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We started looking at the idea of creating empathy through the use of digital games. This led us to emotional challenge and immersive experiences. Being stuck in isolation, we began investigating the world of online gaming and virtual worlds. We thought we could enable players of the game to build empathy by exposing them to different scenarios they might not have considered and created a number of ‘quests’ and game screens.
Our idea for re-imagining smart cities is a massive multiplayer online game (MMOG), to enable immersion, the experience of being a non-human and interaction with other species to thrive and deal with the impact humans have on a city.
It was important for us to create meaningful and tangible experiences, so we explored the idea carefully and remained critical with our approach. Could the MMOG be truly human centered and give other species a genuine voice? Could we really create a feeling profound empathy? Were we just trying to make it fit?
In addition to the feedback from the design crits, there were three big influences in my thinking when it came to the design.
Immersive Experiences & Empathy
Immersive Experiences & Empathy
The feedback on our open source tool and animal personas made us think as a team that we genuinely wanted to try our best to design for non-human and if we could to help other designers to do so. What we felt we were lacking was profound empathy for non-human species. How do we fix that? The answer was what we had been doing already. Immersion. We had spent weeks taking photos, growing plants, building moisture sensors and creating videos on animals and critiquing our designs. Perhaps we could build an environment to enable immersion with other species too?
I had been reading papers on emotional challenge in games for the Readings in HCI module. The gaming world was quite new to me and I had not even heard of most of the games. In the paper An Odd Kind Of Pleasure: Differentiating Emotional Challenge in Digital Games, there were some highly emotional and sometimes disturbing experiences for players.
Nevertheless (and to my complete surprise), it showed humans could empathise deeply with fictional characters, in a fictional world, in what clearly is only a game. Below are just a few quotes from players featured in the paper to explain the point.
"The racism against my character in Skyrim can be a bit depressing and I irrationally felt like the game developers (in reality) and the laws of the land (in the game) were both discriminating against my character."
"I ended up killing Toriel accidentally, and I was very upset about it. And then towards the end of the game, Toriel’s relationships with the other game characters are explained and I felt really bad about what I had done."
"The game shows you all of the civilians that you could end up choosing to burn, and right in the middle you can see a mother holding her child, and it was overall pretty heart wrenching."
Could this profound empathy be extended to non-human characters in virtual world? Enter TierZoo. Tatiana had shared this video titled "The Time Earth Glitched" which introduced us to a MMOG called "Earth" where players can be all sorts of different species and essentially compete with other species.
The fascinating thing in this video was how dominant Anthropod species could be. In the rather hilarious story of the time the earth glitched, the developers rolled out a patch to try to balance the environment for the different types of species actually made Anthropods even more dominant!
I thought this was brilliant because it highlights the immense complexity of designing an entire world and being able to predict the outcomes for even the seemingly inconsequential actions. But people seem to think designing a smart city for a millions of humans and all other non-human life is somehow trivial.
The Physical/Virtual World Dichotomy
The Physical/Virtual World Dichotomy
I wanted to dig deeper into the idea that an online immersive experience would create the same kind of profound empathy as in the real world. Did players of games feel bad for an hour and then tell themselves that their experience wasn't real and carried on with their lives.
Not being a gamer myself I didn't have my own experiences to fall back on. I did however find more research that challenged the physical/real world dichotomy. The paper Virtual Worlds Don't Exist: Questioning the Dichotomous Approach in MMO Studies and The Emergence of the Hybrid Community: Re-thinking the Physical/Virtual Dichotomy both had studied this concept in detail - the former paper in a MMOG environment.
For me the questions became not about whether we could use a MMOG to create profound empathy for non-human species, it was about how we designed the game. Its fundamental principles would be important.
A number of discussion over video calls ensued where we discussed and debated whether we should even allow human characters in the game! In the end we decided (and I think we all agreed) that humans would feature in the game but not as playable characters. However, the impact of humans on other species would be a feature and players would have to find ways of dealing with the consequences of these. These decision were with the intention of creating profound empathy.
The idea was further reinforced when we look at The Gift of the Gab?: A Design Oriented Sociology of Young People's Use of Mobiles paper in another Reading in HCI class, this time on the topic of CSCW. It provided further insight into how the subjects of the study valued personal SMS messages. There appeared to be little difference when comparing SMS messages to handwritten letters. There was no dichotomy.
We considered whether we wanted humans to feature in the MMOG at all. In the end we thought is was important to include them.
We considered various ideas for the setting of the smart city in our MMOG.
We wanted to create a virtual world where players would have to deal with the impact of human actions.
Ambiguity as a Positive Resource
Ambiguity as a Positive Resource
The thing that made me nervous about designing a highly complex simulated environment was the lack of control anyone could have over it. This nervousness continued as we designed the game, the setting, goals and rules. It was only the morning of the final crit when I attended the final Readings in HCI class. I wanted to ask about this concept of ambiguity I had read about in one of the papers title Ambiguity as a Resource for Design.
It made me think about how ambiguity in our design was not only potentially a positive thing, but that for our MMOG it is needed. When I thought about it, I felt certain that players would inevitably appropriate the game in unexpected ways. They might for instance harm another species, just to experiment and see what the result is. Isn't this a safe way for players to learn about the potential consequences of their actions?
Too much ambiguity is of course poor design, but I felt strongly that we were not designing the game to prescribe the result. We are not saying what the balance of species power should be, how much green space there should be or what population numbers should be. Our goal has always been to design an immersive experience for players of the game to develop profound empathy with other living being and use it to better smart city designers.
This is the best we could come up with in the time and given the difficult circumstances, but I'm pleased with the creativity, how we stretched ourselves and how we set ourselves a really difficult challenge instead of playing it safe.
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