Podcast 49: Empathy

[Music] Hey everybody, welcome to the Psychology of Games Podcast. It's me, your host, Jamie Madigan. In every episode of this podcast, I enlist the help of an expert on the Psychology video games to help me answer questions about the intersection of psychology and video games. So we try to answer questions about why gamers do what they do when they play games, why are games designed so often the way that they are, why are games marketed and sold as a way that they are. So you can also find out more about these topics at psychologyofgames.com. You can also find out how to subscribe to the podcast there. Otherwise you just search for it in your favorite podcast app and you should be able to find it, Psychology of Games. You can also go to patreon.com/pog to find out how to support me more directly there. [Music] So have you ever played a game that affected your emotional state? [Music] Specifically one that changed it in a way so that you felt that you understood what emotions another character or another player felt in that moment or in a way that made you feel like you knew what it was like to be in their head or to be them. Empathy, simply defined as the ability to understand and share what other people are feeling, is a basic human skill. It allows us to make sense of what other people are doing, predict what they will do and how we should react to them, and to form social bonds. It's also a standard tool on the workbench of anyone hard at work creating a narrative with characters that they want us to care about. Of course this includes video games. It often helps to sell the narratives or make a big impact on players if the game designers and writers can make players experience the emotions of their characters and what they're supposedly feeling. We get involved, we care, we take things seriously, and we form relationships with those fictional characters. And the hope goes we can start to think about and open ourselves up to conversations about injustice, unfairness, and things that should be better but aren't. Well, ideally. Empathy is a tool, and like any tool, it can be used for good or ill effect. Sometimes though, game designers and writers swing it like a mallet when a more delicate touch is really needed. Sometimes they mistake shock and making players uncomfortable with experiencing empathy. Sometimes they oversimplify and expect too much of what empathy can really do, given the complexities of our lives and our experiences and our attitudes. Not to mention reality. Empathy, I'm told by people who know better than I, is an important tool and can lead to meaningful and powerful experiences. But it has to be done right. These are some of the topics that my guest expert and I will discuss on this episode of the Psychology of Games podcast. Alright, everyone, congratulations. You've once again reached the interview portion of a podcast. My special guest expert this episode is Kelly Dunlap, SID. She's the director of Mental Health Research and Design at I Thrive Games, which is a nonprofit organization that works to benefit teens and foster mental wellness through game development and education. And in that role, Kelly combines her interests and passions for games, psychology, and research. She's passionate about the intersection of video games and mental health and leverages, her doctorate in clinical psychology, and masters in game design to provide and educate in those areas. So Kelly, welcome to the show. Hi, Jimmy. Thanks for having me. It's awesome to have you on. I know that we've kind of run in some of the same circles and we chat and like our super secret discord server and. Well, it's not super secret anymore. No, true. Sorry, I let that out of that. I'll fix that in post. I'll take that out. But I was glad to have you on the show and really wanted to talk to you about some of the presentations and research and talks that you've been doing around. Like empathy in video games, because that's a topic that I get asked about a lot. So, you know, like a journalist or a student working on a paper, will often reach out and say like, you know, can games create empathy? What is empathy? What is empathy? What is empathy's role in the game designers toolbox and so forth. And I never really feel like I had a great answer for them, but from what I've seen, you do. So we'll get into that. But first I want to talk a little bit more about kind of what you do and how you got into this role. So tell us some more about I Thrive games. Like what is that organization? What's its mission? And what do you do there? So I Thrive is a nonprofit and we are focused on helping teams develop with mental awareness, mental wellness through social and emotional learning. And we use games as the platform for teaching that oftentimes when we talk about social emotional learning as like curriculum, it's a lot of, oh fluffy bunnies and feelings and stuff that can be hard to get teams to engage with are pretty much anyone really. And so we use games is kind of the hook of like let's look at games and what they teach us. So things like collaboration, communication, those kinds of skills that we want to foster in in social emotional learning, they're very, they're very prevalent and relevant in games. And so that's just kind of a way that we mush those two things together to make it happen. Cool. So what was the path that led you there and to the other things that you're doing right now? Like what's your, what's your educational background and how did you end up there? Okay, so my origin story. So I initially went to college to study Russian language and culture. But as you do, as you do, duh, pedestal. And eventually I switched into psychology and realized that you can't do anything with a B.A. in psychology. So also accurate. Yes, it's the hard truth there. But I did my undergraduate capstone on video games and mental health because back in my day, the only research that was available on games and mental health. It was all