perceived as charity in order to be noticed.
Biographical
Papers, Please casts the player as an immigration inspector running a checkpoint to control the flow of people entering the fictional Arstotzkan from Kolechia using traveller documents and the Ministry of Admission's inspect, search, and fingerprint systems.
This War of Mine provides a fictional experience of war through the eyes of a group of civilians trying to survive in a besieged city.
I’ve categorized these games as Biographical because, while they are fictional, they are adaptations of real-world systems and events built upon a foundational combination of research, interviews, and first-hand experiences, albeit in the role of “onlooker” or “opponent” rather than the game’s protagonist.
Papers, Please has relatively little online documentation about its making. On its making, sole creator Lucas Pope tells VG 24/7:
“I wanted to show that in politics, all sides of any kind of issue have some justification. There’s not just the good guys and the bad guys – even the bad guys have some justification for why they want to do something.”
Pope says that the experience of losing his passport in a foreign country cued him into the other side of what is otherwise a frightening experience:
“They see a thousand of you a day. You’re a real person, but from their perspective it’s just like an anomaly that they’re worried about. They’re scared you’re going to do something wrong, they can’t verify your identity or they’re being really extra careful... This was one of the things I tried to capture in the game, this kind of ambiguity and this vagueness to everything, not knowing for sure what anybody is saying is true and not knowing who to trust.”
While the game gives off the impression of a soviet dystopia, Pope relates that it is more a collection of tropes that intentionally avoid being entirely Eastern European:
“I worked pretty hard to make it so it wasn’t specifically anything. Anytime there’d be something that would nail it down as Soviet or ‘this is definitely the Berlin Wall’, I would leave it out.”
Pope expertly walks the line of grounding this experience in reality, while making it widely relevant to anyone who’s gone through any sort of checkpoint. Because Papers, Please is not explicitly based on a real person, place, or event, the game does not require consent. Additionally, Pope is careful to frame the goals of this game as expressing his view of this type of political system. Pope does not call Papers, Please an “Empathy Game” or make any claims to social action. Therefore, Papers, Please satisfies its avowed goals simply in the fact of its commercial success; it has integrity.
11 Bit Studios more closely based This War Of Mine on the real-world events. Wikipedia states that “The game was inspired by the poor living conditions and wartime atrocities that Bosnian civilians endured during the 1992-96 Siege of Sarajevo, the longest city siege since World War II.
Game Designer Pawel Miechowski told Kotaku that 11 Bit began work on the game after Miechowski's brother, the company's CEO, came upon an article called "One Year in Hell" by a guy who supposedly survived a siege in Bosnia, possibly in Sarajevo. Miechowski says:
"I'm not even sure if the article is real or not, I cannot find the author. It doesn't even matter. It was so devastating to read about those horrible conditions and we were like, 'We are making a game about it.'"
Also with Kotaku, Miechowski discussed the Warsaw Uprising in World War II, and Aleppo, the largest city in Syria. Although This War of Mine is not explicitly set in any real world event or city. Miechowski says, "I want you to feel it could happen to your country, your city, anywhere.”
While this ambiguity similarly absolves 11 Bit Studios from needing to acquire consent or satisfy fidelity to a real-world event, the team conducted research and numerous interviews of survivors of the Siege of Sarajevo.
Neither Pope nor 11 Bit Studios self-identify with the label “Empathy Game,” although their games are the media darlings for this budding genre. Unlike the above autobiographical works, these biographical examples lack real-world subjects empowered to recoil at the media’s claim that these games are giving gamers the experience of running a checkpoint in a fascist country, or the experience of trying to survive war. If they did, I suspect these games would not make such tidy poster children for “Empathy Games.”
Immersive Journalism (Nonny de la Pena: Project Syria, Gone Gitmo, Hunger in Los Angeles)
Nonny de la Pena began as a print journalist and then became a documentary filmmaker. She merged these interests to create immersive journalism in VR. She begins with audio that was captured on scene. Then she recreates photorealistic models of the scene and people in VR, based on real images of people on the scene. Her stated intention is to help people understand how difficult the circumstances are so they can thing about what change they can bring about.
This audio interview with Nonny from the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference & Expo sheds light on her thoughts on empathy (17:32). Nonny essentially states that VR has a greater ability to evoke empathy than any other medium. She states that participants experiencing Project Syria had a greater propensity to follow up with the issue and to donate. I could not find data to back up the credibility of these claims for social action, but on the other hand, I’d argue that current data collection methods aren’t sufficient to prove causality between a VR experience and a propensity for related social action over an extended period of time. Perhaps in this instance, the best proof of integrity is user and subject testimonials. I wish these testimonials were more readily available. Currently, my indicator that Pena’s work has met its stated design goals is that these works continue to be shown at festivals around the world.
