Vida Migrante: Empathy and the Migrant Experiences Through Data
Visualization
Alberto Meouchi, Enrique Casillas and Sarah E. Williams
Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, U.S.A.
Keywords: Empathy, Human-Centered Computing, Data Visualization, Visualization Design and Evaluation Methods,
Migration, Interactive Games, Empathy, Knowledge Retention, Venezuelan Diaspora, Policy,
Human-Centered Computing, Interaction Design ~ Empirical Studies in Interaction Design, Applied
Computing, Education, Interactive Learning Environments.
Abstract: One of the biggest challenges in developing data visualizations used for humanitarian advocacy and policy
change, is creating empathy for the experiences of people described in the data. Summarizing their hardship
as numbers and charts does not do justice in describing the often-traumatic experiences they face. In many
cases the results of these data visualizations often further remove the subjects from their story making it more
difficult for viewers of the data visualization to empathize with their cause. Our research sought to change
this dynamic through the creation of Vida Migrante, an online interactive game and data visualization
illustrating the trade-offs migrants make every day. Rather than creating graphs or charts from the survey
data collected by our partners at the World Food Programme, our interactive visualization uses that data to
drive the interactive game experience for our audience to help them learn about the migrant experience. In
this paper we illustrate how this interactive game/visualization helped to create empathy in its viewers.
Drawing from literature on measuring empathic behavior, our research team developed a delivered a user
surveys that allowed us to measure the level of empathy the game created in users. The results showed that
while most users already had some level of empathy towards migrants, all participants of the study increased
their level of empathy as they were able to step into the migrants’ shoes and learn new facts and conditions
of the migrant experience that they were previously unaware.
1 INTRODUCTION
In the past decades, the popularity of interactive
online games not only as an entertainment medium
but also as a tool for educating about humanitarian
issues (Berger, 2002). The introduction of online
games into popular culture has sparked a new way of
thinking about entertainment and education as it
provides a completely new medium. Interactive
games and the concept of “gamification” have been
known to be used to teach and increase awareness of
a broad range of topics, including humanitarian issues
(Papoutsi & Drigas, 2016). However, empathy is an
often overlooked focus when using games to retain
knowledge, particularly for humanitarian issues. This
paper seeks to broaden the studied work of interactive
games as a form of sharing knowledge of
humanitarian topics. It primarily focuses on making
the game’s audience more empathetic to the topic it is
exploring. In this paper, we explore the role of games
in creating empathy by analyzing empathy before and
after playing an existing game on migrant integration
and conducting a user study on its effectiveness to
generate empathy. In light of this, there are two
primary questions this study is trying to answer. (1) Is
empathy generated by playing an online interactive
game about humanitarian topics, and how much is
generated? (2) Do people gain more understanding of
migration through playing the game, and how much
more understanding? While this study specifically
focuses on one particular game, we hope its findings
can help guide the creation of other games, ultimately
bringing important humanitarian topics to light.
1.1 Background
The primary focus of this study is an online
simulation game called Vida Migrante, created to
teach people about the experiences of Venezuelan
migrants living in Ecuador and allow them to
Meouchi, A., Casillas, E. and Williams, S. E.
Vida Migrante: Empathy and the Migrant Experiences Through Data Visualization.
DOI: 10.5220/0013347500003912
Paper published under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
In Proceedings of the 20th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (VISIGRAPP 2025) - Volume 1: GRAPP, HUCAPP
and IVAPP, pages 653-665
ISBN: 978-989-758-728-3; ISSN: 2184-4321
Proceedings Copyright © 2025 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda.
653

empathize with the subject (covered in Section 1.2.1).
Thus, to properly contextualize this work, some
background must be covered, including the
importance of empathy in technology, definitions of
empathy and interactive games, and a description of
the game itself.
1.1.1 The Importance of Empathy in
Technology
Traditionary technology is not often specifically
deployed to encourage empathy, especially in software
products such as games (Anderson et al., 2010;
Nishida, 2013). However, because of the incredible
growth technology and software have experienced in
recent decades, the importance of creating empathic
experiences has more been important to the
development of games and interactive experiences. For
example, “empathy-creating” material is quite
important for successfully teaching computer science
students about accessibility in the software products
they may create (El-Glaly et al., 2020).
Additionally, as games have become popular,
their role as an empathy-creating medium is also
being studied. Games often receive criticism for
being “anti-empathy” mediums—violent games are
often cited—yet now more than ever, games are being
used to shed light on real-world issues, as discussed
in Section 2.1 (Manney, 2008). Therefore, it is
important to look at how games can be used to
develop empathy towards any topic and how effective
they can be in developing that empathy. Another
challenge in empathy generation is that it takes time
and consistent effort to generate, which is orthogonal
to the goal of modern technology of accelerating
information gain. For example, computer scientists
and psychologists have cited decreased human
attention spans and focus over the last few decades
(Mark, 2023). Empathy creation techniques must
evolve to match this rapid evolution in learning about
new things (Subramanian, 2018).
