 Reality is fiction. It's a fiction conjured by our minds. When Senua sees abstract patterns in her world and hears voices inside her head, who are we to say this is not what's real? We share in this fiction, enter her reality, and in doing so, get a glimpse into the mind of someone suffering from psychosis. This was the explicit intent of the designers of Hellblade to simulate the world as someone else sees it, to force us to bear witness to the truth of subjectivity. Puzzle-solving was mediated by arbitrary symbols in the environment, getting us to search for meaning where others might not. The game used binaural audio to simulate the voices inside her head, and how each attaches to a specific personality. Even the single-shot third-person camera allowed us to experience Senua from outside herself, to convey through mechanics the disassociation that accompanies psychosis. To tackle this subject matter responsibly, Ninja Theory consulted with the neuroscientist Charles Ferneyhout, and spoke with people living with psychosis from a variety of groups. To authentically communicate the intensely subjective, Ninja Theory had to simulate that which can't be simulated, the projection that mediates reality and our perception of it. They went to extreme lengths to do this, including funding the game themselves and even lying to the players. Yes, at the beginning of the game, when it tells you that you have a finite number of lives to live, that was a lie. It was a lie to communicate truth, the truth of living with paranoia. Apart from generating controversy around its launch, the game was a success, justifying Ninja Theory's dedication to the project, and winning awards for narrative direction and advocating for change. There is something particularly harrowing about playing the game. It's an uneasy sense of being both you and another. She is suffering, but so am I. I am living her story. There's a word for it, I know. Empathy. Empathy isn't just about being able to take the perspective of someone else, often called theory of mind or cognitive empathy, but also being able to feel what they do as it happens. This can compel us to aid in alleviating their suffering, either because it is the right thing to do, or because it actually alleviates your own suffering. However, as Paul Bloom argues in his book Against Empathy, empathy is very directional, is selective towards those we like, and can make us want to avert the stimulus rather than addressing it. When you see those gratuitous advertisements of people suffering in countries far away, is your reaction one of intervention or aversion? What video games allow us to do is see the world as someone else does, to descend into their world through an avatar. How do we overcome our desire to avert the uncomfortable, though? This is where the power of play can come in. Games, because they exist in a relatively safe context, allow us to confront not only our own anxieties, but others. They expand our being and make it positively compelling to endure hardship. Tragedy has been seen as vicarious enactment, disembodied catharsis, but empathy is different. It is about mutual suffering. To build a tentative argument for the power of empathy in games, I'm going to have to combine two circles. In his seminal book, Homo Ludens, Johann Huizinga argues that play takes place in a world separate from ours, in a magic circle that contains its own rules. What this does is segregate it from reality, and the normal anxieties that accompany it. In his book Free to Learn, the play psychologist Peter Gray argues that this capacity for separation allows us to confront our real-world anxieties in a safe context, as well as learn things we will need for the real world. Historically, children emulate the activities of the adults in their culture, as well as devise games that speak to the anxieties of their social context. In his book, Children and Play in the Holocaust, George Eisen speaks about how children devise games that allow them to make sense of the perverse conditions of concentration camps, granting it a quasi-therapeutic effect. The magic circle is a medley of all these things in my estimation, a losary, playful, developmental, and therapeutic domain that allows us to confront our anxieties in a safe context. This is what I posit as the reason games can help us overcome our instinct for aversion and get us to true empathy. What is the second circle I spoke off though? In his book The Expanding Circle, the moral philosopher Peter Singer argues that altruism and empathy began as a genetically-based drive to protect one's kin but has developed into a consciously chosen ethic with an expanding circle of moral concern. With the immersive fidelity of games, we can exercise embodied reasoning to expand our limited capacity for empathy and bring all of humanity, life, and our planet into the fold. Combining the magic circle with the expanding circle, we have a framework to understand not only why video games can help us overcome our restrictive forms of empathy, but why it can also expand our being to all of reality. This is obviously just speculation that requires further analysis, but for now, I'm calling this the empathic circle. Set in an era where superstition and prejudice was more pervasive, Hellblade's central theme revolves around recognizing the humanity of someone a