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Posts tagged: video games

During the act of reading engaging fiction, we can lose all sense of time. By the final chapter of the right book, we feel changed in our own lives, even if what we’ve read is entirely made up.

Research says that’s because while you’re engaged in fiction—unlike nonfiction—you’re given a safe arena to experience emotions without the need for self-protection. Since the events you’re reading about do not follow you into your own life, you can feel strong emotions freely.

[…]

The key metric the researchers used is “emotionally transported,” or how deeply connected we are to the story. Previous research has shown that when we read stories about people experiencing specific emotions or events it triggers activity in our brains as if we were right there in the thick of the action.

New study by Dutch researchers confirms previous theories that reading fiction makes you a better person by expanding your capacity for empathy.

Also see how storytelling makes us human.

(via explore-blog)

I would be interested in seeing a similar study done with other narrative media. Graphic novels, manga, and comic books, seem to follow the description of an empathic work that does not follow your life and allows you to experience the emotions of others.“ And it is still a reading experience. But I feel like taking it further into television and movies might be bordering on poor scholarship. By the same token, what of short stories? Short short stories? Flash fiction? Fan fiction drabbles? (For the purposes of fiction prose, a fan fiction that is 200k words would, I assume, be no different than original fiction of the same sort…)

I would be really interested to see this kind of work replicated with video games - particularly video games of different levels of linearity and plot. Does having your choices impacting the story change the level of empathy or immersion? In which direction? Certainly even a running around and chasing butterflies in skyrim or building houses in the Sims can make us "lose all sense of time,” but what of the claim of empathy?

I feel like the study almost demands to be done with different types of games, what with the claims out there in the news that video games cause the opposite of empathetic growth.

I just worry about researchers outside of the gaming community lumping something relatively freeform, or prized for its freeform play with a more story and character driven game.

I suppose I am similarly curious if the study found the increase in empathy for fiction to be true regardless of the material. Does Lolita and American Psycho produce the same increased empathic skills as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or even something more mainstream like Harry Potter?

If we are going to apply something designed for precision like the scientific method to something as vague and hand-wavy as “fiction” and “empathy” then we might as well go all the way, no?

newsweek:
“ On March 28, 2011, a man who calls himself Kurt J. Mac loaded a new game of Minecraft. As the landscape filled in around his character, Mac surveyed the blocky, pixellated trees, the cloud-draped, mountains, and the waddling sheep. Then...

newsweek:

On March 28, 2011, a man who calls himself Kurt J. Mac loaded a new game of Minecraft. As the landscape filled in around his character, Mac surveyed the blocky, pixellated trees, the cloud-draped, mountains, and the waddling sheep. Then he started walking. His goal for the day was simple: to reach the end of the universe. Nearly three years later, Mac, who is now thirty-one, is still walking. He has trekked more than seven hundred virtual kilometres in a hundred and eighty hours.

At his current pace, Mac will not reach the edge of the world, which is now nearly twelve thousand kilometres away, for another twenty-two years. In the four years since its initial release, Minecraft has become a phenomenon that is played by more than forty million people around the world, on computers, smartphones, and video-game consoles.

It is primarily a game about human expression: a giant, Lego-style construction set in which every object can be broken down into its constituent elements and rebuilt in the shape of a house, an airship, a skyscraper, or whatever else a player can create.

(via A Journey to the End of the World (of Minecraft) : The New Yorker)

yourfavisneuroatypical:
“[image of a man in a green button up shirt standing in an old abandoned building. the wall in front of him is torn apart to create a big gap. on this image is a title reading “Positive Representation for Neuroatypical...

yourfavisneuroatypical:

[image of a man in a green button up shirt standing in an old abandoned building.  the wall in front of him is torn apart to create a big gap.  on this image is a title reading “Positive Representation for Neuroatypical People”]

Silent Hill

While this blog is primarily about fan interpretations of characters as neuroatypical, I thought it would also be good to share examples of canonical representation for neuroatypical people. Silent Hill is a series of survival horror games which are well known for how frightening they are: but what many don’t know is that this series also represents neuroatypical people in a very good way.

Most horror stories show asylums as creepy places with those weird dangerous “insane” people out to get you - but in Silent Hill, it is the doctors, nurses, and institutions which are evil.  The patients are almost always seen positively, and if they aren’t it isn’t because of their illness.  Stanley Coleman, for instance, is a patient who is portrayed negatively because he stalks and terrifies women.

In every instance in which this series includes a hospital, the game touches on the abuses and violence neuroatypical suffer.  Silent Hill is all about justice - and these games heavily imply that the town punishes or has punished ableist, abusive neurotypicals.  

Brookhaven Hospital is a powerful example when you examine the notes left by both doctors and patients.  Patient notes are sympathetic, frightened, upset, fearful.  Doctor’s notes are abusive, dismissive, and violent.  These levels frame the stories in ways that look kindly upon neuroatypical people, and condemn abusive doctors and nurses violently.

This culminates in Silent Hill: Downpour, where the game moves from oblique subtle references to all out in your face condemnation.  St. Maria’s Monastery is a place where neuroatypical children were left by their parents to be “fixed”.  Notes in the level show how violently evil the doctors were, and how much the children suffered.  The level includes ghostly children crying about medicine that makes them feel bad, and hospital beds shaking as you hear a child scream.  One note literally has a doctor say that it is time to give an autistic child (who she calls horrific things) a lobotomy because he annoyed her.

This game also includes Araidne Johnson, and the story of how her horrible mother murdered her because she was autistic and was “tired of caring for her”.  This revelation is shocking and framed as being just as horrific as it really is - and given the town, it’s likely Mrs. Johnson never made it out alive.  Some of the monsters are screaming women who latch onto the main character’s back and weigh him down.  Given other themes of the story, this woman can be seen as relating to abusive mothers, perhaps even Mrs. Johnson.

These are not happy games.  They are violent and horrifying, but what is good about them, is they are true.  They show the reality of how these institutions work, of how bigoted doctors and nurses treat neuroatypical people, what neuroatypical people suffer, how they are abused and killed for being who they are.  It is highly upsetting and triggering - but also very refreshing to see such a candid representation of what is a very real problem in many places the world over.