A Story About You

Feeling with Interactive Fiction Games

Sammendrag

The idea that reading fiction is central to our development of empathy, our ability to feel for and with others, is a common one both in literary criticism and in literature pedagogy. In the Norwegian school curriculum fiction is consistently positioned as a way of better understanding the perspectives and feelings of others, suggesting that, as cognitive critic Maria Nikolajeva writes, "[i]n plain words, reading indeed makes us better human beings" (2014, 228). But what does empathy really mean in this context? This video essay approaches this question through a textual genre that has a peculiar relationship to this term - small-scale, often text-based digital games that focus on capturing the creator's own experiences and that are sometimes, controversially, called empathy games, with the suggestion that these games give you a felt sense of an experience that might be outside the player's own. These games use text and game mechanics to evoke powerful feelings in the player - but do they actually make us feel with the game creator? Using text excerpts from the games and voiceover narration, A Story About You aims to play with the connection that we as readers and teachers of literature often make between reading and empathy.