little different from us, forcing us to be receptive to a plight. It also shows how the manner in which we treat people with mental illness can exacerbate their predicament, forcing us to re-examine our prejudices. The fantastical setting is a little removed from the mundanity of our everyday, but it is still potent in its capacity to affect us. There are a bevy of other games that have also tried to force a perspective shift in similar ways. That Dragon Cancer is a game created by Ryan and Amy Green, Josh Larson, and a small team called Numinous Games. This autobiographical game is based on the Green's experience of raising their son Joel, who was diagnosed with terminal cancer at 12 months old. The game is designed to have the player experience this harrowing event and leverages interactivity to relate the experience in novel ways. There are some scenes where you are forced to listen to Joel's cries of anguish, and there's nothing you can do to placate him. However, these moments of dire disempowerment are also accompanied by moments of whimsy and hope, like this one scene where you live in the imagination of Joel as you race around a previously sterile hospital. The game is an earnest, therapeutic, but unavoidably somber reflection on the process of grief as it happens, serving as a bridge into the mind of another, but was also therapeutic for the parents who collaborated in making it. The game stands as an interactive memorial of sorts, giving the parents a way to grieve through creativity. Dealing with hardship in metaphorical ways is a theme that pervades another game, Papo and Yo. The game stars Quico, a young Brazilian boy that is being abused by his alcoholic father. During one of his father's drunken rages, Quico discovers a strange chalk mark on the wall, which transports him to a dreamlike world, a magic circle if you will. During the game, you encounter a monster who serves as a metaphor for the boy's violent father, who is enraged whenever he consumes frogs. This sense of periodic fear is embedded in the game's mechanics, getting you to feel as helpless as the child does. The main designer of the game, Vander Caballero, created the story based on his own past in dealing with an abusive alcoholic father, and much like that dragon cancer, was ostensibly therapeutic for the creator himself. This idea of exploring trauma through metaphor and abstraction is seemingly very common, with another game bound, using this language to speak to the anxieties of a young woman who is confronting the father who abandoned her. She confronts this in her magic circle, that being a world of dance and pulsating cues, using the constraining but freeing nature of dance as a metaphor for her internal conflict. Dance here is a metaphor for freedom and constraints, hence the title bound, and the designers deliberately both restricted her movement and made it more poetic to capture this conflict. Another game, The Last of Us Left Behind, gets us to play as Ellie as she explores how she feels about her best friend Riley. The exploration of their romantic feelings for one another is handled fairly expertly, it just organically emerges from the dynamics of play, including cooperation and playful scenarios, instead of being heavy-handed in its delivery. Perhaps the reason this worked so well is because most players had already become well acquainted with Ellie in The Last of Us, a game that explored a father-daughter type relationship in its story. We spend the duration of the game protecting Ellie from zombies, mad men, and everything in between, and so the mechanics of empathy from an outsider's perspective, and then embodying the role from within it, come full circle. I'm calling this phenomena our medium's capacity for selflessness. Selfless here applies in two ways, selfless in the sense that you can actually lose yourself and become another character, and selfless in the sense of caring for another person. Games like Nintendogs and The Sims show how by simply being held responsible for the well-being of something else, this activates a sense of compassion and concern, no matter how abstract. A game that executed this expertly was Eco, where you played as a little boy cast into a forbidden castle for being born with horns. In the game, you make your escape and encounter a princess named Yorda. To get us to care more for Yorda than ourselves, the game takes away a traditional health bar and ties our well-being to hers, a mechanical vehicle for eliciting empathy. Another game in the series, The Last Guardian, builds the entire game around the relationship between you and this large creature. The designers deliberately made the creature unresponsive to your commands to create a more authentic depiction of a person and their pet, and the game also crafts puzzles and narrative scenarios where your mutual dependency heightens your love and concern for one another. In any case, like with The Last of Us, we can experience empathy from outside or within, giving us a more robust presence in the magic circle. Using the broader systems of a game to replicate the experience of others becomes another tool designers can use to elicit empathy. In the game, Cart Life, the player controls one of three street vendors and attempts to run a shop whilst looking after their health, interests, and families. It thrusts players into