Because the context of Journalism is distinct from Activism, I think Nonny’s work shines as an example of Immersive Journalism rather than faltering as an example of shoddy activism. However, to me, the practice of using news footage to no holds barred recreate virtual 3D representations of real people, using their voices and factual experiences to heighten the empathy factor for VR players, is wanting. Maybe it’s because the people in the footage are unlikely to know what VR is. Maybe it’s because the huge teams constructing these experiences were not at the scene of the event, unlike the photographer of a video or image, who took some risk to be there. Whatever it is, with regards to consent, it feels to me like the process of creating these Immersive Journalism experiences should be more akin to constructing a memorial museum than making headlines.
Intervention / Co-Creation
Here I focus on an example that is both Intervention (physically intervening in a real world event) and co-creation (radical collaboration towards creation). While these two methods do not need to be paired, Project Daniel does so effectively.
The Not Impossible Labs crowd-sources real problems from around the world and then crowd-solves those problems to make them accessible to all. Project Daniel centers on Daniel, a child in the Sudan who lost both of his arms at age 14 in a bombing. World News covered his story. I was not able to find the original article, but here is a picture of it. Apparently, the news stated that a tree saved Daniel’s life, but that Daniel wish it hadn’t.
Not Impossible Labs co-founder Mick Ebeling saw this article and was motivated to help. He describes thinking of a 14-yr-old Daniel who felt life was not worth living. He outlines the bigger picture for Intel: “Daniel is just one of 50,000 amputees left in the wake of the bloodiest war Africa has ever known.” The Not Impossible Labs mission is to help many by helping one. Mick Ebeling describes his process as first committing and then figuring out how to do it. Ebeling committed to 3D print arms for Daniel.
Ebeling’s brand of co-creation is so effective because the goal is to help a person rather than an issue. The person-centric approach both streamlines the design process of defining the problem, implementing a solution, and measuring success. This human-centric approach also fuels biopics that successfully galvanise support for the subject, the project, and the labs. Both co-founders of Not Impossible Labs have a background in film. “Project Daniel” won 5 Cannes Lions awards in 2014. The human-centric approach strategically condenses an overwhelming issue to a dramatic performance of heroism, collaboration, and world betterment. Critical acclaim and populous support are critical to the lifelines of Not Impossible Labs: sales of Mick Ebeling’s book, donations to the foundation, and the free contribution of specialised skills from doctors, scientists and techies to implement design solutions.
The better part of Not Impossible Labs’ “poster children” for DIY tech solutions suggest a strong level of consent to this level of marketing one’s image and story to represent an issue (rather than, say, Daniel’s interest in singing). Project Daniel is an outlier in that Daniel was unaware of being the “chosen one” until Mick was there, in the Sudan, with a truck packed with computers and 3D printers and a small film crew. As a 16-yr-old, what consent did Daniel supply to this plan? How did he feel about becoming internationally known for overcoming his amputee status? Having never been outside of the Sudan, much less to film festivals, how was he informed of what “consent” would mean? Mind you, I believe Daniel is portrayed as a hero (rather than a victim). But it’s notable that the consent involved in Daniel’s picture being taken by the World News does not necessarily translate to Project Daniel. DIY co-creative technicians especially must think deeply about what medical ethics means in a project like this.
Ultimately, the saving grace of Project Daniel is its integrity. Not Impossible Labs delivers far beyond their stated goals to provide Daniel with arms. They delivered a computer lab and 3D printers to Daniel’s village, taught members of the community how to use them, and as of this year, Ebeling says the village is still printing an arm a week. This means that Not Impossible Labs must be offering a great deal of tech support, replacement parts, and maintenance in the long-term. The Not Impossible Labs seems to be leveraging the best of human stories and co-creation to start a movement. That kind of commitment is worthy of the praise of ethical thinkers such as Deepak Chopra:
“This is the template for a new science of consciousness. Mick Ebeling sees impossible as just a word for something not yet done. Read his book. Think like him. Then do the impossible.”
Conclusion
Grounding Interactive Media works in real world experiences is powerful. It only makes sense that Games and Interactive Media should, like many other art forms, represent a range of perspectives comparable to the range of voices on earth. Autobiographical, Biographical, Immersive Journalism, and Intervention / Co-Creation are a few approaches. Each holds unique merits and challenges with respect to gaining consent and emulating integrity. None request or require a special “Empathy” title, as the hope is that interesting and unique voices in games and interactive media will be the norm rather than the outlier. However, this complicating trend of “Empathy” labelling is more readily problematic for the autobiographical category, whose subjects are empowered to oppose the assertion that gamers have walked in their shoes simply by playing a game. The issue here has nothing to do with these works, it has to do with misguided press setting false expectations.
-ATL3Y
References
Articles: Empathy Games: Birth of a Genre?, Empathy Games Don’t Exist), Why Empathy is the Next Big Thing in Video Games
Documentary Films: That Dragon, Cancer
Games (partially) Played: Dys4ia, Coming out Simulator, Curtain, Gone Home, Papers, Please, That Dragon, Cancer, This War of Mine