the Craig Anderson Bushman stuff about how games are terrible and they're maybe turning people into, yeah, like psychopaths. And I was a huge and still am gamer in college like I would, I, hi mom, I would, you know, wake up at like 3 p.m. Go to my classes, get back from classes is like 8 p.m. Game all night until about 8 a.m. when the cafeteria would open. Go get my food and then sleep again to like about 3 p.m. So I logged, I looked some serious hours and it was this really amazing bonding experience. I literally met my current husband because we played video games together in the dorms. Awesome. So you're one of those couples that you have that through games. Nice. Yeah, my, my halo symbol is literally sewn into my wedding dress and I'm super proud of that. Cool. And so then, you know, you go to grad school because if you want to do anything psychology, you have to go to grad school. And so I continue my, my research in terms of mental health and games, mostly just like making it happen. You want me to write about Freud here? Let me talk about Freud and halo or you want me to talk about CBT. Let me frame it in terms of like Mario and my professors all thought I was eccentric. We'll say that. But I did the thing. I graduated. I did my dissertation on mental health and the interactions with video games. And then I mentioned it a little bit at the, the before we started recording in our secrets, our super secret talk session at the beginning. That's right. All the secrets coming out right. I had a really terrible experience while I was on internship. So for anybody who might not be familiar, internship for a site is basically like the equivalent of a medical residency. So I worked full time in an outpatient clinic for a year. And it was a, it wasn't the clients that made a terrible experience. It was the supervisor and the organization around it. That's a bummer. So I pretty much flipped the bird's psychology when I graduated. Like, hey, I've got my doctor in clinical psych now piece out. And four months later, I went into a master's program for game design where I got to use those same skills and knowledge to work on games, understand games, make games. And then after graduating from there, because apparently I really love school. I stumbled completely on accident into a authorized radar and have been working their sense. Cool. So is this a path that you would recommend to young impressionable college students or even high school students who think I like psychology, I like video games. I want to, I want to do something that involves both of those things. Absolutely not. I do not follow my example. So it's more like the more a circuitous path that you might want to take shortcuts through. I mean, the journey is important and it definitely has informed my perspective and how I go about both mental health and games. But the debt, I think that's the main thing is that the student debt incurred along the way is pretty brutal. Multiple degrees. Yeah. Yeah. But the good news is that since I graduated, especially back from undergrad, there are actually opportunities out there now to study psychology and games directly. Like you don't, you don't have to go get separate degrees now. They're actually fields of study that bring them together already. So, you know, I can be jealous, but there are, there are easier ways to go about it than what I did. Yeah. And it's interesting to see like both somebody with both the psychology degree and a game design. Yeah, I'm a unicorn and I'm full with that. So what are the kinds of things have you been up to besides I thrive? I thrive. What do you do in your voluminous spare time? I don't know what that is. I try to stay engaged as much as possible. So, you know, writing book chapters for people, I call them the nerd herd, a bunch of psychology and geek people in our super secret discord server. I'm familiar with some of them, yeah. The collection that I've curated on Twitter and whatnot of people who are interested in the intersection of games and mental health in some way. So working to support that advocacy work in that area, speaking as much as possible, at events like PAX East, I was just at Games for Change, I was at GDC, went to PAX, I think I mentioned PAX East, I might have you repeating myself, there's a lot of them. And when I'm not doing that, I have a almost three-year-old child who takes up a lot of my time. Yeah, that's a whole project and a whole job and in of itself. Several, several jobs. Yeah. And then along the way at some point, I want to write a book, at some point I want to finish the game that I started making and yeah, just trying to do and have it all. So I'm kind of empathizing with you on this, which is, it makes a good segue. A few, to talk about empathy in games. And I think empathy is one of those terms that actually comes up a lot on this podcast. This happens where it's a term that people think they know what it means, but it may have a different meaning in sort of the casual everyday use versus somebody who's conducting research or thinking about empathy and putting on their social scientist hat and trying to figure it out. So what do psychologists mean when they talk about and when they study empathy? So empathy as a psychological construct is a biologically and psychologically based phenomenon that allows us to interact as a social species. To help one another, it moves us to try and take care of one another rather than like murdering one another, which evolutionarily you can see as being kind of an important thing. Sure. So there's a lot of different kinds of empathy. I think the last study I read, they identified like 15 different kinds. So very, very diverse, but in terms of like the important stuff to think about is cognitive empathy and effective or emotional empathy. And those are the two things that we talk about in psych mostly and mostly in games too. So it's kind of a nice overlap there. But cognitive empathy is our ability to think about somebody else's