Video Games for Empathy and Understanding Towards Human Migration

Abstract

Video games have recently started playing a more important role in education, though there is limited research on how they can be used to generate empathy and understanding towards their subject matters. To address this limitation, we present Vida Migrante, an online interactive simulation game about the struggles of Venezuelan migrants living in Ecuador, and analyze whether or not the game can foster empathy and understanding towards the migrant experience. This study uniquely looks at how the game can communicate the findings from real migrant data in such a way that users can empathize with them. A set of 52 students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were surveyed and asked a series of Likert-style and open-ended questions to determine whether or not this game generated empathy and understanding towards the topic. An in-depth quantitative and qualitative analysis reveals that although respondents already had high levels of empathy and understanding, the game was able to increase those levels rather significantly. This work shows that video games like these can be used not only to increase familiarity and understanding of a humanitarian issue, but also empathy towards the data and the presented human experiences. This paper lastly contributes a discussion of the specific features of this game that allows empathy generation to occur, which may help motivate future work to create effective games that allow its players to empathize with important issues in today’s technology driven world.