#empathy games

11 – 14 Days – Week One

More empathy games! Yay! @rocketorca and @idiotfromindiana don the roles of two people who suffer from migraines and play 14 Days by Hannah Shaffer. 

In this episode, Olivia and Ash navigate 1 week juggling aspects of their lives knowing that a debilitating migraine may occur at any time.

I love Leela. She is one of my favorite all-time companions in the series and I love all the Big Finish stories she has done, but there was something particularly great about this one and I think its because it was a Doctor light story. It opens with a heartbreaking monologue that makes you worry this is Leela’s swan song even though it doesn’t make canonical sense, thanks Louise. But still, that’s a kudos to her acting and the story.

The Doctor and Leela arrive on a planet after the Doctor tells Leela of a time where he could not help and just watched as a planet and all his people died. This surprises Leela, but she ponders it as the two begin to investigate it and I think sticks with her through the story. They soon get attacked and while Leela more easily recovers, the Doctor falls into a self-induced coma turning his skin to ice and his hair white. While waiting for him to get better, Leela learns that this planet that gives people anything they want and has eliminated war also has a competition to eliminate the rodent vermin that flood the under-city. Co-Ordinator Angell pleads with Leela to be his champion because he saw how she fended off the first rodent, but she doesn’t care to. At least not until the orderly she bonds with while waiting for the Doctor explains it’s a great honor and wants to train to be a hunter. So they both go and after being selected for the games in a weird psychological transformation, they begin the hunt.

During it though, Leela’s instincts which never fail her, shine through because she realizes that this weird psychological link she’s formed with one of the rodents is more than that. It even has her face and can talk. And because it wants to die, Leela doesn’t kill it because that’s not how any civilized warrior should hunt. She then tries to help her friend who too has found her rodent, but can’t get through to her how wrong it is. Right as Leela gets disqualified from the games, the whole city begins falling apart and the rodents break out of the under-city and begin attacking the residents. Pretty quick, Leela and the Co-Ordinator find out it was the Doctors doing coming out of his consciousness (which I don’t think really was an accident, Doctor) and the three plus rodent travel to the heart of the city where they learn the chilling truth about how this planet sustains peace. It’s a triumph of a story for Leela’s character and smarts she does have without the Doctor and it is was a pleasure to listen to even though at times it was heavy storytelling.

Martin Sahlin swung by to spin a yarn about Unravel game!

Coldwood Creative Director Martin Sahlin swung by to spin a yarn about Unravel game, our fave bit of red fluff being afrayed of the epic tale ahead of him and more!

Listen on Fresh Out of Tokens // Download the MP3

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Even worse, the idea that a work of art is supposed to fit in the same category as folding beds or hovercars or TV dinners, just another handy gadget to make life easier. It’s not. It’s supposed to your life hecka harder. To expect anything else is an oversimplification of empathy.

And yet, despite this, the battle cry of “empathy games” is so often used by people who feel that they need to use them to legitimize videogames. And don’t get me wrong, I understand that a lot of us want the games we make, our work, to change the world. That’s good! That’s awesome! But the way we talk about their ultimate value can be so disgustingly pragmatic and soulless sometimes, a lot of the time, most of the time.

I think the worst part is of all is that, as a society, our relationship with technology is so harshly split between extreme utpoianism and extreme technophobia (and let me remind you that videogames are still seen by this society as technology first) that I can’t even blame these people for being so willing to “martyr” themselves “on the altar of games,” as Anna Anthropy put it. Sometimes it really does feel like the only way out of our own ugly reputation.

And so we have the guy working on Microsoft’s VR hardware calling it an “empathy machine.”

@feministgamingmatters has a new review up at +10 discussing the recently released indie game, That Dragon, Cancer.