Empathy Mechanics, or: But is Walking in That Character's Shoes FUN?

[dgtziea]

I told @DeusIrae I’d start this thread, and it really is an interesting topic I’d love to hear from people about, so before I go and get distracted by other unfinished reviews/review-a-thons (do I have the time?!)/Slay The Spire(oh no!):

Empathy mechanics. I talked about them in my review of Dysfluent from IFComp 2023. The empathy mechanic in Dysfluent is timed text: your character has a speech impediment and you often have to wait for text to appear, generally dialogue. This mimics the lack of control over speech the protagonist has. In my review, I wrote this:

@dgtziea

Maybe there’s an actual term for it, but I was trying to refer to games that intentionally try to have mechanics that frustrate or bore or confuse the player in certain sections, to mirror what the character is going through. Maybe it’s repetition of a menial task, maybe it’s shifting and confusing environments and descriptions, maybe it’s timed text that makes you wait. Because lots of games try to give the player “fun,” and sometimes they might even try for “sad” (but that sadness comes from the narrative, not from a mechanic). How else can games make you feel?

We’ve sometimes seen experiments with all this in IF and other games. Are they successful? Are they worth it? (I’d get into examples, but I think I’m already going too far off-track). And: how much are players able to buy into the empathy part, versus how often are brought out of the game by it? For Dysfluent, I think the timed text effectively communicates the frustration that the character is facing. But more broadly, where’s the line between understanding what the mechanic wants to communicate, and how much does the player need to continue to experience it after they’ve gotten the point?

(Also for completeness, here’s the Dysfluent post-mortem thread: Dysfluent: a late postmortem for a patience-testing game for the author’s own thoughts on their entry)

Some reviewers complained about the timed text in Dysfluent. Some found it effective. Many pointed out where it could be used less.

The whole idea with empathy mechanics is an attempt to continue to bridge the whole interactive/narrative thing (also known as the crossword/narrative war). “How can games better tell its stories?”

As someone who likes IF because it allows authors to do smaller-scale experiments with things like this, I like seeing empathy mechanic pieces. And in practice, I think I can point to a couple different examples in IF:

Examples

Tedium/Repetition
With Those We Love Alive. Wander the city all you want, you’re trapped, go back to sleep. Howling Dogs. A recurring cage. Cannery Vale. Working in a factory, on an assembly line.

Frustrating/Confusing Environments
Will Not Let Me Go, maybe Shade have sequences that are intentionally disorienting and confusing. Although both are relatively short.

Lack of agency
Rameses. Your character refuses to do or say anything, with lots of self-justification. Depression Quest. Your character is unable to muster up the energy to do certain things, helpful things. The Archivist and the Revolution. Your character suffers from fatigue and can sometimes only sleep, even as work and rent deadlines keep ticking away.

That’s off the top of my head. Plenty of others. Do people have other pertinent examples they can think of?

One thing I’ll note as well: the reception of all the earlier examples were more mixed upon release, with a few huge proponents, and the later examples here (Will Not Let me Go, The Archivist and the Revolution) are more universally positive.

To slightly expand on some of the questions I thought were worth discussing:

Are these mechanics actually successful at communicating something more? It’s still a novel experimental space, but are they effective in practice? How could they be more effective moving forward? What have you found effective, looking back?

There’s the immersion question. If the player experiences a mechanic meant to evoke the same emotion as the one the character is facing, isn’t that sort of like empathy, and thus are you better engaged/understanding/immersed by the story?

But maybe not, and immersion doesn’t actually work that way. Maybe the moment players get inconvenienced, annoyed, or bored, they’re all too aware that this was caused by design decisions made by the game author, and they won’t be able to (or even want to) ascribe those feelings to the story or characters. How large is that subset of reactions?

My other thought is, maybe you don’t actually have to walk in someone else’s shoes all that much, you need just enough understanding to imagine what it’s like. Like I said above: where’s the line between understanding what the mechanic wants to communicate, and how much does the player need to continue to experience it after they’ve gotten the point?

