Games often encourage players to feel empathy for characters or scenarios by design. However, the term ‘empathy’ is often misunderstood and used in a variety of contexts as a substitute for feelings of sympathy, pity and compassion. This article defines a distinction between these similar terms and uses their definitions to describe how players emotionally engage with a game. This helps define an empathy spectrum, ranging from pity to compassion, that can be used to subjectively classify different games. To show the spectrum in use, the article discusses a variety of video games that can be placed at the spectrum’s key points, before discussing how games might reach the spectrum’s furthest point: compassion. The research hopes that modelling these abstract psychological concepts on this spectrum can help game designers, players and scholars better understand the range of emotional responses present in games.
PurposeTeaching students/library patrons 21st century literacies (such as information and library literacies) is important within a library setting. As such, finding an appropriate manner to teach these skills in a practical manner at tertiary level is important. As vehicles for constructivist learning, games provide a unique opportunity to teach these 21st century literacies in an engaging, practical, format. This article discusses the implementation of an alternate reality game (ARG) to teach these literacies through gameplay. ApproachAn ARG was designed and developed where the core gameplay tasks taught and exercised 21st century literacies. The game, once completed, was then analysed as a case study to determine the effectiveness of the game-based approach to literacy learning. FindingsThroughout the play of the game, players spent increasingly more time in the library, often using it as a common meeting point during play. Players reported that they learnt or exercised the skills that each game task focused on, additionally noting that the game-based context made the process of learning and exercising these skills more enjoyable. Value/OriginalityThe findings suggest that the creation of games, whether real world or digital, may be useful in engaging students/patrons with 21st century literacies as well as with their local library. The documentation of a successful ARG to teach 21st century literacies provides a model for future research to follow when designing engaging library-oriented games. Article ClassificationResearch Article
Pro-social themes like empathy and wellbeing are gaining popularity within games to contrast the medium's stigmatised explorations of themes like violence, often to catalyse reflection or even change players' beliefs surrounding complex scenarios. These abstract themes can be classified as a game's "values": elements that are "useful or important" to game designers and their audience. Exploration of values in games was spearheaded by Values at Play, which described how values manifest in games and advocated for their explicit consideration within games and their discourse. Frameworks such as empathy, ethical, and anti-oppressive design all discuss similar values, but present ontological diversity that makes it difficult to collate games and frameworks under the values-conscious design umbrella. Such frameworks also often focus on design approaches and small-scale prototypes but pay less attention to how values influence aspects like publication and play. As such, the present research examines values within each stage of a game's lifecycle: design, development, publication, interaction, and reportage. Doing so provides an understanding of values in multiple game contexts. This provides new perspectives that form the basis of a taxonomy for values in games, which is then presented alongside practical questions for values-conscious designers, publishers, and players to guide its use.
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