April 11th — VR and Empathy

This week, we had to read the following articles Selling Empathy, and VR Makes People More Compassionate.

In the first article, the author seems a bit critical of using empathy as a cheap tactic to sell games and other media, and I kind of agree. I think emotions are something that is often exploited in advertising, which is kind of scummy. I don’t think that this is new, though, or specific to VR, but I think the nature of VR kind of turn this concept up to 11. The author is also critical of the idea of having non marginalized people experience things that they never would for entertainment, whereas marginalized people cannot “take off the headset” so to speak. This is true, and while I don’t think that this is a VR specific issue either, I think content creators have to keep this in mind, and be incredibly careful about the type of content that they’re producing.

The second article discussed how people who have gone through certain experiences in VR are more likely to express empathy towards others with similar experiences going forward. This fact makes sense, but I think it’s incredibly important. Using VR as an empathy education tool makes it extremely powerful in sharing the experiences of others. It can be used to show the experiences of marginalized people to those who would never have to go through these experiences, which would hopefully make people with privilege want to extend their help a bit more than they would otherwise. (It’s a little sad that that’s what’s needed, but it’s important regardless.) While I’m sure these experiences would not capture people’s real life experiences 1:1, I think it’s a good first step. And, as mentioned above, a lot of these experiences could get a bit messy and appropriative if developers and creators are not careful. Overall, I think that these experiences should be use to supplement other educational systems, and not be used completely independently as a tool of education.

I also watched the video referenced in the first article, “How VR Can Create The Ultimate Empathy Machine”.

I found the video pretty interesting, (and kind of funny). I could totally understand how a storyteller would want to look for new ways to tell stories using new and emerging technologies. Not only that, but VR really is the ultimate empathy machine, due to the fact that it is currently the closest a person can get to becoming another person and seeing through their eyes.

When it comes to empathy, it is the job of storytellers to figure out how to get their audience to empathize with their stories. VR, a medium that when used correctly allows for so much empathy, is a really good tool for storytelling in this way, and not a lot of people have used it that way (yet).

I really liked the quote “Talking about virtual reality is like dancing about architecture.” because I find it to be true. It’s hard to explain a lot of the appeal of VR through just words, and much of it has to be experienced. I think due to that fact, it’s a little bit tricky to use VR as a medium for storytelling just now, but as it gets more accessible I’m sure we’ll see some really creative and impactful stories using the medium.