Making room for empathy in contemporary virtual reality cinema

ABSTRACT

This article seeks to redeem the idea that virtual reality (VR) might serve to foster empathy by rethinking both the notion of empathy and the ways contemporary VR films have attempted to generate it. Specifically, this paper considers two forms of embodiment—being and being with—in order to highlight some of the shortcomings of the ‘empathy machine’ discourse. In doing so, I also offer an alternative analogy: a tool for empathy, rather than a machine. Finally, an analysis of two key VR productions that invite users to be with characters—rather than putting users ‘in the shoes’ of a character—allows me to demonstrate how a more productive path towards empathy in VR might instead lay in experiences that create space—or ‘make room’—for the work of empathy to be undertaken by individuals who know and want to use VR as a tool, rather than as an end in itself.

KEYWORDS:

• Virtual reality
• empathy
• embodiment
• point of view
• care

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 I use ‘medium’ loosely here. VR is not yet a fully formed medium as are cinema, video games, theatre, and so on.

2 Roger Ebert has famously said the same thing of cinema, stating that ‘Of all the arts, movies are the most powerful aid to empathy, and good ones make us into better people.’ (Ebert 2003, XV)

3 In a recent article, Gal Raz has made a similar effort by focussing on the affordances of VR from a psychological perspective. See (Raz 2022)

4 https://www.randallokita.com/the-book-of-distance.

5 On the use of ‘incarceration’ as opposed to the usual ‘internment,’ see Teresa Watanabe’s recent article in the L.A. Times (Watanabe 2023).

6 Although she does not study The Book of Distance, Katherine Guinness’s ‘Negative Hauntology’ (2020) offers additional tools for interpreting a key moment in the latter half of the experience, which I dare not spoil here.

7 https://www.randallokita.com/the-book-of-distance.

8 This was said during a speech Roger Ebert gave on the topic of empathy, which delivered in 2005 at the dedication of his plaque outside the Chicago Theatre.

9 While I focus on cinema, others have addressed how different media deal with the issue of empathy, including in novels (Keen 2007; Hammond and Kim 2014) and video games (Pozo 2018; Ruberg 2020).

10 The latter is addressed specifically at films like Chris Milk’s own Clouds over Sidra (Gabo Arora and Barry Pousman 2015).

11 To address the need for proper distance in VR, Raz evokes Roger Silverstone to insist on the idea that, ‘the gap between the self and the other has to be acknowledged as a “necessary precondition for our capacity to care for the other,”’ as well as Amy Coplan’s definition of empathy, which stipulates the need for ‘maintaining a clear self-other differentiation.’ (Raz 2022, 4, 9) See also (Silverstone 2003, 479; Coplan 2011, 6–7)

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Fonds de Recherche du Québec-Société et Culture and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes on contributors

Philippe Bédard

Philippe Bédard, PhD, is a postdoctoral researcher currently working on the design of VR exhibits, specifically those which ask viewers to put themselves in the shoes of a character. Along with Alanna Thain and Carl Therrien, he is the co-editor of the forthcoming volume States of Immersion: Bodies, Media, Technology (AUP, 2024).