Those not already empathetic towards certain
topics might have difficulty finding a medium that
allows them to empathize in the amount of time and
attention they are ready to give. Fortunately, the space
of games, with their connotation of being “fun,”
“engaging,” and “interactive,” may be an excellent
way to bring empathy creation into a face-paced digital
world. In our discussion in Section 5, we find that,
there are in fact several key features of online games
that can generate empathy extremely effectively.
Arthur Berger, in Video Games: A Popular
Culture Phenomenon, cites several characteristics of
games, such as being entertainment, having rules,
taking place in an environment, whether real or not,
and, most relevant for this study, being perceived as
“artificial” and not real life (Berger, 2002). From
another point of view, James Gee in Are Video Games
Good for Learning? creates a definition by broadly
categorizing them into problem-solving games,
where players need to solve a problem or tackle some
issue, and “world” games, where players interact with
a simulated world (Gee, 2006).
What makes games different from traditional
media is the high amount of player-environment
interaction, which allows players to immerse
themselves in the situations they are put into. Not
only does this quality of immersion make games fun
and engaging, but it can also be used as an empathy
generation tool, as explained in Section 1.2. Given
this class of empathy games, we hope that by
explicitly studying the effectiveness of our own
empathy game Vida Migrante, others may be inspired
to create similar games so that people around the
world can empathize with important issues and
ultimately help provide a means to alleviate such
issues.
1.2 What Is Empathy?
Empathy in the modern world has been studied in
psychology since the mid-20th century. Rosalind
Dymond defined it as the “imaginative transposing of
oneself into the thinking, feeling and acting of
another,” which today has colloquially become
known as “putting oneself in someone else’s shoes”
(Dymond, 1949). Later authors such as Ezra Stotland
critiqued this definition because it focused too much
on how “accurately” the empathetic person could
predict the other person’s thoughts and actions
(Stotland, 1969). Stotland proposed that while
empathy is the ability of a person to place themselves
into the lives of others imaginatively, it can be
defined as the “vicarious” emotional response the
person feels due to the other person’s emotions. This
looser definition allows us to explore how users
reacting to a game might gain empathy. Within our
definition of games in Section 2.1, oftentimes, there
is no “other” person that people can react to since the
players act as that person and are making the
decisions themselves.
We can explore the facets of empathy generation
to deepen the analysis of such from games. Leiberg
and Anders guide the analysis by studying how
empathy is created (Leiberg & Anders, 2006). Their
findings can be grouped into three categories: (1)
Empathy can be created by reproducing others’
mental states, a process often described as Simulation
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Theory [16]. For example, if someone shows signs of
pain, empathy is created by simulating that pain in our
minds. (2) Empathy can be created through prior
representations and familiarity with situations. Using
the same pain example, empathy can be created when
seeing someone in pain by remembering a time when
we were in pain. (3) Empathy can be developed
through perspective-taking, the act of combining
information from several sources to determine
another person’s mental state.
1.2.1 Migrant Integration Background and
Vida Migrante
Over the last three decades, around seven million
Venezuelans have left their home country, with
500,000 immigrating to Ecuador (International
Migrant Stock | Population Division, n.d.). Many
migrants left Venezuela due to the political and
economic unrest, and have come to Ecuador in search
of better job opportunities, food security, and access
to healthcare and education. However, migrants
trying to integrate into Ecuadorian society and
economy often encounter many challenges, which our
partners as the World Food Programme (WFP)
wanted to explore. As such, in 2022, 920 Venezuelan
households in Ecuador were surveyed to gain
information about their current condition and uncover
their specific vulnerabilities (Lab, 2023b).
Findings from a survey showed a disparity between
the vocational skills the Venezuelan migrants already
had and attainable careers in Ecuador and insufficient
resources for migrants to improve their employment
opportunities. These factors have led to high food
insecurity amongst migrants, to the point that migrants
have been reported putting 90% of their income
towards necessities like food, rent, and health,
preventing them from being able to pursue personal
growth opportunities such as training to improve their
economic situation (Lab, 2023a).
As our research team began to develop
visualizations to illustrate these, among other
findings, we quickly realized that it was hard to
convey the numerous trade-off migrants make every
day. Therefore, our team turned to the idea of creating
a simulation game. Our game, Vida Migrante, is at its
core a data visualization project as real data is being
used to drive the outcomes of players of the game. For
example, all decisions and cards are based on real
migrant data; every decision a user makes has an
“implication text” that is driven by real data, giving
context to the player’s decision.
Vida Migrante: Venezuelan Migrants’ Inclusion
in Ecuador
itself is structured as a single-player,
round-based simulation game where users step into
the shoes of a migrant and make decisions for them.
