Reflecting on Current State and Future Research of Empathy Assessment and Development within the Game-Based Learning Community

This position paper argues that empathy research within the game-based learning (GBL) community has grown rapidly across many fields, but lacks a shared vocabulary, which risks confusion and weakens interdisciplinary collaboration. Empathy is linked to social-emotional learning frameworks such as CASEL's social awareness competencies, and it is invoked across design thinking, user experience research, virtual reality, affective computing, and artificial intelligence. The author notes that this spread has produced a fragmented set of definitions and measures, and calls on the GBL community to jointly clarify what empathy means, how it should be defined and measured, and what role it should play in educational games.

The paper traces two broad lines of definition in the psychology literature. One treats empathy as an umbrella construct with affective, cognitive, and behavioral components, while the other treats it as a feeling that may not always support prosocial action, distinguishing it from compassion. The author cites a count of 43 distinct definitions identified in earlier work, and a systematic review of empathy and games that found 18 definitions in use, many applied loosely or reshaped without grounding in psychology research. Empathy games are described as an emerging subdomain still in its infancy, with growing publication interest, including 61 papers in 2024 that mention both game-based learning and empathy on Google Scholar.

The paper reviews projects that pair sensing technologies with social-emotional goals, such as InsideOut, which visualized classroom emotions from physiological sensors, and EmotoTent, which projected children's emotional states as holograms to prompt discussion of prosocial behavior. It also discusses a circular iterative empathy development model for gamification, which aligns with a perception-action account of empathy, though the author observes that its educational effectiveness remains unclear. The paper concludes by proposing a systematic literature review, research on affective computing and mixed reality for biofeedback-supported learning, development of game design frameworks for empathy games, and AI-driven characters that model and respond to players' empathic behavior.