Gaming for Sustainable Futures: Exploring the Role of Environmental Empathy in Worldmaking Interactions

It has been suggested that we currently experience a crisis of the imagination, which refers to the fact that we are entrenched in ways of thinking that render us unable to envision and embrace futures radically different from the present. Given the ongoing climate crisis, we are in dire need of a new, sustainable vision. Researchers have claimed that such futures can be coproduced by incorporating principles of worldmaking interactions in interactive media. In this article, we explore this idea specifically within the realm of video games, and further develop the concept of worldmaking interactions within this context by incorporating recent insights from research that suggest that environmental empathy is crucial for fostering sustainable interactions with the biosphere, and show how environmental empathy can help foster worldmaking interactions through game design. The empirical results reveal that players often exhibit empathetic responses toward in-game content that can be translated into actions and concerns related to real-world issues.