Analysis of The Perception of Users of Empathic Games in Discussion Forums and Their Relation to Death

Abstract

Empathic games present, among other characteristics, the use of narratives about strong themes, which invite users to reflect and identify themselves with scenes and images from the narrated world. Among other themes, death and human frailty are recurrent. We herein analyze users' perceptions of the empathic game The Dragon Cancer in order to identify useful aspects to conceive and evaluate empathic games. Our research is based on netnography, by means of manual qualitative and quantitative analyses of users' comments in forums in Steam's page. We analyzed comments where users expressed their opinions about technical issues of the game, as well as how it addressed themes such as death and mortality. Our results are useful for the production and evaluation of empathic games.