Video games are the only medium in which empathy can be explored. This is because a game gives agency to a player unlike books and movies. This was demonstrated in class with “When Rivers Were Trails”. As player has to go through the plight of Native Americans and learn about what happened to them. A similar game that tries to have an empathetic impact on the player is “Specs Ops the Line”. For the first half of the game it is a painfully average third person cover shooter. It hits all the beats that a generic shooter would have to hit such as macho man shooting at Americans current enemies. There is really no thought in the actions that is being done. Like is done in so many shooters before it. However, it is slowly reviled the atrocities that were taken. In the vein of “The Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad and the movie “Apocalypse now”. Unlike those mediums the player had an active participation in what happened. Even if most action beats were forced, there were opportunities to refrain from acting as it was a game. It tries to explore morality with more than just a slider as is common with most games. It makes the player evaluate themselves and what they did in the course of the game. It also demonstrates that the player will do anything by listening to the authority. In the context of the game it is a man over the radio telling you what to do. As it is just a game it is possible to walk away and not complete it and the game even recommends that to the player. On death screens it makes fun of the player telling them it is just a game and that makes it okay to do what they are doing. Even though most people would find it morally repugnant.
Even more mainstream titles such as Battlefield one has tried to demonstrate that while it is a game there are real world consequences to what it is depicting. They do this by showing name of someone who died in World War 1 when the player dies.