Purpose As digital media reshapes storytelling, pedagogical opportunities emerge for empathic engagement through videogames. The term ludonarrative highlights videogames that evocatively intertwine story and gameplay. As videogame use both inside and outside of school increases, so does young people’s potential for empathic experiences with playing ludonarratives. This paper aims to conceptually explore such possibilities. Design/methodology/approach The term ludonarrative empathy is introduced, which expresses how story and gameplay work together, stemming from sociocultural, postdigital and pedagogical theories. A novel analytical tool, Ludonarrative Empathy Analytical Framework (LEAF), is outlined for analyzing how videogames can be used in teaching and learning that engages empathy and then applied to three commercial videogames. Findings The analysis of the three videogames using LEAF reveals how gameplay and narrative elements of videogames offer playful and meaningful experiences for student empathy. This is typified through games’ ability to mediate player agency in addition to multimodal and semiotic means of communication. Originality/value While empathy through literature has been widely studied, less is known about the effect of videogames on empathic engagement within classroom contexts. There is a gap in this field of understanding their potential affordances for experiencing empathy through textual study in the subject of English; this paper therefore invites further empirical research.
Gerard Altura (2026) studied this question.