the predicament of living day to day, paycheck to paycheck, but it also introduces unique scenarios for each character. For example, Melanie yearns to be around her daughter more, and she, and by extension you, struggles to have time to walk her daughter to and from school each day. Another game called dysphoria shows the power of representing personal experience. In the developer Anaanthropy's own words, it is, an autobiographical game about my experiences with hormone replacement therapy. Players are faced with mini-games that explore her experience through mechanics. For example, one game presents a Tetris-like game that can't be solved to symbolize not fitting in. It is an abstract semiotic system that uses the internal language of games to communicate something deeply emotional. Mechanics were also used to excellent effect in the interactive love story Florence. For example, one level has you solve increasingly easier puzzles to symbolize the comfort Florence starts to feel on her first date, and another section has you getting rid of some of your things when your boyfriend is moving in. The language of games has a powerful repertoire of emotions that can elicit, and we have only started exploring its range. An important caveat to mention here, though, is despite the fact that empathic games are an incredible interface for relating to different people, we should be careful not to trivialize, reduce, or presume to understand their unique circumstances. Empathy should exist both intimately and at a distance, what Donna Harroway calls becoming with, to prevent empathy tourism or reductive representations. This circles back to our critique of empathy before, and how we should be very wary of how it can be appropriated and misused. With the right aesthetic distance, though, there is no reason games of this ilk can't be powerful vehicles for interpersonal connection. One of the more popular games that uses systems to craft empathy is Papers, Please, a game that has you play as a border agent during the height of a Cold War S scenario. In the game, you are asked to process people's paperwork accurately in order to have enough money to feed yourself and your family. However, this often requires you to split families apart and capitulate to the whims of an authoritarian state. The game both forces you to confront systems that conflict with each other and your values, whilst also getting you to empathize with civilians in times of deep civic repression. Another game that explored this idea was This War of Mine. Inspired by the 1992 Siege of Sarajevo during the Bosnian War, the game differentiates itself from most war-themed video games by focusing on the civilian experience rather than the soldier's one. You play as a group of civilians who are trying to survive and are asked to scavenge for resources to do so. Sometimes, you feel the urge to kill and steal from the elderly to accomplish your mission, but this can actually lead to the psychological turmoil of your characters. Empathy can be communicated through avatars, can be replicated using meaningful mechanics or be invoked by leveraging systems. This is already a powerful suite of tools that designers have. However, the power of empathy in games can go much further. In his book The Proteus Effect, Nick Yee summarizes his research into the Proteus Effect, a phenomena where the avatars we inhabit can actually change the way players behave and view themselves. He uses a theory called self-perception theory to argue that what you think others expect of you determines how you act and think of yourself. For example, findings from a study that compared the appearance and behaviors of avatars in Second Life shows that those that designed their avatars to be more attractive also reported engaging in more confident and extroverted behaviors. Other findings include women who used a sexualized avatar reported having more thoughts about their body image and men who use a female avatar acting more compassionately. In essence, our conventions and social norms dictate how we act and behave, but this is in accordance with the expectations of an avatar you inhabit. Thus, video game avatars give us the ability to transcend ourselves by becoming more than who we are. This is the expressive power of phenomenology that games have to make us shift our real world outlook based on who we inhabit. Additionally, as Jeremy Bernstein argues in his GDC talk, strong video game characters. Unity of trait, being similar to our character in physical terms, is of very little consequence in crafting immersive games, so there should be no limit to how far we can expand our capacity for empathy. A more concrete example of this can be seen in the game Assassin's Creed Liberation. In it, you play as a mixed race woman living during the French and Indian war, tasked with tracing your lineage and freeing slaves. In the game, you can change your attire between a high-class woman, a slave, and an assassin, and the world reacts differently based on how you dress. This reinforces how we might feel internally with a corresponding change in the actions of the people in the world around us, immersing us more fully into our role. You also have different abilities based on which costume you've done. Another game that explores this idea is Mafia 3. In the game, you also play as a mixed race