Thoughts? Experiences, with any of the examples, other games, or with your own work?

[pieartsy (Aster F)]

So there are a LOT of papers, talks, and articles about this topic – specifically ludonarrative design regarding aligning player and character feelings to induce empathy. A LOT. Across video games, LARPs, TTRPGs, and, basically every version of Game possible.

I could’ve sworn I even stumbled across one specific one when researching for my Thematic Puzzles talk. From what I recall, what stuck out to me was the description of (I think a co-op?) game, where half of a single controller is dedicated to playing one person and the other half to another. When one of them is Not Available, the other has to get by with half a controller to mechanically symbolize the loss (via having lost half of the controller’s function). Just now, when searching for that paper (and failing to find it) I stumbled across like three other ones which also seemed extremely in depth and fascinating (just from their table of contents and some skimming; I haven’t read them in depth as it’s midnight here…) As far as I can guess, none of your questions have gone unanswered elsewhere.

This isn’t to say that this topic isn’t worth discussing again, or new answers aren’t warranted! I am interested in the forum IF community’s thoughts about how this pertains to IF in particular – though I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a paper on it already given IF’s penchant for using the 2nd person pronoun, which middle school writing class taught me was the most empathetic perspective anyway (I am not the only one feeling my thoughts, YOU are feeling them too…)

[HanonO (Hanon Ondricek)]

I really enjoyed @litrouke’s 10pm where the protagonist is mute and communicates in glyphs. This is more of a prototype, but I would love to see more of this.

I really like an occasional atmospheric grind which might be a bit repetitious, but is also satisfying like bubble-wrap. You can make a choice, but if you want this choice you’re gonna have to put in some effort.

It’s also fun to play with expectations if you get the player into a routine and then interrupt it.

In Cursèd Pickle of Shireton there’s so much repetition with the combat system - the strategy is basically hit enough buttons to not die and maybe also damage the opponent when the timer stops. If you want to spend the time clicking an attack up to the third level of power, you might be wasting time if you don’t have to do as much damage. Also as you use a weapon or cast a spell over and over you memorize what to click and become more efficient.

[Kastel]

@dgtziea

There’s the immersion question. If the player experiences a mechanic meant to evoke the same emotion as the one the character is facing, isn’t that sort of like empathy, and thus are you better engaged/understanding/immersed by the story?

I have gone through a revolving door of thoughts on what “immersion” actually means. Sometimes, I think it’s a nonsensical word. Sometimes, I think it’s too subjective a psychological state (much like empathy) to be directly analyzable. Sometimes, I think it’s like agency in that it’s trying to describe the responsiveness of systems.

I recently read a post by Aevee Bee (Heaven Will Be Mine, Neon White) who described the last thing in the context of Disco Elysium and attention. She noticed that players are willing to experiment and even be okay with failures since

The attention you get is fulfilling even when at your expense.

Disco Elysium can be a pretty mean game to your protagonist, but at least for me it’s fun to see how the game systems respond to my weird actions. It’s all an illusion, of course: no game system will be as robust as life itself, but the fact the game could almost account for everything that the player could do inside its system makes the illusion “believable” for lack of a better word.

So to answer the broader question, I think walking in any character’s shoes can be “fun” as long as the narrative systems can adequately respond to the player. It’s notable that no one is extremely critical of Dysfluent’s multiple responses and systems, just the “speed” of the text because it’s so uncomfortable for reading experiences.

Whether system responsiveness or design choices that hinder player agency like timed text work to create an “empathetic” connection is however difficult to say. I’ve written for The Rosebush that I’m skeptical if people will empathize with the message of games with extreme “empathy mechanics” for lack of a better word, even if they understand the point:

It is easy to imagine them playing these games and getting nothing out of the games or, in exceptional cases, being so effective that the games are heavily censored. Knowledge and understanding are not inevitable conclusions; on the contrary, we should expect hostility because trauma is still a stigma in our world. No amount of theorizing will convince a hostile world to think otherwise.