experience. So that's the walk a mile in their shoes and see the world through their eyes, which are all way overly simplistic. But it's that that mental ability to project yourself into the experience of somebody else and to understand what's going on and why they might be thinking or feeling what they're doing what they're thinking and feeling. Emotional empathy are the feels. This is the stuff that's a little bit more subconscious. If you want to go there, stuff that we don't really think about doing because it just kind of happens. So if you see somebody sad and you're hit with a pang of similar emotions, so sadness or grief or whatever they're experiencing, that's the emotional empathy side. That's the the thing that gives us the motivation to care and want to act because it's uncomfortable for us and we're trying to decrease that discomfort. And ideally in a perfect world, you would have these two things integrated and working together because if you're all cognitive empathy and zero emotional empathy, you're basically Hannibal Lecter where you you understand what everybody's going through and you know how to manipulate it, but you don't care. Yeah, use it to your advantage. Yeah. Anything else. And if you're all emotional empathy, then you're just like a weepy mess and you have no idea why. So ideally they work together to make the dream work. Cool. So yeah, it sounds like the emotional empathy is picking up on or soaking up the emotions of those around you or the mental mental states, at least emotionally speaking of those around you and cognitive empathy is sort of this more like I understand why you feel this way or I understand I can recognize what you're feeling. Yeah, exactly. Okay. So this kind of makes me think of like emotional intelligence to a degree. It seems like there's a little bit of an overlap in those concepts where emotional intelligence involves a bunch of stuff, but part of it is like being able to interact with a person and understand sort of what's going on emotionally with them and mentally with them based on cues that you pick up from your interactions and observations. Oh, yeah. I mean, that's an entirely entirely different intelligence and skill set that we we don't value and I wish we did. Yeah. So what do game designers do with empathy and how do they typically go about trying to get people to experience empathy or maybe I should I should back up and say why would they want to do that? So like why would game designers want to have their players experience empathy either for other players or for characters in the game. So there's a lot of different answers to that and I will I will try my best to be succinct. Okay. So one is that their game designers need to practice empathy for their players because when you're making a game, you are ultimately thinking about the experience that your player is having. And so empathy in that regard is really useful to creating something that people are actually going to want to engage with. So that's that's a very more dev side of things. Whereas in terms of you know, why would somebody want to make a game that gives you the feels or exposes someone to an experience they probably otherwise wouldn't be exposed to. And it stems from this idea that games are unique medium for conveying human stories. So you know, we have film, we have books, we have television, we have all these ancient and relatively modern art forms, but games are unique in that they require active engagement from from the user from the player. You know, you don't you don't play Shindler's list. You watch it and you passively experience what's going on and you may have a reaction. But in games, it's the only form where we say I do and we take ownership of the action. So it's you know, I did this thing as opposed to that character did that thing. So there's an internalization process that goes on that makes games a really good fit for working on things related to empathy. And so games out there that are specifically, you know, quote unquote empathy games or games that are trying to evoke empathic responses or behaviors from players. The idea is that those are those are social impact games. They can help change the world. You know, that kind of mentality of if you if you will just understood what the Syrian refugees were going through or if they could just, you know, see the world through someone else's eyes, we could change the world, which is a very lofty and admirable goal falls short in a lot of ways. But that's one motivation for making them is to try and make the world a better place. So give me a few examples. It seemed like you just made a reference to is it bearing me my love? Yes. The game about the Syrian refugees. But like what are some other examples of these kinds of games that you're talking about to give people a reference? Well, if you want one, then I'll make you ball forever is a game. It's a game called Hush, which is basically you are playing as a mother whose baby is crying, but you have to get the baby to be quiet because militants are coming through. And if they hear the baby, they'll come and kill you both. Yikes. As a, you know, relatively recent mother, that game really, not for me. I saw that episode of Mash where the thing or whoever it was thought it was a chicken. And so, yeah, that just watching that episode kind of messed me up so I can imagine. Yeah. So there's that, which is, you know, on one end, then you have games like, you know, a normal lost phone or what remains of Edith Finch or I think another good one. That dragon cancer is probably one of the most famous ones. I remember that, yeah. Which is all about those stories in particular are about expressing a really difficult event in someone's life, like doing the storytelling about something that's emotional and upsetting and very vulnerable and raw. So that players can connect to it and the ones that I've seen it do it the best are ones where they're connecting with the emotional experience, rather than