6. A Breathtaking Journey . Appealing to Empathy in a Persuasive Mixed- Reality Game Martijn Kors, Gabriele Ferri, Erik D. van der Spek, Cas Ketel, & Ben Schouten Abstract Persuasive games are designed for a variety of objectives, from marketing to healthcare and activism. Some of the more socially aware ones cast players as members of disenfranchised minorities, prompting them to see what they see. In parallel, designers have started to leverage system-immersion to enable players to temporarily feel like another person, to sense what they sense. From these converging perspectives, we hypothesize a still- uncharted space of opportunities at the crossroads of games, empathy, persuasion, and system-immersion. We explored this space by designing A Breathtaking Journey, a mixed-reality game providing a first-person perspective of a refugee’s journey. A qualitative study was conducted to tease out empathy-arousing characteristics, provide insights on empathic experiences, and contribute three design opportunities: visceral engage- ment, reflective moments, and affective appeals. Keywords: mixed-reality game; persuasive games; empathy; research-through-design Introduction Games are no longer designed for entertainment purposes alone and increas- ingly play a role in marketing, education, healthcare, and political activism. Some games simulate experiences; others aim at persuasion. Games with the latter objective are typically produced with the designer’s intent to shape Hera, T. Dela, J. Jansz, J. Raessens, B. Schouten, Persuasive Gaming in Context. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463728805_ch06 96 MartIJN KORS, GABRIELE FERRI, ERIK D. VAN der SPEK, CAS KETEL, & BEN SCHOUTEN how players think and feel about the represented issue in reality (Bogost, 2007; Kors, van der Spek, & Schouten, 2015), with the more socially aware ones designed not for expressly commercial or promotional purposes (i.e., advergames [De la Hera, 2019]) but for addressing social and humanitarian issues. These games often have players temporarily take on the role of specific actors—for example the disadvantaged, the marginalized, or the dispossessed—to communicate how it feels to be in a certain condition. In parallel, several HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) solutions have been developed over the years exploring empathy as a desired outcome. In this chapter, we aim to connect the two fields, namely: (1) games that foster empathic engagement to persuade, and (2) HCI artifacts designed to elicit empathy as a main objective. In the following paragraphs, we further unpack these two perspectives on empathy and digital games/artifacts. The first one is slightly more functionalistic and foregrounds empathy as a desirable means to leverage in persuasion. The second brings aesthetic experiences to the forefront and explores artifacts aimed at altering users’ perceptions, thus possibly simulating empathic states. We explored the connection of these two fields by designing A Breathtaking Journey, a mixed-reality game providing a first-person perspective of a refugee’s journey. Empathy-oriented persuasive games The particular empathy-arousing capacities of games have been recognized in different studies (Belman & Flanagan, 2010), for example as a result of simulated role-taking (Peng, Lee, & Heeter, 2010) or players adopting goals of the protagonist (Lankoski, 2007). Games that are subsumed under the umbrella of empathy games (Bartel- son, 2013) may stimulate both the cognitive and affective states of empathy (Boltz, Henriksen, & Mishra, 2015; Belman & Flanagan, 2010)—empowering players to explore alternate points of view—and foster a sense of shared similarity and empathic concern for individuals and groups with whom they may not have direct contact. Belman and Flanagan (2010) point to PeaceMaker (ImpactGames, 2007) as an exemplary empathy game: ‘Cognitive empathy is involved in gameplay […]. To make progress […] players have to consider the perspectives of a variety of stakeholders, rather than only that of their own side. […] The game requires one to think carefully about the perspectives of a wide range of stakeholder groups […] Policy decisions that agitate a stakeholder group too much can potentially derail the peace process.’ (p. 12). A BREATHTAKING JourneY 97 With players, journalists, and designers often asserting an uncritical and almost charitable stance concerning the design of such games (e.g., Bartelson, 2013), it is often overlooked that many are also intentionally designed to shape attitudes towards represented issues (Bogost, 2007). As Boltz et al. (2015) argue, ‘well-designed empathy games can also encourage [players] to evaluate choices and consequences, and to question the system a game represents.’ (p. 8). Games such as PeaceMaker (ImpactGames, 2007) and This War of Mine (11 bit studios, 2014) do not only ask players to empathize with certain actors, they also present the player with arguments that might cause one to think and feel differently about the people, events, or situations that are represented in these games (Belman & Flanagan, 2010; de Smale, Kors, & Sandovar, 2017). Empathy-oriented use of system-immersion Empathy has also been conceptualized in the domain of Human Computer Interaction (HCI), in particular with respect to artifacts that—while not being full-fledged games—still leverage a degree of playfulness in engaging their users (Schouten, Deen, & Bekker, 2010). Specifically, the interplay between system-immersion and phenomenology is opening new design spaces: the rapid and widespread diffusion of VR (virtual reality), AR (aug- mented reality), and wearables has made it feasible and relatively affordable to create a variety of artifacts that turn an experience into someone else’s phenomenological perception. Design research has drawn upon pragmatist phenomenology to argue that interacting with technology in society ‘requires us to understand the experiences of [a] person in relation to ourselves and it is [there] that we identify empathy’ (Fiore, Wright, & Edwards, 2005, p. 131). To illustrate this, we highlight two approaches of using system-immersion for empathy-oriented playful HCI: first, immersive journalism, and second, wearable devices that modify the perception of one’s own body. As we present our selected examples, we categorize them as playful inasmuch as they are not games. But they are not functionalistic tools either: as Lucero, Karapanos, Arrasvuori, and Korhonen (2014) argue, ‘playfulness is a mindset whereby people approach every day, even mundane, activities with an attitude similar to that of paidia’ (p. 36). De la Peña et al. (2010) discuss the possibilities of immersive journalism, a form of first-person experience of a journalistic reportage, ‘[allowing] the participant […] to actually enter a virtually recreated scenario representing the news story […] [that] affords the participant unprecedented access to the sights and sounds, and possibly feelings and emotions’ (De la Peña et al., 2010, p. 2). In a 98 MartIJN KORS, GABRIELE FERRI, ERIK D. VAN der SPEK, CAS KETEL, & BEN SCHOUTEN similar vein, Arora, Pousman, and Milk developed Clouds Over Sidra (Arora, Pousman, and Milk, 2015), a 360-degree film in partnership with the United Nations, following Sidra, a twelve-year-old girl living in the Za’atari camp in Jordan. On the production company’s website, co-director Arora describes: ‘by leveraging breakthrough technologies, such as virtual reality, we can create solidarity with those who are normally excluded and overlooked, amplifying their voices and explaining their situations’ (Arora et al., 2015). And indeed, filmmaker and digital artist Chris Milk has recently argued for VR constituting an ‘ultimate empathy machine’ (Milk, 2015, 3:01). When playing Clouds Over Sidra, ‘you’re sitting there in [Sidra’s] room, watching her, you’re not watching it through a television screen, you’re not watching it through a window, you’re sitting there with her […] when you look down, you’re sitting on the same ground that she’s sitting on […] and because of that, you feel her humanity in a deeper way: you empathize with her in a deeper way’ (Milk, 2015, para.13). In addition to using technology to alter the viewpoint of the viewer, technological devices can also be used to stimulate the other senses and thereby alter the viewer’s bodily perception, with the objective of making the viewer feel what someone else might feel. Marshall et al. (2011) and Benford et al. (2012) have experimented with devices built around military- style gas masks. Marshall et al. report on a horror-themed maze visited by volunteers wearing sensor-equipped gas masks, who were remotely observed by other participants through their video- and audio feeds. Semi-structured interviews showed the remote participants experiencing heightened fear, arguably because of their empathic bond with the volunteers inside the horror labyrinth, which was based on seeing what they saw and hearing them breathe. In a later study (Benford et al., 2012), they present Breath- less, a physical installation for three participants wearing breath sensors. Breathless prompts one participant to sit on a swing, another to control its rhythm, and the last one to observe them from afar. All participants were instructed to synchronize their breathing and their movements. The authors concluded that the shared perceptions created an empathic relationship between the participants. An opportunity space: games, immersion, empathy, and persuasion The cases discussed