Radical empathy vs palatable sympathy
Why majority culture loved Dys4ia years before trans issues became “mainstream”
--
In 2012, Chicago-based indie designer Anna Anthropy released dys4ia. When the player starts the game, an introductory title card reads, “This is an autobiographical game about my experiences with hormone replacement therapy. My experience isn’t anyone’s [sic] else’s and is not meant to be representative of every trans person” (Anthropy, 2012). This was before celebrities like Laverne Cox and Caitlyn Jenner brought trans issues into the general public discourse in the United States, and the game was celebrated for its educational and advocacy value (Faye, 2021; D’Anastasio, 2015).
Anthropy was displeased by this response. Her game had been given a new label — “empathy game” — and she didn’t want it (2015). From her perspective, it was impossible for a 10-minute game to truly cultivate empathy, and she was unhappy to see people “using a game like dys4ia as a substitute for truly educating themselves on issues surrounding trans women’s lives and how to support them” (Priestman, 2015).
In a 2015 gallery show, Anthropy debuted “Empathy Game” an installation in which participants were given a pedometer and a pair of her own heeled boots that had nearly fallen apart (Alexander, 2015; D’Anastasio, 2015). The instructions were simple — after hearing people talk about how dys4ia allowed them to “walk a mile in her shoes,” Anthropy was now challenging them to literally walk a mile in her shoes.
Over the past ten years, many scholars have debated the question of video games’ ability to cultivate empathy) Bonnie Ruberg, a queer media studies scholar, writes that “empathy” is used to represent countless psychological concepts and prosocial values (2020, p2).
In this article, I will equate caring, allyship, and respect with empathy. This falls in line with Tobi Smethurst and Stef Craps’ more technical definitions of cognitive and parallel emotional empathy in their analysis of The Walking Dead video game (2015, p275). Additionally, it associates “empathy” with the traits that have the greatest social-justice impact. As Ruberg writes, “More valuable than a video game that allows players to [identify] with someone else is a game that requires players to respect the people with whom they cannot identify” (2020, p15).
In that case, does dys4ia provoke empathy? Is there a high likelihood that players will care more about trans people, respect them and their identities more, and work to become better allies after playing it?
No — and that’s exactly why majority culture liked this game so much.
Anthropy found her footing as a developer during the Flash games bubble, and this game perfectly encapsulates that era (Heyward, 2019). Published under her former screen name “Auntie Pixelante,” dys4ia is a colourful 8-bit game played entirely with the arrow keys. Abstracted challenges are paired with short descriptions of Anthropy’s journey through medical transition (see figure 2).
Some scenes, like the one pictured above, function more like a walking simulator. The player must press the right arrow key to move the figure, representing Anthropy, across the screen. As they do, character dialogue (in green and blue) and Anthropy’s own narration (in pink) appear. In others, the player must complete simple challenges to proceed, such as catching pills in their mouth so that Anthropy’s blood pressure will decrease enough for the doctor to feel prescribe oestrogen (see figure 3; 2012).
The playtime of this game is important to note. Firstly, the whole experience is approximately ten minutes long. Within that, scenes last five-to-thirty seconds, even if the player seemingly didn’t succeed (Anthropy, 2012). For example, if the player fails to dodge hate comments from internet transphobes they do not die in the game. Instead, the game just moves on to the next scene and the next facet of her experience that Anthropy wants to explore.
Smethurst and Craps argue that video games have a unique ability to provoke empathy because they are “interreactive” (2015). That is, rather than focusing on what the player is doing (“interacting”), they emphasise that the unique thing about video games is that the game reacts to the player (2015). There is a “feedback loop” in which the player makes choices, the game responds, and the player responds to the responses.
As a player is asked to make choices, the brain often responds emotionally as if these actions are happening in real life (Ibister, 2017, pp 8–9). The character’s failures become the player’s failures and the character’s successes become the player’s successes. This is parallel emotional empathy — the player is vicariously experiencing the character’s emotional state (Smethurst and Craps, 2015, p275).
In 2013, indie game developer Zoe Quinn began receiving death threats in response to her game, Depression Quest (Parkin, 2014). The game is a simple point-and-click exploring a day in the life of a young adult with depression. It makes its point by denying the player’s agency in an atypical way — productive and/or prosocial behaviours are often greyed out, forcing players to “choose” to just get back into bed instead of doing work or to isolate themselves instead of socialising at a party.
While journalists generally reviewed the game positively, some players were furious that Quinn seemingly had no desire to entertain them (2014). The controversy ended up launching Gamergate, an internet culture war over representation in games and the role of women as players and industry members (Dewey, 2014).
While criticism of Depression Quest came primarily from players who were offended by the game’s content and creator, this is not always the case. In her thesis on trauma narratives in games, Evgeniya Kuznetsova discusses reviewers’ critiques of Quantic Dream’s Beyond: Two Souls. The game is AAA, realistic, and story-driven with voice acting and motion capture by Elliot Page and Willem Dafoe and it takes just under eleven hours to complete (Ross, 2013; HowLongToBeat, 2021). It denies agency in many more ways than Depression Quest — the endings of its narrative “episodes” are pre-determined, the game presents skill challenges after which the character suffers regardless of the player’s performance, and powerful abilities are disabled when they would be most useful (Kuznetsova, 2017).