No matter how one spins it, empathizing with the message of a game is a consciously political and psychological decision. One can empathize with the message of a jingoist Call of Duty game and not necessarily empathize with The Archivist and the Revolution. Part of why I wrote the article this way is to avoid suggesting that there are successful methods to get people to feel for other characters or the political message of the game. It’s way too complicated, too vague, and too out of my depth to characterize potential sentiments on a game.

And besides, there are plenty of works I’ve played where I “got” the message but did not actually like the work in any sense of the word. One could say that I empathized with the message, but I didn’t particularly care for it. Or to put it in game studies terminology, the “procedural rhetoric” has persuaded me to think differently, but I otherwise don’t really care for it.

That’s fine, too. There are plenty of political art that isn’t intended to be enjoyable; they only have one purpose: to teach. This didacticism is going to always encounter pushback, both from people who think art is much more and those who reject the message entirely. And there are plenty of people who want to experiment and see how people react to it, a school of thought that I count myself in. I want to see how far people from different sides of the world can understand what I’m trying to do in my games.

To speak of my own experiences, I think it’s been fascinating to see people have strong responses to my restraint in my own works. It’s almost as if people want to exercise their empathy, to search for more text and characterization. To use a recent and representative review:

@DeusIrae

And what’s here is a good teaser for that longer piece – it’s shocking, well-written, and again, I want to know more. But I felt like it was trying to do too much in its limited space; to work at 500 words, it might have been wise to make at least some aspect of the family’s unhappiness more familiar, to take some pressure off the player’s imagination and enable the truly aberrant pieces to stand out.

In the context of this thread, I take it as a desire from players for me to include more “walking in that character’s shoes”. They don’t want to “imagine” walking in the characters’ shoes; they want to walk in them. I find it somewhat amusing that my “problem” might be the total opposite of creators who put too much in their work. I always think that I’m being too heavy-handed, that I wrote too much, and that I don’t really have much to say.

I thought this was “enough empathy/attention/immersion” for my games, but people seem to hunger for more. Almost as if I could even communicate something more. I’m still unsure how to think about this since my authorial influences are writers who pack like ten ideas into a sentence.

Empathy is quite difficult to theorize about, but I like to believe that “wanting to know more” is a stronger empathetic connection than “just connecting to someone”. It’s why I like the attention/responsiveness angle because it creates more multifaceted ways of thinking about player empathy. I’m unsure how many people can “feel” my emotions in my work, and I sorta don’t care – I just want people to create new, complicated, and unusual emotions from playing my games and reflect on them.

In a way, I value contemplation more than empathy itself. People can choose to empathize to a degree, and it’s really hard for the author to have any control with that. But to provoke thought and start wondering about the wider world? I think there’s some leeway there, and that’s where I’ve focused my energies to.

[JoshGrams]

@pieartsy

half of a single controller is dedicated to playing one person and the other half to another. When one of them is Not Available, the other has to get by with half a controller to mechanically symbolize the loss (via having lost half of the controller’s function).

Maybe Brothers: a Tale of Two Sons? Single-player but sort of co-op with yourself? It was a bit controller-clenching and “movie director makes his first video game,” and I thought it overdid the scene when one of them became Not Available a little: the slow-mo went on for long enough that it went beyond grief to just annoying for me, but it was short and pretty and the mechanical reprise at the end of the game worked really well… (though I guess play the original, NOT the remake?)

[pieartsy (Aster F)]

yep that one!

[pinkunz]

@Kastel

Disco Elysium can be a pretty mean game to your protagonist, but at least for me it’s fun to see how the game systems respond to my weird actions. It’s all an illusion, of course: no game system will be as robust as life itself, but the fact the game could almost account for everything that the player could do inside its system makes the illusion “believable” for lack of a better word.

So to answer the broader question, I think walking in any character’s shoes can be “fun” as long as the narrative systems can adequately respond to the player.

This makes me think of the many gruesome deaths of Roger Wilco. I suspect the distance between you and the game is what makes this fun. It can be fun exploring a character’s misfortune, but no one in their right mind wants to actually be Roger Wilco.