Steve Wilcox, GI alumnus and Assistant Professor of Game Design and Development at Laurier, presented a paper at the International Academic Conference on Meaningful Play in East Lansing, Michigan on Oct. 11.
Wicox's paper entitled "(Re)Thinking Empathy Games" looks at empathy games through the perspectives of feminist epistemology, phenomenology, psychology, disability studies, and rhetorical theory. This research comes from Wilcox's recognition of our need for a new understanding how empathy functions in games:
Empathy games have recently and deservedly been criticized as facile attempts to reproduce fundamentally inimitable experiences. As a result empathy games have increasingly been viewed with skepticism at best and derision at their worst.
- Steve Wilcox
By analyzing empathy in games through different paradigms and theoretical frameworks, Wilcox argues that we can chart a new path forward for designing more effective tools for honing empathy in gameful systems.