This article was first published in the November 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
You stand in a locked room. In ten seconds' time the door will swing and shudder open and your violent partner will stride in, spoiling for a fight. What do you do? Can you evade the seemingly inevitable?
Or: you're an immigrant in America, selling newspapers to commuters. But people aren't buying too many papers these days. It looks like you won't make the rent. You arrive home to find a note from your landlord. Get rid of your cat, it reads, or face eviction. Will you take the risk, or cast out your only companion?
You're an immigration inspector working at an east European border checkpoint. Each day you must abide by a set of increasingly complicated rules governing who's allowed to enter. An elderly man creaks up to your booth. His papers are in order; you let him through. His wife is next in line. You scan her papers and immediately notice a problem with her visa. Let her through and, if found out, you will pay a penalty. Do you uphold bureaucracy or save the marriage?
These are just three of the scenarios into which videogames have placed players. 10 Seconds in Hell uses the medium to communicate the terror of domestic abuse. Cart Lifeoffers an affecting videogame study of life in America for those working on the poverty line. Papers Please is a study of the ways in which red tape can entangle people, and even decide their fates.
During the medium's first two decades, videogames mainly presented us with the opportunity to enter situations too dangerous, rarefied or expensive for reality. So we became the racing-car driver, the marine, the superhero, a footballer and so on. More recently, the rise of easy-to-use videogame-creation software, and the lowering of the barriers of game distribution, have vastly expanded the range of people making and selling games.
Videogame themes have broadened in kind. In Prison Architect we are made responsible for both the architectural layout of an American prison and its day-to-day running, balancing the needs and human rights of our prisoners with the bottom line. Phone Storyexamines the plight of sweatshop workers assembling smartphones for western clients. Coming Out Simulator 2014 is an autobiographical game about a young man trying to tell his parents about his sexual orientation. Games increasingly allow us to experience something of other people's lives and predicaments.
Film critic Roger Ebert described film as "a machine that generates empathy". Film, he said, allows us to "understand more about different hopes, aspirations, dreams and fears". Games are better poised than almost any other medium to do this.
Moreover, videogames are not only a way for an audience to experience a life outside their own, but also a powerful way for a person to invite others into one's own personal history and perspective, to not only view the story from the sidelines, but from the inside. And by becoming a soldier, newsagent or victim of domestic abuse, we begin to understand the world and its people a little more. The potential of these empathy machines is something that we are only just beginning to explore.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