veteran in New Orleans around the time of the Vietnam War. It was the height of the civil rights era, with segregation still in effect. As the developers explain in their GDC talk, segregated and desegregated shops treat you differently, hateful overtones in the dialogue change based on the demographics of which region you are in, and the police are quick to respond and apprehend you if you commit a crime in a predominantly white neighborhood. Again, this all reinforces the self-perception you might have as a mixed race character in the 1960s, giving you a powerful way to relate to the predicament of someone other than yourself. Structuring the rules of a game can incentivize certain behaviors in players, and different games encourage different attitudes. Call of Duty is a hyper-competitive battleground that incentivizes lone wolf play through killstreaks, and so the behavior of its players follows suit, whereas Battlefield, with its emphasis on team-based play, encourages more cooperation and understanding. A game-like journey was explicitly devised with the intent of getting players to treat one another with empathy and friendship. Being set in a desolate landscape encouraged people to revel in the presence of others, and omitting any violent mechanics reinforced this further. Additionally, your abilities improve in the presence of one another, incentivizing cooperative play. Even MMORPGs can change the structure and relationship of people based on how they configure their rules. Greg Kosterkian argues that not having the ability to kill other players in EverQuest made it more peaceful, whereas Ultima's PvP rules created a more dangerous social climate. However, as Nick Yee argues in the Proteus Effect, this danger actually made people cooperate even more, shifting the dynamics of empathy and cooperation in unforeseen ways. The way we structure the rules of our games can alter how people relate to one another, giving developers powerful tools to control behavior. This idea of expanding our being can extend to other people using more direct interfaces, not just avatars. In the project, machine to be another, the developers attach people to virtual reality goggles that simulate being in the body of another person. The effect here is quite startling, forcing you to see the world through another's eyes, and bridging the divide between genders, race, and people with disabilities. Its application and effects are still being studied and examined, but the possibilities for leveraging virtual interfaces to bring us closer together are potentially endless. The idea of empathy still remains very nebulous, and as such, we can and should conceptualize it in a broader context than we might conventionally envision. Empathy and design can come from understanding how to design games for a broader array of people, from different aesthetics of play to different abilities and preferences. The game's celeste is a story about a young woman named Madeleine who seeks to overcome her anxieties by climbing a mountain. The game is deliberately difficult, but it has an extremely robust assist mode that allows players to customize it in intricate detail. Some argue this undermines the aesthetic of challenge in the game, but by crafting a fiction around both difficulty and accommodation, it manages to be both thematically rich, mechanically versatile, and accommodating all at once. The game also uses interesting mechanics, blaring synth music, and sublime theming to get us to feel the predicament of Maddie through gameplay. We still have a long way to go to accommodate the preferences of a wider array of players, but the first barrier to entry will always be one of empathy. Empathy can also extend to empathy for the other, for people, traditions, and cultures you have not had much experience with. A practical example of the utility of this kind of empathy can be seen in the game Never Alone. Never Alone is a puzzle platformer conceived with the intent of preserving the Inupiat tribe's stories and traditions. Developed in collaboration with elders and people from the tribe, the game is an exercise in preserving the ingrained stories of the tribe for a new generation. And it does this with some fascinating mechanics. You play as a girl who voyages to save her village from a blizzard, and she does this with the help of a fox friend, her spirit animal. The cooperative puzzles reinforce the relationship that the Inupiat have with their animals, but it goes even further. In certain sections, your ancestors emerge from the ether to aid you in your platforming sections, showing mechanically the Inupiat's worldview about interconnectedness. The empathic circle can possibly even reach beyond the confines of humanity itself, towards life in the universe at large. The game flower has you play from the perspective of mother nature. You use motion controls to spread joy and life with music and dance, and are only impeded by humanity's industrial expansion. However, the end of the game encodes a rhetoric of reconciliation, where humanity and mother nature find a way to coexist. Another game, called Everything, was conceived of as a systemization of Alan Watts' monist philosophy, the idea that everything in the universe is connected. The game allows you to move between different scales of resolution, from the microscopic to the galactic, to