Sharing Stories: The Emotional Impact of Video Games I’ve always considered myself a bit of a nerd and my love of all kinds of gaming is definitely to show for it. Over the past few years, I started to realize that the types of games I was playing tended to have one significant reason: their emotional impact. Games which pull you in and wring you dry and leave you stunned into wondering how it could hit you quite so hard. My empathy for these games, their characters, and their subject matter, naturally got me thinking: Why is it that so many of us can empathise with our video games? According to Li & Kim’s Analysis of Emotional Design in Interactive Games and Physical Interaction Mode of the Games, “the uniqueness of the way electronic games convey emotions lies in their interactivity. The game process requires human participation. …Therefore, emotional design is more important in new media products with real-time interactive features” (Li & Kim, 2020). Which initially suggests that our empathetic reactions to these games, lies in their interactivity. Games use, as they put it, ‘emotional design’ through the use of interactivity. Conveying emotions for us to empathise with in our in-game choices and participation. Many praised Indie games do this, such as the Life Is Strange series of games, which
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highlights the way choicedriven narratives can create compelling story function and strong emotional story beats. But what about games which don’t rely on choice as their primary narrative or gameplay function? Games such as Oxenfree or Night In The Woods which rely on cultivating protagonistcentric relationships? In a study performed by Karen Schrier, “Game participants practiced empathy-related skills and thought processes more frequently after having the time and opportunity to build relationships with
in-game characters.” But what does this actually mean? In the simplest form, it means that our ability to form relationships with in-game characters, despite their fictionality, is what allows us to build up empathy. Our relationships - both as the acting ‘protagonist’ (even if the character we play as might not be anything close to how we are in reality) - and as the player, towards these in-game characters allows us to foster those warm fuzzy feelings and emotional fallout when things get ugly.
