For the heritage and experience design sectors of the Creative Economy, empathy is a holy chalice – the means of directing an audience to experience what they believe (and what you want them to believe) a character or protagonist is herself experiencing at a given moment: a means to build emotional intensity or deliver pro-social ends. There is, however, little agreement either on the nature of empathy, or on its value in the realm of moral decision making. Empathy is a dark horse. What might an ethics of empathy look like for interactive storytelling?

As part of the AHRC-funded project Heritage Empath, I conducted research into different disciplinary perspectives on empathy and how they suggest guidelines for a new model, and ethics, of interactive storytelling. Working with perspectives on empathy from developmental psychology, phenomenology, neuroscience, and the social and political sciences, this work aimed to shift a common discourse in the Creative Industries from a focus on “what is empathy and how do you trigger it in others?” to “what is the experience we want to share, what is its motivation, and how might it be meaningfully enabled together?” Tentative guidelines were developed for creative practitioners, elaborating on a multi-disciplinary theory of empathy, its consequences for audience participants and narrative ‘target groups’, the role of quality in characterisations, agency in a ‘shared space’ between audience and characters, and the impact of cross-modal (mind-body) operations and experiential flow. This informed the development of a new work by Zodwa Nyoni called “Of Home and Each Other” and a conference on the possibilities of historical empathy “Feeling the Past“.