Over the past decade, a recurring narrative has emerged around the idea that video games are powerful empathy machines. Game designers, scholars, and critics have often claimed that interactive storytelling can offer unparalleled insight into other people’s experiences. While this belief is noble in intent, it places an unrealistic expectation on game design and misrepresents the medium’s unique strengths. It’s time to reconsider whether empathy should be a primary goal of game design—or even a plausible one.
TLDR: Video games can encourage players to think differently, but they are ill-equipped to consistently build meaningful empathy. Emotional engagement is possible, but interactivity complicates empathy rather than guarantees it. Games are most effective when they focus on agency, systems, and perspective—not when they try to simulate someone else’s trauma. Game designers should embrace games’ unique affordances instead of mimicking the emotional goals of other media like film or literature.
The Rise of Empathy Games
Beginning in the early 2010s, a number of indie games like That Dragon, Cancer, Papers, Please, and Depression Quest attracted attention for addressing serious topics. Journalists and academics praised these games not just for raising awareness, but for the claim that they made players feel what it was like to be someone else. This gave birth to the term “empathy games” — titles that aspire to foster emotional connection through interactivity.
On paper, the logic makes sense. Because games are interactive, they theoretically allow players to step into the shoes of someone else in an embodied way that passive media can’t replicate. This interactivity is often cited as the key to building genuine empathy. But this claim rests on shaky foundation.
Games Offer Agency, Not Ownership of Feeling
One of the fundamental misunderstandings in the empathy-games conversation is the assumption that controlling a character equates to understanding or sharing that character’s emotional state. In most cases, what players are given is agency, not emotional ownership.
- Agency means the ability to make choices and influence outcomes within a system.
- Empathy means emotionally identifying with another person or experience.
These are not the same thing. When you play a game like Papers, Please, you are confronted with difficult moral decisions as a border officer. But you’re not actually living a life of oppression; you’re interacting with a cleverly designed moral system. The emotional impact comes from a gamified structure, not a deep personal connection to the character’s struggles.
The Empathy Gap of Interactivity
Interactivity doesn’t always foster empathy—in fact, it can do the opposite. When players are in control, they often subvert or reject the emotional narrative intended by designers. Consider how often players pursue the most efficient or advantageous outcomes, even if that contradicts a character’s feelings or backstory.
In trying to make games more “empathic,” designers risk reducing complex emotional experiences into mechanical systems. This can trivialize suffering instead of honoring it. Telling a player “you are now experiencing homelessness” by lowering their game resources is not the same as fostering a real understanding of the trauma that entails.
Empathy as a Misguided Design Objective
Many serious games aspire to build empathy through content that tackles grief, oppression, or mental illness. However, these themes don’t automatically translate into emotional understanding just because a player controls an avatar.
Why is this problematic?
- Empathy becomes instrumentalized: It turns into a feature or mechanic rather than a human emotional response.
- Players are distanced, not immersed: Awareness does not equal emotional resonance; players often remain emotionally detached.
- Pain becomes performance: Designers may unintentionally turn trauma into a kind of spectacle under the illusion of “authenticity.”
This doesn’t mean games shouldn’t explore serious emotional topics, but it does mean we should stop expecting games to consistently produce empathy in players. The expectation itself may lead to shallow design and misguided validation.
What Games Actually Do Well
Instead of trying to mimic the emotional effects of literature or film, games should focus on what they are best at: pushing players to make difficult choices, engaging with complex systems, and modifying behavior through feedback loops. In these areas, games can shift perspective—not necessarily by generating empathy, but by creating new understandings through action and consequence.
For example, strategy games like This War of Mine don’t succeed because they make us cry for civilians in war zones. They succeed because they create a hostile survival ecosystem that pressures the player to make morally grey decisions. Players reflect not because they feel someone’s pain, but because they made choices they feel ambivalent about.
This kind of introspection—why did I choose this?—is arguably more powerful than any attempt to feel what a fictional character feels.
The Difference Between Awareness and Empathy
There is undeniable value in games that raise awareness about underrepresented topics or social issues. But awareness is not the same as empathy. A game can inform players about real-world issues, present different perspectives, or challenge assumptions, but emotionally understanding others is a much taller order.
And that’s okay. We can appreciate a game’s educational or narrative depth without requiring it to create an emotional revelation. Just as not every book or film is expected to change your life, not every game needs to reconstruct your worldview through emotive storytelling.
Making Space for Ambiguity and Discomfort
Arguably, the most powerful games are not those that tell us how to feel, but those that complicate our feelings. When designers let go of the prescriptive goal of fostering empathy, they make room for players to respond in varied, uncertain, deeply personal ways.
Consider the dissonance in ambiguous games like Pathologic or Inside, where the narrative resists tidy interpretation. These experiences are less about feeling what someone else feels and more about confronting emotional uncertainty. Games are uniquely effective at creating this kind of discomfort—something that can lead to meaningful reflection, even if it doesn’t build empathy directly.
Conclusion: Reframing the Goal
There’s immense creative potential in exploring emotion, perspective, and human experience through games. But expecting games to build empathy as their central output misunderstands how people process emotion—and how games work mechanically. This expectation risks flattening emotional experience into guided tutorials in sympathy and guilt.
Rather than aiming for “empathy,” designers should embrace strengths like systems-thinking, moral complexity, and procedural rhetoric. These approaches don’t tell players what to feel—they show them what consequences look like when those feelings are put into action. That’s where games thrive, and that’s where they can influence how players see the world—not by simulating pain, but by making players think critically about the systems that cause it.
A Final Word to Designers
If you’re a developer trying to engage players with difficult content, consider these points:
- Focus on agency and consequence, not direct emotion transfer.
- Respect emotional ambiguity; not every player will respond the same way—and that’s okay.
- Use mechanics to reflect themes, not to mimic suffering.
- Design for reflection, not just feeling.
Games don’t need to build empathy to matter—they just need to be honest about what they can uniquely do. And that’s more than enough.