Creating an Empathy Driven Narrative in a Deeply Unempathetic Time

Writing is an interesting process. It’s a practice in which we’re forced to describe experiences, whether they live in our heads or stem from things we’ve lived through, using the abstract and deeply personal medium of language.

That means translating physical conditions, emotional states, and cognitive imbalances into something understandable to a broader audience. Much broader than the one we have when we’re thinking to ourselves — when we are our only audience.

That challenge is at the heart of what I’m trying to explore with Floppy/Write. The player is asked to communicate using broad tools for cataloging information: data they’ve gathered by interpreting a wide spectrum of social, human experiences. They’ll need to express what they’ve understood in a way that can be parsed by my personal network of systems.

(For the sake of this article, I’m going to ignore the very real limitation of me being the sole architect behind that network. I have a plan. Let’s save that for a future Devlog. Thanks in advance for your charitability.)

In practice, this means the player is constantly navigating the consequences of their expression. These consequences are not often punishments; rather, they define what avenues of exploration are available. The stories in Floppy/Write grow out of specific, character-defined, systemic limitations. These are problems the player is uniquely positioned to resolve by editing the public record through information spoofing and social programming.

Many characters will face a range of hardships that the player must interpret and eventually prioritize. My goal in writing these questlines is to make each one feel like it has a reason to be addressed, whether big or small. I think my guiding ethos for this game is: “Everyone has a reason, no one has excuses.” You might agree or disagree with those reasons, but I want the player to at least reach the point of acknowledging and respecting them as such.

The quest I’m currently writing centers on a character named Olivia. She’s a wealthy local politician facing a sudden health crisis. It’s invisible, at least physically. She holds a position the government has labeled “essential,” which disqualifies her from taking sick leave. Although her finances are currently stable, her role is at risk. Along with it comes the threat to her access to healthcare and her ability to heal post opperation. The player will have the opportunity, through observation and social engagement, to influence and potentially resolve her situation by manipulating the surrounding data.

This is just one story out of currently fifteen questlines that exist outside the main narrative. I want to explore the wide range of social and systemic barriers people face in contemporary life, especially under capital-driven, data-backed martial law. I’m not trying to present open-ended moral questions. Each story follows my own moral compass. What I do want is to emphasize the reasoning behind people's actions, and give the player space to engage with those reasons directly.

Empathy is a difficult cognitive association to inspire. Most of us, at some point, have run into people whose limitations in that realm make communication feel impossible. We try to share our experience, but we’re often met with defensiveness. Sometimes it stems from self-preservation under capitalism; other times, it grows from delusions built on the myth of meritocracy.

Writing and reading, however, offer a way to hold on to interpretation. It’s much harder to gaslight yourself than it is to gaslight someone else. In Floppy/Write, the player is the one making the logical connections. They are responsible for logging those implications in order to progress the story. Early interpretations become lasting artifacts. They turn into objects of thought that the player must contend with for the rest of that quest. That tension makes it far more difficult to ignore the cognitive dissonance required to invalidate another being’s (in this case, an NPC’s) experience. One thing I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is what Jerrett, Carter, and Oatley refer to as the “empathy spectrum," the idea that emotional responses to stories aren’t binary, but stretch across a range of engagement, from momentary pity to long-term identification. My hope is that by treating the player’s act of logging information as a form of authorship, I can extend their relationship with the story into that deeper territory. Once you’ve written something down, it becomes a sort of contract with yourself. And if that “contract” represents someone else’s pain, someone else’s need, then even the smallest act of in-game resistance takes on weight. It becomes a response to a moral prompt you were never able to dismiss as fiction.

There’s also something important to me about how Floppy/Write reframes the act of problem-solving. Instead of puzzles as abstractions or contrived mechanics, the player’s challenges are rooted in real systemic contexts: bureaucratic oversight, structural neglect, social classification. Like in DATA Agent or Façade, the data that drives outcomes is laced with human implication. I’m not interested in presenting code as neutral. The game’s systems are explicitly biased; toward empathy, toward mutual aid, toward redistribution of power. That bias is the point.

A lot of writing about empathy in games stops at “feeling what another feels.” But what I want is to make the responsibility of empathy visible. You don’t just receive someone’s story in Floppy/Write, you decide what to do with it. You categorize it, falsify it, link it to someone else’s struggle. You map magnitudes of harm, then trace your route through it. There’s no way to progress without making those judgments explicit. And the system doesn’t forget. Further Reading & Sources

Schrier, K., & Farber, M. (2023). A Systematic Literature Review of “Empathy” and “Games”. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/368898575

Jerrett, N., Carter, M., & Oatley, K. (2020). The Empathy Spectrum: Emotional Responses to Games and Narrative. PlayLab! https://www.tuni.fi/playlab/the-empathy-spectrum-emotional-responses-to-games-an...

Cerny Green, M., Kreminski, M., & Wardrip-Fruin, N. (2018). DATA Agent: A Generative Mystery Using Open Data. https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.02251

Mateas, M., & Stern, A. (2005). Façade. [Interactive drama video game]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fa%C3%A7ade_(video_game)

Ruberg, B. (2020). Empathy and Its Alternatives: Deconstructing the Rhetoric of “Empathy” in Video Games. https://ourglasslake.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Ruberg-Empathy-and-Its-Alter...