- Joined
- May 14, 2019
There is a certain genre of games that exists, though I have never heard anybody comment on it. I call them empathy games. Games which exist for the purpose of encouraging a person to adopt a certain mentality, or cultivate empathy towards a people, through use of mechanics that put you in that group's shoes. I have a big interest in games as edutainment, not in the sense of the shitty kind they have to you play in grade school that's just a bad game that only lets you play after answering a question correctly, but the kind that simulates something and uses the simulation to teach you by making you rediscover the same logic. Strategy games are great for this with social studies type matter, and empathy games are interesting in their own right.
Common traits of an empathy game are that it's pixelshit (or artsy) indie stuff that the likes of Extra Credits fawns over. (I used to watch a lot of them.) Examples I have collected - and I'm interested if you all have some - are below.
PAPERS, PLEASE
Everyone knows this one. I won't ramble about it again here. Point of it, to use bureaucratic drollery to illustrate the large ways small people can make big effects in strangers lives, how Communism ruined lives in the Eastern Bloc, the challenges of juggling duty to one's family against wanting to help others.
THIS WAR OF MINE
Survival game inspired by some Yugoslav city that underwent a very long siege. From what I've read the game both is and isn't accurate, a lot of specific scenery in the game (like the sniper alley) are real things, but people who were there said it was nowhere near the breakdown of society depicted in it. But, the point of it is that you're in control of a party of Ruritanian civilians trying to make it through a modern day siege. The economy has collapsed, collateral damage is racking up from the fire between both sides. You scrounge, scavenge, make typical mOrAl ChOiCeS like you'd see in zombie dreck, but it's much more impactful here because those moral choices have a realistic setting no different from things going on in this world right now. You can rob helpless old people's homes right in front of their eyes. One novelty of it is that your characters are people with actual consciences and so can break down from mental stress, including the stress of guilt at shotgunning someone for a can of beans. I found it too clunky and it honestly may lay on the grungey, dreary feeling too thick (to the point of goofiness), but it was definitely interesting and caught a lot of people's attention.
CART LIFE
"Lemonade stand with emotional impact." It's lemonade stand, you just are an immigrant in a country whose language you don't even speak. An exploration of how shitty life is when you have no one to fall back on and are in a totally alien environment.
OREGON TRAIL
Now, this is the odd man out, as it is much more traditional edutainment, has a much brighter feeling to it, is aimed at children, and people tend to find it actually fun and laugh at it. But Oregon Trail is basically an empathy game, as it puts you in the shoes of a pioneer family trying to deal with the awful nature of being a pioneer family, constant death. (Extremely exaggerated death.) For many children of a certain time period, Oregon Trail was like a lesson in the brutality of olden times.
Personally, I have three big ideas for empathy games, two of which are things I could actually make as C++ text adventures (I know enough C++ to do that). One is just rip off the Oregon Trail, but with the Trail of Tears. Another is a game exploring Rawlsian philosophy, where the gimmick is that at the start of the game you have to make resource allocation decisions (or other decisions) for a group of people, but then you have to play a random member of the group, so that you are put in the position of weighing collectivist pragmatism against libfaggot fairness; what's good for the group maximizes your expected likelihood of success, but it will totally blow if you roll the wrong life. And the last is a business simulation of a plantation, company town, or Gilded Age corporation, used to show how competitive pressures can by themselves make moral behavior impossible (like, if other people are using slaves or paying their workers nothing, they can sell cheaper than you, so it becomes extremely difficult to even survive as the philanthropic businessman).
Common traits of an empathy game are that it's pixelshit (or artsy) indie stuff that the likes of Extra Credits fawns over. (I used to watch a lot of them.) Examples I have collected - and I'm interested if you all have some - are below.
PAPERS, PLEASE
Everyone knows this one. I won't ramble about it again here. Point of it, to use bureaucratic drollery to illustrate the large ways small people can make big effects in strangers lives, how Communism ruined lives in the Eastern Bloc, the challenges of juggling duty to one's family against wanting to help others.
THIS WAR OF MINE
Survival game inspired by some Yugoslav city that underwent a very long siege. From what I've read the game both is and isn't accurate, a lot of specific scenery in the game (like the sniper alley) are real things, but people who were there said it was nowhere near the breakdown of society depicted in it. But, the point of it is that you're in control of a party of Ruritanian civilians trying to make it through a modern day siege. The economy has collapsed, collateral damage is racking up from the fire between both sides. You scrounge, scavenge, make typical mOrAl ChOiCeS like you'd see in zombie dreck, but it's much more impactful here because those moral choices have a realistic setting no different from things going on in this world right now. You can rob helpless old people's homes right in front of their eyes. One novelty of it is that your characters are people with actual consciences and so can break down from mental stress, including the stress of guilt at shotgunning someone for a can of beans. I found it too clunky and it honestly may lay on the grungey, dreary feeling too thick (to the point of goofiness), but it was definitely interesting and caught a lot of people's attention.
CART LIFE
"Lemonade stand with emotional impact." It's lemonade stand, you just are an immigrant in a country whose language you don't even speak. An exploration of how shitty life is when you have no one to fall back on and are in a totally alien environment.
OREGON TRAIL
Now, this is the odd man out, as it is much more traditional edutainment, has a much brighter feeling to it, is aimed at children, and people tend to find it actually fun and laugh at it. But Oregon Trail is basically an empathy game, as it puts you in the shoes of a pioneer family trying to deal with the awful nature of being a pioneer family, constant death. (Extremely exaggerated death.) For many children of a certain time period, Oregon Trail was like a lesson in the brutality of olden times.
Personally, I have three big ideas for empathy games, two of which are things I could actually make as C++ text adventures (I know enough C++ to do that). One is just rip off the Oregon Trail, but with the Trail of Tears. Another is a game exploring Rawlsian philosophy, where the gimmick is that at the start of the game you have to make resource allocation decisions (or other decisions) for a group of people, but then you have to play a random member of the group, so that you are put in the position of weighing collectivist pragmatism against libfaggot fairness; what's good for the group maximizes your expected likelihood of success, but it will totally blow if you roll the wrong life. And the last is a business simulation of a plantation, company town, or Gilded Age corporation, used to show how competitive pressures can by themselves make moral behavior impossible (like, if other people are using slaves or paying their workers nothing, they can sell cheaper than you, so it becomes extremely difficult to even survive as the philanthropic businessman).
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