Is This Trauma Yours or Mine? Empathy Gaps and Single-Player Videogame Experiences

Empathy with game characters is generally treated as a positive outcome of gameplay experiences, although the concept of ‘empathy games’ has received due criticism in recent years by mostly indie game developers and scholars of queer games. Empathy with game characters in single-player videogames, in the sense of both player-characters and non-player characters, is therefore often described as a profound emotional experience for players, or an especially compelling expression of identification, agency, immersion, social-emotional skills, or selflessness. Videogames like The Last of Us (Naughty Dog, 2013, 2020), This War of Mine (11 bit studios, 2014) and That Dragon, Cancer (Numinous Games, 2016), for instance, compel players to engage with the trauma of game characters in different ways to induce resounding affective responses and experiences in players. However, because people primarily use themselves as referents for understanding others, even when their own experiences are not intuitively relevant, they generally underestimate the impact of their own affective states when trying to empathise, which leads to an egocentric bias in emotional perspective-taking with both themselves and others. Consequently, when players feel intense emotions about game characters and represented trauma, it can easily obstruct the process of empathy by directing players’ experiences toward themselves, creating a gap in understanding and emotional connection between self and other. Player’s own seminally related experiences may thus overshadow any trauma they perceive in-game, and such a indiscriminatory projection of self into other may express an egocentric bias rather than empathy in any prosocial sense. This complicates the thematisation and reception of trauma in single-player videogames, where