the specific content. So set another way. All humans, yeah, all humans experience grief and loss. At some point we're all going to lose someone we love. We all know what it feels like to be excluded. We all know what it feels like to be scared. We may not all be Syrian refugees, for example, but we do, we can connect with the feeling of being displaced or unwanted or afraid. And so connecting to those universal human emotions tends to have the most impact as opposed to, like, here's a very specific example of one person's experience. Okay. So I see you're kind of making a case for, if I'm a game designer, I want to use empathy or I want to create empathy in my players because it's the kind of like artistic statement that I want. Or it's just not even using that word. It's just the experience that I want the players to have, which seems like a good goal in and of itself, right? But are there other sort of outcomes of players experiencing empathy? Like do they tend to get engaged with games more? They tend to enjoy them more or is there anything else that it sort of comes out of that experience? So this year was the 21st year that games for Change was held, which is a festival in New York City all about games that are social impact and to change the world. And I bring that up because if these kinds of games were actually moving people to change their behaviors, we'd be seeing a change in the world. And I, we're seeing a change, but I don't think it's for the better and not the way that they want to go. I don't remember how I got on that tangent. Get you a very good question, and I just kind of linked on it. Yeah, I mean, the question, and I think that sort of addresses it, or at least one possible answer to it, but it was like, what are the outcomes of empathy? So there is that there's also some really significant significant, what's the word I'm looking for? Ethical issues, I just presented on this at Games for Change last month about when you're designing for really powerful emotional experiences, that's okay, games have every right to explore that space. But if you wanna play in the psychological sandbox, you need to come prepared and observe the same kind of boundaries and rules that professionals in that space do. You know, you would expect a psychologist working with somebody around topics around trauma and grief to have training and ethical guidelines around how to deal with those really powerful emotions. And unfortunately, sometimes game designers throw stuff out there into the world and they don't think about the actual potential negative harmful impact that it could have. The best example that I have happened to me, I was at Games for Change last year and they had a VR exhibit all set up. And I'm like, walking through, you're looking at the VR games and someone asked me, do you wanna play? Absolutely, I wanna play more VR games. - It's a trick, don't fall for it. - I mean, yeah, that's kind of what happened is that I had no idea what I was getting into. I had no clue. The only other VR game that I'd seen was called Tree where you put on the goggles, it looks like you're in a tree forest and you play as a tree. Like you stand there and they blow air on you and they scorch you with mistors and which was really cool. It was actually really, really cool and powerful. So I'm just sure I'll do the thing. And within the first two minutes of this experience, you're in the perspective of a small child watching your parents have a domestic violent encounter. - Oh yeah. - Yeah, no. - That's something a lot of people have probably experienced and been traumatized by. - Yeah. - And so I, one, considering it's in this public space and two, it's a professional conference, I feel a situational demand to sit through the entire thing. Because I don't want to have to explain why I took the headset off after only two minutes. And so I sat through the whole thing and it ended up being about how a woman became a Nazi and then got de-nautified. And it was supposed to be this powerful moving thing about how to reach the alt-right or something like that. And but it was completely lost on me because I was so fixated on, did they really just do that? Did they do that without a content warning? Oh my gosh, the ethical ramifications for this. So, I don't know. And I think one of the most important things that was really pivotal for me is when I took the headset off after it was over and the guy came over and it's like, "So, what do you think?" And I said, "Well, I thought it was really upsetting that there was that scene in the beginning and I wish somebody had told me that that was gonna go on and his response at Kid You Not was, yeah, a lot of people find it really intense. Isn't that great? - Yeah. - So, - Mission accomplished from his point of view. - Yeah. - So, that's a long-winded explanation about the ethics of using empathy, the vulnerability of empathic overload of, you know, if you're exposing someone, if you're exposing someone to something that could be traumatic and there seems to be an assumption in the game space that trauma equals empathy. And so, I really wish we could get past that. - So, what's the difference? Or why did those two things not equate? - Well, I mean, trauma is not a prerequisite for empathy. Like in our magic book of psychology, at no point does it say that you must be traumatized to experience empathy, especially considering that empathy is pretty much the definition is the exact opposite. It's the ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes without having to experience what they're dealing with. That's the definition of empathy. And so, this idea that you just need to go through the exact same horrific traumatic experience as someone else. It just shows a lack of understanding of what they're trying to do and a lack of consultation with people like mental health professionals who might tell them not to do that. - Yeah, so it's not that you're experiencing or understanding what they're experiencing. It's