Sharing Stories: The Emotional Impact of Video Games Elizabeth Harris...............................................................pages

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 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.

This, naturally, leaves us with two answers: that gameplay through emotional design allows us to empathise through the choices we make in-game, and that our relationships to ingame characters allow us to empathise with them through those relationships. Answers which allow us to very easily find an explanation to the raw emotional power so many games hold over us, no matter what their content might entail. So, what does this say about us? About our empathy levels and our emotional output?

Some people have started to consider a term known as “therapeutic gaming”. This idea revolves around the notion that games we can empathise with, have a therapeutic benefit to our mental health. Often this is explored through the idea of perspective. Since, so much of empathy is related to the idea that we can view others’ perspectives and take away messages or ideas for ourselves. Very often this is done through the story that a game will follow, as Pirker, Kopf, and Guetl suggest: “[the] sufficient story-line of video games can positively impact aspects such as the ‘perspective taking’ of players.” . . .and games such as What Remains of Edith Finch or Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture, capture this perfectly. These games are what’s often referred to as “walking simulators” games without much need for choice, and with little to no other characters to interact with, and yet they desire to tell a deeply intricate and cohesive story based solely on your first-person protagonist walking through an environment - typically with some narration. It’s the closest you can get to an “interactive novel” style of game, and yet so many people talk about the way that scenes in these games, such as the daydreaming sequence where Edith’s older brother fantasises to the point of his own demise within What Remains of Edith Finch, leave them breathless.

The way that we empathise with games, and how they manage to capture us so well, really seems to be down to the way these games tell their stories. Things like choices, character-relationships, and storylines, are often attributed too, to those old “choose your own adventure” books. Only, I can’t really remember ever feeling as much emotional depth with the amount of page-flipping I had to do. So, perhaps the gut-punches we’re left with are from a coherent narrative. One that’s got characters for us to take a hold of, choices for us to make, and a story we want to be invested in - without the need for so much back-andforth. In one, well-formatted and digestible sitting. Where maybe for an hour or two we can give ourselves permission to live someone else’s life, and when we walk away from the screen, we take their story into our own.