Actions and digital empathy in the interactive storytelling of serious games: a multimodal discourse approach

This paper proposes a multimodal discourse method for analysing empathy-related actions in the interactive narratives of serious games. It first reviews recent theories of socially impactful designs in serious games, particularly the debates about whether serious games should focus on actions of tackling social issues or on the player’s emotional engagement. This paper then sets out a multimodal discourse method of event action patterns, which bridges the analyses of actions and empathy-related perspective-taking. The multimodal discourse method that we propose in this paper establishes a fine-grained semantic web, systematically tracking the three core narrative design aspects: types of event actions, character developments and the player’s participatory roles. Through analysing the empathy game That Dragon, Cancer, this paper uncovers how interactive narratives have the potential to both achieving empathetic impacts and highlighting a system of actions related to the serious issue.