that you're experiencing your own experience that just happens to be similar to theirs. - Yeah, and I always like to liken it to that old Sarah McLaughlin commercial for the ASPCA. - Oh my God, now you've made me sad. - I know, right? That's the perfect example of empathic overload. Of like, no one, everybody turns the channel. People turn away from that because it's too painful. And you're not worried about the pain of the dogs, you're worried about the pain that you have. And now I am sad too. So let's talk about something happy. - Yeah, let's go find a friend's rerun or something else to watch. Yep. - Yes, please. - So, along the lines of ethics, well, what other kind of pitfalls do you think there are to trying to create empathy in players and what can game designers do to avoid those or minimize them? - So kind of at the opposite end of the spectrum is a pitfall of thinking that an empathy game could be this magical thing that solves all these problems. And what the research has found over and over and over again is that the most important aspect, especially for children in adolescence, in shaping their development, their social emotional skills, their ability to thrive into adulthood, is having the physical human interaction as a core grounding piece. And a way to think about this is that you would never ask a kid to sit down and read all of war and peace and assume that they have mastered the content, that they understand the themes, and that they're going to take that material and integrate it into their lives. Spoiler alert, it doesn't happen because that's what my English teacher made me do. And all I remember from the book was that I had to read it. - Yeah. - And it's just like, games in that way are no different that if you sit somebody down and they play a game, that doesn't magically unto itself make anything happen. And so what I would hope that game designers working in this space would take into account is that what they're creating is a space that is common and providing a shared experience for people who are going to explore this particular topic. And that really, the work is not all on the game. That's just unreasonable. So what can you do in the game that sparks conversation? How can you encourage people who are maybe sharing this game in their classroom or what supports can you provide for parents to talk with their kids about whatever game they're playing, whether it's an empathy game like Edith Finch or even something like Fortnite. There's tons to learn about empathy by playing and watching Fortnite. And so I would like to see game developers do more with that, especially those who are looking to make an active, positive impact, 'cause it's not gonna happen without the actual human involved. - Cool, and so what kinds of content warnings do you think are particularly effective along those lines? - Having one. - Yeah. - Having one's a really good first step. If you are going to have a content warning again, something is better than nothing, but the more specific you can be about the content, the better. So for example, I think it was Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, they had the famous No Russian scene where you go into an airport and the player has the opportunity or the option to murder a bunch of-- - Kill civilians. - Yeah, kill civilians. I'm like trying to be very mindful of my word choices here, because content warning, we're talking about that. And but the pop-up that they get at the beginning basically says, there's content that you may find objectionable. What the heck does that even mean? There's no way to know. And even ones that will give content warnings like contains violence. Well, there's a lot of different kinds of violence. Are we talking about war-related violence? Are we talking about trauma? Are we talking about sexual-related violence? Because if you've experienced one, it doesn't mean that the other two are going to necessarily trigger you. But so yeah, the more information you can give to someone upfront, the more informed consent you can get back from them. So being as specific as possible and open as possible with the caveat of, if you're worried that some kind of trauma being told upfront will spoil your game or the surprise or the twist, then you're doing it wrong because trauma is not an Easter egg. So rethink what you're doing. - Yeah, I like that line. Trauma is not an Easter egg. Yeah, and I think in the presentation at games for change that you made, there was one thing about the Call of Duty warning that you did like though, because it said basically you won't be penalized if you skip this. Like no downside to skipping this, other than just missing this piece of content that you're choosing to miss. - So when we talk about doing research and ethical treatment of individuals and research settings, we always talk about how they have to know what they're getting into, they have to give you informed consent, and they have to be able to withdraw at any time without any penalty, and they have to know that. Because otherwise there can be a sense of coercion and they stay in even if they don't want to. And that's what we see happening with that particular warning screen with Call of Duty is that it's letting the player know, if you skip this, there's no penalty for withdraw. You're not going to be penalized in any way. Because if there was an achievement during that section, or if you were required to kill civilians in order to get a specific gamer score, then there are people who are going to do it because they are oriented to be achievement hunters that maybe wouldn't want to do it. And so it takes that coercive piece out. And so I think that was great. - Yeah, or even worse, like it branches the storyline in a way that you would only see if you play through that level. - Yeah, your preferences, and of course your trauma should not preclude you from being able to experience a game. - I guess one of the things I'm still trying to get my head around