Tappetina's Empathy - A Study of Serious Games Facilitating Empathy with Storytelling

Abstract

Background: Empathy is the ability for people to understand other people s motivations, positions, and emotions. This is an important way for people to relate to each other and much research has been done to find out how serious games affects empathy. Much of it has, however, been focusing on negative impacts, which encourage anti-social behavior and reduce empathy. There is still a notable potential for games to have a positive impact on pro-social behavior by encouraging and building empathy.

Objective: This thesis investigates how a serious game can affect players in such a way, through the use of storytelling. First part of this objective is to do a literature review, which lays out discussions, reports and game projects on the topic of serious games, empathy and storytelling. The second part of the objective is to do design and develop a storytelling game. By having players collaborate on telling a story, the game aims to exercise their empathic abilities. Each player uses a smartphone which displays the story structure and grants new cues for building the story together.

Method: The research performed here is design and creation, in which the main results is the design discussion and the game artifact (including the digital solution, and the flow of the physical activity). The game is then evaluated with a second research strategy, a quasi-experiment. This took place in a workshop trial with 12 participants.

Results: Contributions include the game activity, and the results of the literature review and the evaluation: Participants responded positively and enjoyed playing the game. The participants showed different abilities to build a story, and various reactions that suggested links to empathy.

Limitations: The game is still in an early stage and the quasi-experiment was too small to accurately generalize. A more streamlined game needs to be systematically evaluated to a larger audience.

Conclusion: The evaluation showed enough potential to use this approach to empathy through storytelling. Two scientific papers were written, one of which was published and the game will be presented at the IDC conference. The project has also been further developed and researched based on the process and design outlined in this thesis, to better facilitate empathic responses.