Are we game enough to practise empathy?

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In mid-2021, I was invited to join a team of volunteers building ToBeYou.sg, an interactive-fiction game from Better.sg, a tech-for-good charity.

The game helps players build empathy by role-playing as someone unlike themselves and peeking into the hidden lives of fictional characters such as Nadia Rahim, Aman Singh, Ravi Kannaswamy and Zhihao Lim.

As a Singaporean of subcontinental heritage, I have lost count of the number of times I’m asked: “What are you?”, only to be told, “Cannot be lah, not so black what?” Indeed, an outing to a mosque or a lesson in a classroom about"those people" may inadvertently encourage"othering". With these tendencies also amplified by social media bubbles, empathising with the variegated lived experiences of other people isn’t something that comes easily or naturally.We often assume that stereotyping and “othering” is something that happens between people who belong to different identity groups.In developing the game, we realised that there sometimes lies an empathy gap within one's own community — for those who have different life circumstances or make different choices.

Indeed, in playing various ToBeYou characters who face different types of discrimination, we acutely feel the distress and discomfort that many people live with, just owing to their lived experiences not being widely acknowledged or validated. After ToBeYou was launched on July 21, 2021, Singapore’s Racial Harmony Day, we asked undergraduate students studying Serious Games for Health and their lecturer, Dr Bina Rai, to play-test the game and give us feedback.

 

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