Playing for Change: How Game Design Could Promote Empathy and Awareness?

Video games, once relegated to leisure and escapism, have evolved into a powerful medium for tackling complex social and ethical issues. Game design, with its immersive storytelling and interactive experiences, is emerging as a potent instrument for raising awareness and fostering empathy towards these intricate matters [1]. This essay aims to show the ways game design can lead to a social change. Games invite players into a meticulously crafted world, by making them active participants in the narrative. This immersion can be harnessed to draw players into the lives and experiences of characters facing challenging social and ethical dilemmas. By embodying these characters, players gain firsthand insight into the issues [2]. For instance, in the game “Papers, Please,” players have the role of an immigration officer in a fictional dystopian state. Through the game’s mechanics and decision-making, players experience the moral dilemmas faced by immigration officers. By presenting complexities and consequences, the game encourages players to face with issues like empathy, ethics, and the equality. <a href="https://medium.com/@efekayrasoylu/playing-for-change-how-game-design-could-promote-empathy-and-awareness-b9a2cffd3595">Read More</a>