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ABSTRACT
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.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Chiao-I Tseng
Dr. Chiao-I Tseng is a Senior Researcher at the Faculty of Linguistics and Literary Sciences at the University of Bremen. She has been developing theoretical methods for multimodal and transmedia discourse analysis, such as frameworks for analysing cohesion, event types, narrative space in narratives across audiovisual, graphic and digital media. Her publications include a monograph Cohesion in Film (2013, Palgrave MacMillan) and several international peer-reviewed papers on empirical issues such as narrative comprehension process, genre, authorship, narrative complexities, narrative persuasion. She is currently working on research projects on multimodal narrative strategies of online news videos and on children’s understanding of transmedia narrative (with Dr. Emilia Djonov).
Leandra Thiele
Leandra Thiele (M.A. in English-Speaking Cultures, University of Bremen, 2022/B.A. in English-Speaking Cultures and Linguistics, University of Bremen, 2018) is pursuing studies of multimodality. In her research, she focuses on multimodal linguistics with a special interest in discourse analysis of film and video games, amongst other multimodal artefacts. Apart from her research, she currently works as program coordinator for the Durden Dickinson academic exchange program at the University of Bremen.