is what are the tools that the game has to do? designers used to create empathy though. So if they've decided they want to do it and they've thought about how they want to do it, how do they actually go about doing it? Oh, it depends if it's, you know, the good kind or the bad kind. I feel like we've talked about the bad kind a little bit with basically shock value. So assuming they, assuming that's, yeah. Learn that lesson, I don't want to do that. I'm going to do something different. What would they end up doing? Or what do they often end up doing? I think the best way to answer that question is to talk about hell blade, which I know has been talked about a million times, but it's a a game held by Ninja Theory where it explores the experience of what it is like to have psychosis. And the reason I'm talking about it at this point is that while they were developing the game, not only did they talk with mental health professionals who were experts in, you know, addressing psychotic issues and treating individuals experiencing psychosis, but they also had person people come in who were in a recovery group and recovering from psychosis. And those people shared their experiences and gave feedback on the game. And you can see directly, there's a really great documentary that goes over this at the very beginning of the game if you want to watch it. It's also on YouTube, but they're talking about their experiences directly impacted the design of the game and the way that the cinema of the main character experiences the world and what she goes through. And that game is so much richer for having both the mental health expert and then the expert by lived experience there and present. And ultimately it goes back to the idea of nothing about us without us, which has been kind of a rallying cry around accessibility for persons with disabilities. Is, you know, you would hope that someone wouldn't make a game about depression without actually talking to people who have experienced depression. The same way, you wouldn't, you would hope that somebody wouldn't make a game about being Canadian. If they weren't Canadian themselves, they didn't know any Canadians and they didn't do any research around Canadians. I just let her, Kenny, I know exactly what being Canadians about. Okay, so that kind of mentality is probably a no. Yeah, like if, you know, who is this game supposed to be serving? And are you including that community in the development in some way? So whether that's play testing, whether that's asking questions, whether that's immersing yourself in that community and getting to know their wants and needs and experiences. And it is a lot of work, but you're ultimately going to have a better game as a result. Yeah, and the interesting thing about Hellblade, Seno Asakur-Faise, is that it doesn't seem like they set out to make a game to get players to empathize with a character who has, you know, these mental issues and who has these experiences. Like it didn't, I'm sure that was part of it, obviously, because they invested, you know, and took so much care to do that. But also, like, it's just a video game. Like where you go around and you explore and you have battles and you know, go through the world and so forth. So it's not necessarily the type where it's like, okay, I'm going to focus you, the player and filter you through, you know, this character and the whole point of the game is to sort of empathize with him or her and experience what they experience. Yeah, generally, I found that games that try to do it on the nose like that, they tend to get the title of edutainment and they tend to not be very good. There are exceptions, Oregon Trail is a fantastic example. I thoroughly enjoyed Number Crunchers as a kid, but there is something to be said that when you're dealing with really intense, overwhelming and often unpleasant emotions, a degree of abstraction or distance from the material can do wonders for someone's ability to perceive it, process it and understand it. So can empathy be abused or can it be to put another way, can it be used for ill effect? Oh yeah. Because I'm imagining using it as a recruiting, you know, using a game like that for recruiting material or getting to try to change people's minds, you know, to different viewpoints that we would probably find objectionable. You know, could you use a game to like indoctrinate somebody into fascism or the alt-right or get them to adopt, you know, viewpoints towards different groups of people? Yeah, if you make that sympathetic, you know, not all men, white fragility, male tears, look at this mean lady talking, she's obviously a feminist harpy poor woe is me. Yeah, you can absolutely leverage that. It's again, it's as an emotion, there's just a thing as a good or a bad emotion, it's what you do with it. And so you can absolutely get people to, you know, like sympathize with their oppressors. I think the, it's kind of a tired example, but it's still the best one out there. So I'm going to say it anyway, is there was a game called spent that came out a couple years ago. It was a game that was a branching narrative game that was supposed to model what it was like to be poor in America. So you start the game, you've got a thousand dollars to get through the month and things keep happening to you. Like do you take the bus or and be late to work or do you pay for a cab and like dig into your savings and I instantly failed when it asked, Hey, you know, your dog is sick. What do you do? I'm like, take it to the vet and I said, you lose a little tube. And so that's, they were trying to create empathy for people who are in poverty, but the actual result, they didn't empathy study on it, found it had the opposite effect because the game was structured as if you just make the right choices, you can get out of poverty. You can get out of this thing and it didn't really actually look at the system, like the political system that is making poverty happen in the first place. And so that's