Games often encourage players to feel empathy for characters or scenarios by design. However, the term ‘empathy’ is often misunderstood and used in a variety of contexts as a substitute for feelings of sympathy, pity and compassion. This article defines a distinction between these similar terms and uses their definitions to describe how players emotionally engage with a game. This helps define an empathy spectrum, ranging from pity to compassion, that can be used to subjectively classify different games. To show the spectrum in use, the article discusses a variety of video games that can be placed at the spectrum’s key points, before discussing how games might reach the spectrum’s furthest point: compassion. The research hopes that modelling these abstract psychological concepts on this spectrum can help game designers, players and scholars better understand the range of emotional responses present in games.

游戏通常会鼓励玩家通过设计对角色或场景产生同理心。然而，“同情”一词常常被误解，并在各种情况下被用来代替同情，同情和同情心。本文定义了这些相似术语之间的区别，并使用其定义来描述玩家在情感上与游戏互动的方式。这有助于定义从同情到同情的共情频谱，可用于对不同游戏进行主观分类。为了展示使用中的频谱，本文讨论了可以放在频谱关键点的各种视频游戏，然后讨论游戏如何达到频谱最远的点：同情心。该研究希望以此为基础对这些抽象的心理概念进行建模可以帮助游戏设计师，