Ready, aim, feel: empathy, identification and leadership in video games

Rethinking Research Ethics, Power, and the Risk of Visibility in the Era of the “Alt-Right” Gaze

“…Using the hashtag #OperationDiggingDiGRA, these individuals publicly declared their intention to fact-check and peer-review every DiGRA conference paper, and later, just the “feminist” ones (after presumably stumbling across DiGRA’s open-access conference paper archive and noting just how many papers they were committing to read). The DiGRA mailing list then received several messages from Gamergate supporters with the results of their “peer reviews,” most of which demonstrated unsurprisingly a deep lack of understanding as to how research is actually conducted and reported (Bezio, 2014; Mortensen, 2016). Some months later, the main public face of Gamergate, a Reddit community called /r/KotakuInAction, hosted several threads about academic papers written about #Gamergate (including the Chess and Shaw piece mentioned above), creating yet another recursive layer of the “Digging DiGRA” operation.…”

Playing At Being Human: Finding Leadership and Empathy Through Digital Games

“…In particular, players' agency requires them to identify with the character they virtually occupy, what I term imaginative identification ; the simple fact that players control an avatar, a player‐character , requires players to relate imaginatively to and identify with that character. In the process of play, players digitally occupy the bodies and identities of the player‐characters: “This relationship of player to player‐character permits video games to be used as a platform designed specifically to encourage and foster tolerance, self‐reflection and empathy” (Bezio, 2018b, p. 158). Yee's (2014) analysis of player‐character emotional transformation provided a more comprehensive picture of how a player's avatar, self‐chosen or a player‐character, informs player emotions and decision‐making, feeding directly into the current argument about games as transformative for leadership conceptualization and development, as well as having the potential to instigate cultural change.…”

“…While Every Day the Same Dream and The Graveyard are short game experiences, recent game development has seen these same ideas developed into longer, more popular titles. Games with choices that impact later ludonarrative options are enormously popular, with series such as Mass Effect (discussed at greater length in Bezio, 2018b), The Witcher , Dragon Age , and Baldur's Gate including story choices that ask players to make ideologically based leadership and followership decisions. As I have argued previously, “What this means, from a leadership studies standpoint, is that more and more popular games…are including leadership choices as part of their gameplay to force players to imaginatively empathize with the complex and difficult choices leaders have to make” (Bezio, 2018b, p. 165).…”

Single‐player videogames in leadership learning

“…Nevertheless, discussions frequently bring up questions of decision‐making and consequences, either in terms of how students “felt” about certain decisions or about being “forced” to take certain actions (such as killing an enemy or allowing one to escape). These discussions about free will, choice, and consequences are particularly productive in a leadership or leadership studies classroom, especially because the virtual space of videogames creates a space in which students feel more willing to experiment with their ethical impulses (Bezio, 2018b). Some students will deliberately make the “wrong choice” in order to test the consequences, although the vast majority of students will feel compelled to act ethically, even in digital space—particularly those playing in groups.…”