(University of Innsbruck)
Complicity and Empathy: The Gamification of Emotions
In 2016, game-designer Brenda Romero argued that “games convey complicity like no other medium can” (Romero in Wadell 2016). Exploring this claim, I will discuss the relationship of complicity, empathy and gamification in serious games. I am particularly interested in the question whether empathy is actually an effective way to learn about systemic and individual injustices and how empathy is being used or abused as a means and an aim in educational contexts with a particular focus on the intersections of gamification. Here, I will argue that gamification is not only used as playful way of teaching positivist knowledge. Gamification, is also employed as a means of “affecting affects” (Wächter, Complicity Network Description).
By looking at serious games that attempt to induce or nudge subjects towards a sense of empathy, I will explore with Toby Smethurst and Stef Craps “the inter(re)activity [of computer-games], the way they create empathy, and how they make the player complicit with in-game events.” (Smethurst and Craps 2015, 271). I will, firstly, introduce the recent trend of so-called ‘empathy-games’, such as Anna Anthropy’s Dis4ria (2012), Amy and Ryan Green’s auto-biographical That Dragon, Cancer (2016); Pixel Hunt’s Bury me, My Love (2017) and Zoë Quinn’s Depression Quest (2013). Secondly, I will explore how the respective game-mechanics aim to strike a balance between allowing immersion and creating empathy. In doing so, this article will approach digital games from two perspectives: On the one hand, these games will be discussed as media to highlight complicit behaviour as part of their game-mechanic. On the other hand, the very notion of empathy as political tool will be critically examined, particularly regarding their counter-normative meanings: “These meanings have counter-normative and arguably radical implications for the politics of affect in video games. Some of these include caring, compassion, respect, the sorrow of loss, intimacy, love, and a surprisingly queer kind of interpersonal entanglement.” (Ruberg 2020, 64)
Works Cited:
Ruberg, Bonnie. “Empathy and Its Alternatives: Deconstructing the Rhetoric of ‘Empathy’ in Video Games.” Communication, Culture & Critique. 13. 2020: 54–71.
Smethurst, Toby and Stef Craps, “Playing with Trauma: Interreactivity, Empathy, and Complicity in The Walking Dead Video Game”, Games and Culture 10(3), 2015, 276.