Many reviewers criticised the game for being passive (2017). One went as far as calling it “an instructional video to be followed” rather than a game (Sterling cited in Kuznetsova, 2017), which is perhaps fitting since it was only the second game to be shown at the Tribeca Arts Festival with films (Thomsen, 2013).
Kuznetsova herself liked the game, and found many of the scenes in which player agency is reduced “poignant” (2017). But for the majority, being forced to watch the main character endure traumas without the power to help was disengaging. While discussing the game at Tribeca, actor Elliot Page suggested that the team behind the game wanted players to “just be with [main character Jodie] and share a life” (Thomsen, 2013). And yet, many found that the game’s attempt to force their hands made it more difficult to sympathise or empathise with her (Kuznetsova, 2017).
In dys4ia, the pacing is not geared toward generating empathy. Anthropy’s commentary on her “Empathy Game” installation supports this. She told journalist Celia D’Anastasio:
You can get a high score [in “Empathy Game”], but you’re probably not going to beat mine. You can spend hours stomping around in those boots and it will only bring you a fraction closer to knowing what it’s like to be me, to be trans (2015).
More specifically, dys4ia is not to designed to foster a deep emotional understanding of Anthropy or the challenges she faces as a trans woman. There are three ways Anthropy could have achieved this if she desired: through meaningful choice in a branching narrative, through denial of player agency, or through time spent and relatability.
Firstly, Anthropy offers the player little meaningful choice. This game has a linear narrative, so there is no grounded cognition to force parallel emotional empathy.
Additionally, her written narration shares that many of Anthropy’s struggles with medical transition were directly related to time and exhaustion (2012). She had to find a doctor’s office that would prescribe hormones without conducting ableist tests. Then she had to take high-blood pressure medications with many side effects and wait until the doctor cleared her for the prescription. Then she had to wait for the hormones to work, though she was already dealing with the side effects of those too.
Anthropy never forces the player to feel the emotions associated with the constant research, negotiation, and waiting. The player does not have to attend appointments where they are dehumanised or find a perfect-looking clinic online just to realise that the private insurance they didn’t even choose isn’t accepted.
While trans people around the world find “denial of agency” to be a constant while medically transitioning, Anthropy doesn’t force the player to experience it (Faye, 2021; Heyward, 2022). If she did, her game would likely feel a lot more like Beyond: Two Souls, and players likely would not respond as positively to it.
Instead, players get to learn a lot about the many challenges of being trans and then move on before real discomfort occurs. This is not much different than a personal essay written by a trans woman, except for the format in which there are fewer words and more colours.
That said, linear and deeply personal storytelling can still make people care. While it rides the line between sympathy and empathy, it’s not unheard of for players to feel much more strongly about a social issue than they did before completing a game. An example with a linear narrative is A Normal Lost Phone. Players find a lost mobile phone belonging to “Sam” and sort through its photos, apps, and notes completing puzzles to try to figure out who the owner is (Accidental Queens, 2017). To spoil it, over a few hours it is revealed that Sam is a recent high-school graduate who has been exploring her gender identity and discarded the device when she moved away to escape her prejudiced family and start a new life.
Though it’s short and linear, several reviewers called their experience with A Normal Lost Phone deeply emotional (Accidental Queens, 2022). In this case, readers become attached to Sam as they unlock access to her private files. There is an intimacy in reading the texts Sam sent only to her most trusted friends and looking through the pride photos stored in a hidden folder app, and this creates a parasocial relationship with the player (Isbister, 2017, p7). This is compounded by the fact that many players can probably relate to some aspect of Sam’s experience as she tries to figure out what to do after graduation, deals with relationships that have been damaged by secrets, and struggles to fit in with her family members.
In the case of dys4ia, the game is focused very narrowly on Anthropy’s medical transition, and its exploration is rather shallow. Anthropy mentions that she finds herself crying constantly in response to her girlfriend once she starts taking oestregen, but there is no backlog of texts for the player to read (2012). That is entirely reasonable since Anthropy is a real person who deserves privacy. However, it means that dys4ia does not provoke empathy the way that A Normal Lost Phone does.
As Anthropy stated nearly ten years ago, dys4ia is not meant to provoke empathy in a meaningful way. Due to its length, level of interreactivity, and storytelling, it is better suited for raising awareness of the challenges many trans women face. It’s important to note that this mischaracterisation of Anthropy’s game isn’t harmless.
Asian-American developer Robert Yang wrote about this type of mischaracterisation — he labels it as appropriation — in response to discussion of VR as an “empathy machine” (2017). His games often focus on gay experiences, and audiences and reviewers have continually stated that they are perfect for helping straight people understand what it’s like to be gay (2017). This results in discussion and perception of Yang’s games becoming focused on straight people learning tolerance instead of gay culture and queer solidarity, which are what he is focused on as a creator.
