Designing Game Narrative to Evoke Players’ Empathy

Abstract: The paper would focus on the game narrative and empathy, more specifically, the primary goal of this paper is to see how game narrative evokes players’ empathy and get some narrative design principles that can be used in future game design and research. To fulfill the research goal of the paper, I will analyze three role-playing games To the Moon(2011), A Bird Story(2014), and Finding Paradise(2017). They are all developed by a designer Kan Gao, and focus on storytelling, especially To the Moon, receiving praise for its narrative and was given the "Best Story" award by GameSpot(“To the Moon,” 2022). The result of the paper can complement the study on the intersection of game narrative and empathy, also it can supply some practical cases in the game field for Keen’s(2006) narrative empathy theory. And the study can help researchers to study deeper in this field, and provide more empathic narrative design strategies for game designers. And those devices about plot twists, flashbacks, camera angles, etc, may also apply to the literature and film creation for evoking the audience’s empathy.