even a good intention to game that did wrong. Yeah, yeah. And I kind of had that question in the back of my mind. It was trying to look it out for a good place to fit it in. And this seems like one is that even if you make people empathize and sort of understand, you know, what's going on in the minds of these characters and be like, oh man, I really can empathize with people who are poor or somebody who's an African American, you know, in America today. Because I played this game and saw their experiences and had to make the choices that they made. Like that, that could be good, but it also doesn't really do anything about the real life systematic, you know, things that are causing them to have those experiences in the first place and have those difficulties. You know, like being poor for a lot of people is something that is done to you. It's not, it doesn't care what choices you make because you never have the options to break out of the systems that are stacked against you and and keep you from being able to just think and sort of by virtue of good choices and willpower not be poor anymore. Yeah, and that's the danger of empathy is that you feel like you did something. I thought about your experience and I felt what you felt. And so it's almost like well-meaning white lady syndrome of, you know, oh, I did it and I went and I saw this thing and I played this game and it's almost like it's almost voyeuristic or in terms of mental health, I always refer to it as mental health tourism. Like, oh, that's what it's like to have psychosis. Bye-bye now. And so you're not actually getting out at what the underpinning and what's going on. So do you want to talk about the extra credits episode that you co-rope? Oh my god. Yeah, so let me set that up. So, you know, kind of speaking about representation of mental illness and those related issues in games, you recently co-wrote an episode of extra credits. And for those who don't know, extra credits is a YouTube channel and they do amongst other things, but they started out doing these animated videos that are sort of like game design and the gaming industry and business of games and so forth. And they're great. I've been watching them for years and you had the opportunity to co-write an episode about mental health representation in games. You want to talk about that experience and what that episode was about? Oh my god. Like, it still feels so weird to hear because I too grew up on extra credits a bit and getting to write for it was just I still have a hard time processing that that actually even happened. But kind of I guess how it all came about is one of my co-workers, Heidi McDonald. She knows James Portnell, who obviously is of extra credits. And apparently they wanted to do a mental health episode for May of 2019 since May is mental health month. And so Heidi and I collaborated. I had the research and she helped like massage it into something that better flows. That's less academic and jargonian. So we all work together to create this thing. And I think one of the things that I'm most proud about that episode is that pretty much all the content in it is my original research. And it just it makes me deliriously happy that it's out there in the world and that hopefully it's connecting with people. And not only will they be more critical about evaluating how mental health is represented in games and how that reflects societal norms and what we expect and what we think is okay. But hopefully it'll help game designers too to think more critically about what they're making and what that does say about their values and reflect their own understanding of mental health or lack thereof. Yeah so some of the things you you criticize and talk about are like the old tropes around mentally ill people are violent and dangerous or mental hospitals are places of terror. Yeah and they're you know right up there with haunted houses and when you need to go to environment like what else did you did you talk about in that episode? So it was it was based on a paper I published in And connected learning summit 2018, I think, 2018. Probably something like that. And laying out that one, there is almost no research whatsoever on how mental health is represented in games. There's a ton out there. There's like 40 somewhat years of analyzing representations and television, even more in representing film and novels. But there, when I originally started my research, I could count on one hand the amount of sources that scholarly sources that had engaged in this topic at all. So it's definitely an area that needs a ton more research. And it's critically important because when we engage with media, we can learn a lot, especially about a topic that is taboo in other spaces. So the comparison I always like to make is how can I say that having bad representation of mental health in games leads to negative outcomes, but violent representation in games doesn't lead to violence. And the answer to that, actually, it's not because we're taught from the time that we are tiny, tiny babies that violence is bad. Hitting people is bad. You don't hurt one another. There are social laws around how we treat each other in social spaces and respecting spaces. And we all know that violence and aggression like that, those are bad things. They are socially unacceptable. But because we don't talk about mental health at all, and it's stigmatized so much that people don't even seek treatment and don't feel like they can ask questions, it is highly probable that someone's only experience with mental illness could come across in the media they consume, whether that's TV or games. And especially considering how popular games are, you know, more people are playing games and watching movies. So it's just so critical to address these issues out in the open. And I'm not saying that you could never have a crazy villain. I'm not saying that at all. I'm just saying that right now that's all that's out there. You're not going to take away my