Empathy and Identity in Digital Games: Towards a New Theory of Transformative Play

This paper looks at the concept of transformation in digital games and posits it as a core pleasure of digital games that can be positioned within a new discourse of “transformative play”. The poetics of transformation are uniquely suited to particular forms of narrative play, and the power of transformative play has significant implications for the design of persuasive games. Transformative play supports a process of empathic identification with a new point-of-view or lived experience, which impacts how we understand games as persuasive cultural artifacts. We situate our argument at the intersection of two bodies of theory and practice. The first is method acting, which is perhaps best known for its capacity to profoundly transform an actor into his or her character. The second is figured worlds theory, which considers the dynamics through which both agency and identity are constituted within social and technological imaginaries. We then use these new theoretical perspectives to analyze examples from recent digital games that we see as producing the types of identification and empathy that arise from the pleasures of transformative play. We conclude with a set of themes for understanding and deploying transformative play within digital games.