Like Anthropy, he is frustrated to see straight audiences thank him for creating an educational experience for them and moving on instead of becoming educated about justice (D’Anastasio, 2015; Yang, 2017).
It’s easy to spend 15-minutes playing a linear game with no fail states. Ruberg asserts that when recontextualising games as empathy machines, players are offered “the chance to feel good — and, more specifically, to feel like they have done good — by playing through another person’s hardship” (2020, p11). However, since Anthropy’s game is not designed to push players to become better allies, there is no meaningful benefit for Anthropy or any other trans people.
dys4ia is a powerful autobiography project that serves as a time-capsule both to the era of flash games and to a time when many westerners didn’t know anyone who is openly trans. However, it’s short, direct, and linear format that made it widely popular also mean that players can easily use it to satisfy their need to be “supportive” without investing much time. Players and journalists must celebrate marginalised creators’ work for what it is instead of repackaging it as a tool for members of majority culture to earn brownie points.
References
Accidental Queens. (2017). A Normal Lost Phone.
Accidental Queens. (2022). A Normal Lost Phone on Steam. Available from https://store.steampowered.com/app/523210/A_Normal_Lost_Phone/ [Accessed 23 February 2022].
Alexander, L. (2015). This ‘empathy game’ reveals a real challenge for indie games. Boing Boing. Available from https://boingboing.net/2015/09/09/this-empathy-game-reveals.html [Accessed 22 February 2022].
Anthropy, A. (2012). dys4ia. FreeGames.org. Available from https://freegames.org/dys4ia/ [Accessed 20 February 2022].
D’Anastasio, C. (2015). Why Video Games Can’t Teach You Empathy. Vice. Available from https://www.vice.com/en/article/mgbwpv/empathy-games-dont-exist [Accessed 20 February 2022].
Dewey, C. (2014). The only guide to Gamergate you will ever need to read. Washington Post, 14 October. Available from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/10/14/the-only-guide-to-gamergate-you-will-ever-need-to-read/ [Accessed 23 February 2022].
Faye, S. (2021). The transgender issue: an argument for justice.
Heyward, J. (2019). For those called to creative careers, accessibility challenges loom in every corner. Medium. Available from https://jasmineheyward.medium.com/ll-wfor-those-called-to-creative-careers-accessibility-challenges-loom-in-every-corner-c6fe666a0a3 [Accessed 22 February 2022].
Heyward, J. (2022). (re)creating gender. Available from https://gender.jasmineheyward.com/ [Accessed 23 February 2022].
HowLongToBeat. (2021). How long is Beyond: Two Souls? HowLongToBeat. Available from https://howlongtobeat.com/game?id=1023 [Accessed 23 February 2022].
Isbister, K. (2017). How Games Move Us: Emotion by Design. MIT Press.
Kuznetsova, E. (2017). Trauma in Games: Narrativizing Denied Agency, Ludonarrative Dissonance and Empathy Play. University of Alberta. Available from https://doi.org/10.7939/R30Z7196H [Accessed 9 February 2022].
Parkin, S. (2014). Zoe Quinn’s Depression Quest. The New Yorker, 9 September. Available from https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/zoe-quinns-depression-quest [Accessed 20 February 2022].
Priestman, C. (2015). The sequel to dys4ia explores the failure of empathy games. Kill Screen — Previously. Available from https://killscreen.com/previously/articles/sequel-dys4ia-explores-failure-empathy-games/ [Accessed 20 February 2022].
Romano, A. (2019). The frustrating, enduring debate over video games, violence, and guns. Vox. Available from https://www.vox.com/2019/8/26/20754659/video-games-and-violence-debate-moral-panic-history [Accessed 23 February 2022].
Ross, A. (2013). Beyond: Two Souls Demo Coming October 1st. Playstation Blog. Available from https://web.archive.org/web/20161224213701/http://blog.us.playstation.com/2013/09/05/beyond-two-souls-demo-coming-october-1st// [Accessed 23 February 2022].
Ruberg, B. (2020). Empathy and Its Alternatives: Deconstructing the Rhetoric of “Empathy” in Video Games. Communication, Culture and Critique, 13 (1), 54–71. Available from https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcz044.
Smethurst, T. and Craps, S. (2015). Playing with Trauma: Interreactivity, Empathy, and Complicity in The Walking Dead Video Game. Games and Culture, 10 (3), 269–290. Available from https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412014559306.
Thomsen, M. (2013). Beyond: Two Souls Woos Movie-Goers at Tribeca Film Festival. IGN. Available from https://www.ign.com/articles/2013/05/03/beyond-two-souls-woos-movie-goers-at-tribeca-film-festival [Accessed 23 February 2022].
Yang, R. (2017). ‘If you walk in someone else’s shoes, then you’ve taken their shoes’: empathy machines as appropriation machines. Radiator. Available from https://www.blog.radiator.debacle.us/2017/04/if-you-walk-in-someone-elses-shoes-then.html [Accessed 20 February 2022].