Joker. Yeah. That's a big one. When one of the articles I read, they did an analysis of Batman Arkham Asylum. And I always feel like that was cheating. Yeah. That's the low-hate, of course. It's like painting for gold at the jewelry store. I mean, come on. Yeah. Yeah. I've heard somewhere, so much respect to them. But yeah, ultimately this idea that 25% of games feature a mentally ill character or have one that is in the game at some point. And that number doesn't include things like settings. So in St. Asylums, it doesn't include paraphernalia like a straight jacket or using words like crazy or naming your characters a psycho. And so we're so inundated with mental health, imagery and language, and it is almost always in a very negative light. So either we need to do better in games, do better in society so that we're not as susceptible to whatever is going on in games or ideally both. And we just treat people like good human beings. Gee, that's radical. Yeah. I know. I know. I know. I know. Blowing minds here. I'm willing to try it. I'll let you know. I'll check in. Yeah. On down, however many billion left. Cool. So this is great stuff. And like you said, I think we could keep going forever. But I'll put a link to that episode of Extra Credits and other things in the blog post that's going to go with this episode of the podcast. So you can find that at psychologygames.com. Before we go, what have you been playing? Yes and no. So I recently finished Ashen, which is on the Xbox and I don't recommend it. It's like bad dark souls. And I hate saying anything negative because I know how much work goes into making a game. And they're the same creator to me to what remains of Edith Finch, which is amazing. Actually, let me double check that. I'm not sure that's true. But I'm pretty sure it's Anna Perna. Anyway, but that one, it was not an enjoyable experience. But I am currently playing a game called Full Metal Furies. Fantastic. It is on the Xbox. It might be on other platforms. I'm very dedicated to my Xbox, so I don't know. But it came out, I think at some point last year, it's currently on Game Pass. So if you have that, you don't even have to buy it. So I haven't bought it. I'm just playing it. Cool. And it is the most beautiful co-op game ever. My beautiful co-op, I mean, the co-op itself is perfect. If you pick up a health pack, it boosts everybody in the party. If you pick up a cool down, it boosts everybody in the party. It is everything I ever-- it's like castle crashes, if castle crashes was good. OK. So is it like a brawler or what kind of game is it? So it's a two and a half de-exploration adventure type of thing. But there is a lot of combat. So again, they're likening it to a castle crashes type of thing, with big set pieces at the end. But there's a lot of depth. There's a lot of teamwork. I can use one ability that pops and enemy up, and then my friend can take it down, and we get the bonus, like the more you work together, the bigger bonuses you get. And the writing is hysterical. And I'm so jealous of that narrative team that got to do that. And then the cherry on the top is because they're furries. All four playable characters are female, and they all identify as female presenting. But there's not a drop of pink or purple in sight. They actually look like, you know, enemy-styled warriors going into battle to save the world. And I'm super, super enjoying that. Cool. Yeah, I got it. Yeah, I've got the game pass. So I might check that out. I've been kind of had a dry spell on games. I've been working on other projects. I, as soon as I finish the book, I'm reading that I'm going to go back to games. And I've got several games on the game pass service that I'm going to check out. And that's not even including the PC version of Game Pass, that they start to roll out. Well, if you do play Full Metal, it is absolutely a much better experience if you're playing with someone else. And it has couch co-op and online co-op. Okay. And you can set up your own server. So if you want to play, hit me up. I'll happily play some more. I'll do that. I'll play, maybe I can talk my daughter, my older daughter into playing. She's kind of like stuff like that. Oh, perfect. Yeah. It'll be fine. Yeah. Cool. So if people wanted to find out more about you and the stuff that you do, where would they go on the internet to do that? The best place to find me is on Twitter. I pretty much live there. And my handle is @kellyanddanlap, which I'm sure will be in the show notes. Exactly. K-E-L-L-L-I, the letter N, and then my last name, D-U-N-L-A-P. Perfect. Yeah, I definitely put a link in that, but I'm sure many people are typing that into their web browser as we speak. Well, probably not as we speak. Yeah, I know that. I know that. I know that. But I appreciate it. Get out of the recording. What are you doing here? I didn't let you in. Very cool. Well, thanks so much for coming by and talking about this stuff. It's one of those things that's sort of been on my list of episodes to do for a while, and I'm really glad that you were able to come on and help me do it. Oh, I'm so delighted. As you can tell, I love to talk. So I am just thank you so much for having me on the show. Fantastic. Hey, thanks for listening to another episode of the Psychology of Games podcast. I hope you enjoyed it, and I hope you got something out of it. You want to learn more about Psychology and Video Games than, hey, you're in luck. You can go to my website at www.psychologyofgames.com, where you can frolic and engage in any number of wholesome activities. These include, but are not limited to, reading articles, subscribing to the podcast, supporting me on patreon.com/pog, following me on Twitter @@jmematigan, follow me on Facebook, checking out my book about Psychology and Video Games, which is for sale now, and pumping your fist wildly into the air and wants into the ground. So go do some of those things. In the meantime, I'm prepping the next episode, and I'll talk to you then.