More than once we have talked to you about how Video Games, understood as an interactive medium and a 360-degree means of expression, can potentially bring benefits and improvements into the life of each one of us, if used with healthy and mindful criteria.
Exactly like every other technological tool invented by humans, from the wheel outside the caves to the latest and most cutting-edge virtual reality headset. The discussion on Empathy in and through video games can only start from the latest breakthrough in neurophysical connection between avatar and user.
Every gaming experience puts us in someone else’s shoes (or something else), granting us the right and the duty to experience the game in a way completely different from ourselves and from the everyday life that surrounds us, which is part of our lived experience.
Experiences set in other worlds, though fictional, with their own rules of coexistence and sociocultural structures, foster awareness of one’s own self in relation to the other, thus creating empathetic bonds and improving the perception of others’ living conditions.
Empathy. What is it? The dictionary comes to our aid by defining empathy as the ability to put oneself in another person's situation. A definition that hides a world of meanings, capable of openly challenging the paradigms of the past.
Think of Life is Strange, which allows us to experience a fragment of the life of a sixteen-year-old girl with extraordinary powers: through Max and her feelings, we are able to (re)live the high school period, with all its issues and small and large traumas. By retracing the main storyline, we discover tragic truths and supernatural horizons, but the powerful emotions the protagonist experiences reach us, and we connect with her, discovering how hard it is to choose whether or not to get revenge on the school bully, whether to return a kiss stolen by her best friend or sacrifice budding feelings for a quiet life. Playing video games as a way to better understand the world and at the same time an act of rebellion in a society not always open to understanding minorities of every kind, from outcasts to the marginalized.
E it is not all: let us think of the children.
With a rational and educational approach, video games can help them develop fundamental principles of empathy that risk being lost in the chaos that a hyperactive society like ours throws at them, without filters. Personally, I believe it is essential to possess an empathetic imprint that goes beyond the superficial identification of others’ emotions.
In simple terms, it is not enough for us to realize that people are suffering, but by establishing a sufficiently strong bond of empathy we can take on all of this, truly understand it, and do everything in our power to eliminate the conditions that could make it happen again.
Living in someone else’s shoes, remember?
Ora think of modern titles like Split Fiction, where it is necessary to coordinate with our gaming partner and develop a true symbiotic gameplay in order to proceed in the adventure, or Heavy Rain, in which as a desperate father we will have to find our son kidnapped by a serial killer. I assure you that the pounding heart you feel while gathering clues without knowing whether and when we will find, alive or dead, our own flesh and blood, is something thrilling, that will make you tremble, literally.
By identifying with our heroes and heroines, empathizing with their travails, the tragedies but also the joys of their pixelated existence, we will be able to perceive the reality in which we live with a gaze that we perhaps did not suspect we possessed.
