Empathy with Computer Game Characters:

This paper discusses recent findings concerning the brain mechanisms underlying visuomotor, visuotactile, and visuo-affective mappings and their relevance to understanding how human players relate to computer game characters. In particular visuo-affective mappings, which are regarded as the foundation for the subjective, emo-tional elements of empathy, come into play especially during social interactions, when we transform visual in-formation about someone else’s emotional state into similar emotional dispositions of our own. Understanding these processes may provide basic preconditions for game character identification and empathy in three main cases discussed in this paper: (1) when the game character is controlled from a first-person perspective; (2) when the character is controlled from a third-person perspective; and (3) when the character is seen from a third-person perspective but not controlled by the player. Given that human cognition springs from neural processes ultimately subserving bioregulation, self-preservation, navigation in a subjective space, and social relationships, we argue that acknowledging this legacy- and perhaps even regarding it as a path through design space- can contribute to effective human-computer interface design.