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citizens in public places throughout Seattle. Destroying them is not a
requirement, but doing so provides a catalyzer in the form of a less oppressed
city. More citizens will be out speaking freely, which in turns transforms the
gaming world that particular player chooses to inhabit.
The issue of immersion also leads to another major area of
investigation in current video game studies. Put simply, researchers explore
whether or not video games can teach empathy or morality. As a whole, the
answer is probably not. While the question is intriguing, it might be the wrong
one to explore. The question itself is inherently unfair and it is not one that
would be asked of other forms of narrative. For example, one does not ask if
literature teaches empathy or morality — as in all of them, as a whole. Indeed,
some certainly might. Yet others are merely read for pleasure, with stories that
are not intended to do more than provide entertainment, or a bit of an escape.
Others might connect a reader to some greater understanding of what it means to
be human, but without teaching or compelling that reader to become morally
different.
Scholars around the globe study literature in large part because of what
it has to say about our common humanity. A reader may not learn to be like a
character and he or she may not pick up traits of heroism, or altruism, or
kindness beyond what he or she already possesses of these traits. Yet that does
not preclude any reader from at least seeing how life is lived through the eyes
and experiences of a fictional character. While there has been a concerted effort
to undermine the study of the humanities in higher education, those calls have
primarily come from those who assert that these sorts of explorations have no
practical monetary value in the marketplace — they do not translate, the
argument says, into jobs. Setting that unfortunate argument aside, the more
telling point is perhaps that it does not focus on a call to do away with reading or
to diminish the importance of stories to how humans frame their own lives.
Even though video games may not reasonably be expected to teach
morality or other major strengths of character any more than literature, the genre
is forging ahead with new ways to connect human beings to one another through
the sharing of grief and pain. “Empathy games,” as they have been dubbed, are
the newest genre of games to begin to receive a lot of critical interest and
attention and they reflect an exciting new trend in gaming. As Kimberly Wallace
explains, “More and more developers are using games to convey their personal
stories, tackling heavy issues like depression, alcoholism, and cancer to make
players experience what it’s like to be put in an unsettling situation” (23). That
does not mean that there are not video games that already tell stories tackling
these issues, but these new empathy games seem to be striving for a more
intimate gaming experience, as opposed to the broad, sprawling worlds
encountered in many titles. Two games currently in development and nearing
release illustrate the possibilities of this new genre.
That Dragon, Cancer, currently in development, chronicles the battle
Ryan and Amy Green’s son Joel fought against aggressive cancer.
Unfortunately, Joel, barely four years old, succumbed to his illness earlier in