Designing gamified interactive systems for empathy development

Abstract

The lack of empathy contributes to the development of insensitive social attitudes, so the design of interactive systems based on games or playful experiences for the development of empathic skills is of vital importance in the field of education. In this paper we propose a circular and iterative empathy development model and analyze gamification strategies that can be useful for the design of interactive systems that favor the development of empathy through pedagogical strategies in which users are exposed to affective, cognitive, reflective and social experiences that encourage the expression of behaviors of a prosocial nature.

A Narrative-Driven Role-Playing Game for Raising Flood Awareness

“…This is quite hard to accomplish without the added constraints of the 3-h session/lecture and the varying levels of game literacy among players, although immersion can be established through interactivity with both the game world and players via the gameplay loop. The suggested gameplay loop consists of seven steps of a circular process of empathy, as described by a previously published work [27], with the goal of creating and overcoming personally set challenges when identifying with a character. In this work, due to the means used, the gameplay loop was deliberately more abstract; observing, assigning meaning, and imaging happened in each player while conversing with the game master, then a certain perspective was taken by each player internally, which caused an emotional reaction (feeling and understanding), and finally acting.…”

A New Pyramid Model of Empathy

“…Empathy has been an influential concept in ethics and moral theory, aesthetics theory, social/developmental psychology, clinical psychology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence which all have followed the foundational work in philosophy [2][3][4][5][6][7]. Contributions from this rich variety of fields have resulted in several definitions [8], functions, proposed components, theories, and models of empathy [7,9,10].…”

“We need to do more... I need to do more”: Augmenting Digital Media Consumption via Critical Reflection to Increase Compassion and Promote Prosocial Attitudes and Behaviors

“…Prosocial behaviors, broadly defined as "any action that benefits another" [113], are crucial for managing global social issues such as pandemics [59] and climate change [94]. Within the HCI research community, there has been a recent trend of employing technology to promote prosocial attitudes and behaviors by fostering empathy (e.g., [3,5,10,20,52,74,98,103,107,123]), that is, "the ability to share someone else's feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person's situation" [32]. Often, this takes the form of simulation and storytelling using immersive technologies like virtual or augmented reality (VR/AR) [3,5,20,45,52,107], or ways of designing online interactive experiences [10,123].…”

“…Our work extends existing HCI research on compassion and prosocial behaviors in several ways. First, compared to the number of studies examining empathy (e.g., [74,98,103,123]), much less attention within HCI has been paid to promoting prosocial behaviors via compassion (e.g., [102]); this work aims to contribute to the latter. Second, this work explores an associated construct of compassion that has received little attention in empirical work to date, namely, critical reflection.…”