Games are alive with emotion. Maybe that emotion is excitement at finding a new piece of legendary gear, or aggression at trying to kill a particularly difficult boss, or sadness when a character dies (what, you’ve never cried during a video game? No? Yeah, yeah… me either…). One of the most raw, impactful, and important human emotions is empathy. Empathy is the ability to feel the pain of others as they experience it. Not physically, of course, but emotionally. Perhaps you see a child playing alone while other children point and laugh at her and you get a pit in your stomach. Maybe you see a dog die on TV and tears well up in your eyes. Ok, just writing those things made me feel a little queasy.
The big question with games is whether or not gaming makes us more or less empathetic. This question has been circled around for years, with scholars and studies on both sides. I’ll talk about that briefly, but what I’m really interested in is the kind of empathy that video games promote. (Oh yeah, spoiler alert, I think video games do create empathy.) What exactly is happening to my brain when I cry out when my little fox I’m controlling slams into the wall? As Alisha asks in a recent (and brilliant) post, do we feel more empathy for cute characters than ugly ones? Is it the visual style that evokes the most empathy and feeling? Or perhaps it’s the storyline? All those questions will not be answered, but certainly they’re useful to think about. Now…
Games have been targeted again and again, people claiming that long-term gamers have become so desensitized to violent imagery that they straight up lack empathy for other people. Even The New York Times has weighed in, claiming that there is a connection between video games and school shootings. For those of us who are familiar with the actual science behind the connection between violence and video games, it may be shocking that anyone can make this connection. However, it’s extremely prevelant. What’s different about articles like this in recent years, however, is the focus on empathy. Violent video games don’t a violent person make, BUT—they claim—violent video games do lower our ability to feel pain for the plight of others. From the article:
“The research is getting clearer that over the long term, people with more exposure to violent video games have demonstrated things like lower empathy to violence,” said Dr. Jeanne Brockmyer, a clinical child psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of Toledo. “Initially, people are horrified by things they see, but we can’t maintain that level of arousal. Everyone gets desensitized to things.”
But there are proponents on the other side of the argument as well. While I find some of the studies a bit cynical and simplistic, they nevertheless are compelling. Look at this study in Psychology Today that claims video games do teach us to be more empathetic. The reason? Perhaps it’s because of the deep level of human emotion and the way players become attached to storylines and characters and allow us to explore our identities in ways non-interactive media don’t. Nope. This study says that video games promote empathy because they give us better rewards for positive behavior than for negative behavior. BUT that’s not all, and the next finding is much more compelling (and hopeful!).
Researchers found that when players played a game with cute characters (Lemmings), they were far more likely to feel less schadenfreude toward someone. Schadenfreude is the glee we feel when something bad happens to someone who we don’t like or who we see as having “earned” retribution. I have learned over the years that personally I felt a lot of shadenfreude when growing up, but that has steadily dissipated, to where I feel almost none. Even people who have done horrible, horrible things to me—I just feel bad for them. I think, “they must be so miserable themselves that they have to take it out on someone.” Was this cultivated by my years of gameplay? I don’t know. But…
I am interested in exactly how games influence our empathy. I can’t on one hand say that cartoon-ish games decrease shadenfreude while saying it’s junk science that violent games decrease empathy. I think the problem is in the equivocating empathy with sensitivity. You can be desensitized to a media portrayal of violence or gruesome imagery but still feel empathy in a real situation. For example, I’m addicted to horror movies. 99% of the horror movies I have seen, while many have scared me, have not evoked a sensitive response from me. One could say I’m desensitized to violence. BUT, that doesn’t mean my empathy is impacted. I can feel no empathy toward a movie character, because I understand intuitively that the situation is not real, and still get sick to my stomach thinking about that little girl on the playground being teased. One is real, one is not.
In the end, I don’t think anyone can say if games cause people to be more or less empathetic on a large scale. What I do think we need to do is stop equating reactions in a game with assumptions about what reactions will be in the real world. And what we REALLY need to do is keep investigating, studying, and asking questions about the cool way games can shape who we are.