feel how all of life is bound in a circle. Like the intermittent narrative vignettes of Never Alone, the game supplements these mechanics with lectures by Alan Watts himself, getting us to reflect on our place in the universe, and expand our being beyond the corporeal. However, to conclude this video, I'm bringing it back down to earth, as we have a long way to go within our own species, before we can even dream of an empathic universe. Lots of games have tried to examine how we can empathize with those we are currently in conflict with, as well as with the tragedy of the human condition. The game September 12th shows us how interventionist foreign policy only leads to the perpetuation of more pain, by having more insurgents rise as you kill them. Brenda Romero's train was a brilliant example of using mechanics to elicit strong emotions, by framing your actions within the game as being complicit in perpetuating genocide. Another game, Peacemaker, is structured such that only reconciliation between the two opposing sides in the Israeli-Palestine conflict leads to victory, and where every other option ends in death. Recently, though, a more mainstream developer was explicitly motivated by the idea of empathizing with those we are supposedly in a conflict with. Yoko Taro designs games backwards. He has an idea or theme in mind, and then reverse engineers the experience to lead to that culminating moment. Hence, when we examine the ending of near-automata, which I'll spoil here, we are pushing towards its genesis. For the ending of near-automata, the guiding principle was empathy, and strangely enough, he took inspiration from a project by Coca-Cola. In their Small World Machines project, Coca-Cola installed machines in Lahore, Pakistan, and New Delhi, India, two cities generally unfriendly with each other. These special Coke machines would connect people via live streaming video, hoping that they could surpass their misconceptions and just enjoy a drink. The idea here was to bring people from opposite sides together. Once you see someone's humanity, it's hard to harbor any resentment. Near-automata's overarching theme is that of existentialism, about what our purpose is independent of the vulgar drives that mediate our action. The game deconstructs a variety of Eastern and Western philosophies through its run, using androids and robots as a surrogate for us, to highlight the arbitrariness of our own purpose. At the end of the game, you play a shoot-em-up section where you are literally fighting against the creators, trying to break free of the cycle of violence endemic in games and the world at large. This is the quintessential killing god moment that Nietzsche spoke about in interactive form. The characters through the game are brought to ruin owing to their ideological fragmentation and the disputes that arise out of competing visions for reality, but here is our chance to defy fate. We are, in mechanical form, escaping the matrix of ideals that keep us from fully expressing ourselves, by metaphorically killing god. Breaking free seems hopeless though. This section is practically impossible. That is, until these disembodied names start to grant you assistance. With their assistance, you push through the cacophony of names and live to forge a new future. Once this is over though, you are given another option. The option to sacrifice your save data to aid others struggling with this same part. All that work put into the game, dozens of hours, needs to be expunged to aid someone you might never meet. It then downs on you. At your most hopeless, others were willing to make this same sacrifice for you, so you feel compelled to do the same. Think about that. The game is literally asking you to sacrifice something of yours to help another. Finally allowing us to become the hero we always thought we were. Only gamers will know how painful letting go of our save data is, but Yoko Taro knows this and plays with the expectation. As Scott Allison argues in his book Heroes, a real hero is willing to sacrifice for others without expecting anything in return. It is the purest expression of empathy one can conjure. Through its systems, Nir Tamada gets us to share in this heroism, and empathize with others without needing recognition. In some sense, stories are inherently empathetic. We live vicariously through others and witness their ordeal, or with games, we embody the role more fully in sharing their pain and triumph. By using mechanics, avatar systems, and storytelling devices, games are a powerful extension of our prior art forms, rendering the reality of others in higher resolution than previously thought possible. Many consider stories an empathy technology, and storytelling to be instrumental in the transformation of our values, of expanding our circle of empathy. As the newest of our storytelling technologies, games are just realizing the capacity they have to transform not just us, but the world around us. In my estimation, the empathic circle is only as potent as it is because it is accompanied by the frivolity of play, allowing us to broach serious topics with whimsy and flair. Addressing the greatest challenges of the next century by anyone's estimation requires that we all come together. My hope is that games, as the newest of our empathy technologies, has a huge role to play in this future.