The large and distinct world of games, with its quirks, has been surfing on the unruly and progressive evolution of the development tools that are part of their complex creation process. With the tools that once limited the developer community now extending that market to small and even singular development groups, this new generation has been able to create a market of its own.
In their apartments and white garages, this generation of enthusiasts passionate about the possibilities that these media could conceive were responsible for developing and scaling several game genres that diverged from the simple fun that the big market “can’t get enough of”.
These developers, freed from capitalist demands, proposed player experiences that attempted in some way to express more personal characteristics of their lives, such as desires, dreams, and difficulties, with goals of mirroring their deepest, most emotional, and personal aspects of their lives, sharing some of their innermost secrets and pains of adolescents/adults in a capitalist society, also being accommodated so that identity groups could attempt to create media to express their yearnings.
While these unique artistic products were produced, played, and discussed by small groups hosted in the darkest corners of the net, this community went unnoticed by the world and its market, but the maturing/aging of the gamer community and the emerging need of this audience to institute themselves as a pro-social individual, made games with divergent and emotional proposals gain interest from this audience.
In a market that seizes and commodifies the material to the abstract, games that set out to offer empathetic experiences about the lives of people recognized as essentially dependent on basic social needs, such as respect or simply life itself, became an emerging product to satiate this audience that needed to feel and fulfill part of “That” which they believed was enough to make them images of their Ideas.
Appropriating the goals of this genre, the market floods the virtual shelves of this audience with narrative titles that perform the Experience of Others, in the belief that the conception of ownership and use over these media qualifies them to express the depth and complexity of the problems of these, resulting in a group of consumers satisfied with their yearnings for social change, because within the illusion of the idea of empathy, these players fulfill their role by feeling what they think they should about the lives of these people.
The mark of the progress of this kind of empathy in games directly enables the feelings of “I’m glad it’s not me” or “I’ve been there” indirectly in these consumers.
These games portray how society itself deals with works that criticize them, making them more of a product, going as far as to create awards for games that promote this idea of empathy, as if the concept were apt to have quantitative and qualitative levels.
Not being able to be detached from the prevailing ideologies of our society, rethinking how we classify and understand games as promoters of empathy and other similar feelings becomes necessary for the game developer community, instead of creating games as narratives of suffering, need to create games that make it possible to make players able to recognize their social place in these issues.