As a brief overview, users first select their migrant
profile and occupation (Figure 1), then proceed
through a series of 4 months (rounds) where each
month they need to decide based on a card they get at
random. For example, users may get the
“Remittances” card, where they need to decide
whether to borrow money to send it back to a relative
in Venezuela or forgo sending money altogether
(Figure 2). Lastly, users can select assistances
provided by nongovernmental organizations which
may help their livelihood, which is meant to emulate
potential policy interventions (Figure 3a).
(a) Migrant Selection
(b) Occupation Selection
Figure 1: Players of Vida Migrante get to choose the
migrant they want to experience the simulation as and their
occupation.
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When borrowing money, for instance, a popup
states that “48% of migrants have to ask for money
from family or friends to meet their basic needs”
(Vida Migrante - Civic Data Design Lab, n.d.).
Similarly, the migrant profiles—Luis, Génesis,
María, and Jose—are not completely imaginary
profiles; instead, they are taken directly from the data.
The profiles were found by running a K-means
clustering algorithm, a form of unsupervised machine
learning, on the migrant biographies sourced from the
WFP survey data, then by taking the average values
of a series of characteristics (such as family size and
immigration status) of four clusters (Lab, 2023b). The
“average” migrant from these four clusters was
transformed into the profiles
(a) Life Event Card
(b) Decision
Figure 2: Players of Vida Migrante receive cards, such as
the “Remittances” card, where they must decide what to do.
we see in the final website so players could empathize
with them. The goal of this game is to be interactive
and engaging yet also strike a balance between its
serious educational aspect and the real issues
migrants in Ecuador are facing today.
(a) Assistances Selection Page
(b) Dashboard
Figure 3: Players can select assistance twice a game which
helps them in their journey to integrate into Ecuador (top).
At most points in the game players can also see their current
resources in a dashboard view, such as their income,
expenses, and hours worked, as well as a breakdown of their
expenses (bottom).
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2 EMPATHY
2.1 Empathy Games
Past works have surveyed the many games made to
educate and bring empathy towards a topic. While
this research does not measure the extent to which
empathy was achieved, a literature review shows how
games designers seek to deploy empathy in their
players. Papoutsi and Drigas survey a variety of
games, citing the importance of simulations in
developing empathy because of their ability to allow
users to see an issue “from the inside”(Papoutsi &
Drigas, 2016). Along those lines, in Migrant Trail,
user simulate the experience of migration. Users can
either play as border patrol agent or as a migrant
themselves, `experiencing what both groups might go
through in real life. In an analysis of Migrant Trail,
Boltz et al. cite the agency given to players as the
main driving factor for generating various feelings,
thus being a good way to create empathy (Council,
2021). This example shows how game designers
recognize the power games hold when it comes to
teaching empathy, particularly in this topic of
migration.
Empathy games are often applied to understand
health conditions. One such example of an empathy
game is That Dragon, Cancer, a game where players
play as a father raising a son with cancer, knowing
that he only has a few more years to live (‘That
Dragon, Cancer,’ n.d.). The interactive game allows
players to make an emotional, empathetic connection
with the father, experiencing the highs and lows of
such a situation. The creator, Ryan Green, even noted
that they chose the video game medium because of its
ability to “[tell] a story the viewer can be present in”
(‘That Dragon, Cancer,’ n.d.). Research on empathy
creation from these games focuses on how it helps
medical students increase their understanding of
patients and their families. For example, Chen et al.
looked at how That Dragon, Cancer can be used to
teach empathy to psychiatry students within a
clerkship curriculum, where they were able to find an
increase in empathy among students (Chen et al.,
2018). Similarly, another study by Ma et al. claims
that the game deployment in a virtual reality format
increased empathy (Ma et al., n.d.). Ma’s study
specifically targeted nursing students as well within
undergraduate nursing programs.
Another notable example of an empathy game
from popular culture is Papers Please by Lucas Pope,
a game in which players play as an immigration
inspector at a fictional border checkpoint, deciding on
who to let through and who to deny by checking the
documentation of immigrants (Papers, Please, n.d.).
The game was well received for immersing players
into this scenario, establishing empathy for the
situations the inspector encounters (Campbell, 2013).
This work demonstrates that an empathy game can be
created for the topic of migration with success, as
shown in the increase of empathy in our study, so the
importance of studying the effectiveness of these
games cannot be overstated.
2.1.1 Testing for and Quantifying Empathy
Creation
How, then, do we test for empathy creation in
interactive games? The first tests for quantifying
empathy in general began by specifically looking at
how well people can share emotions with other
people, as described in Dymond’s work (Dymond,
1949). These tests asked questions about how people
thought other people would rate themselves based on
a set of several personality traits. In these studies,
higher empathy correlated with a more accurate
score, whether or not their predictions matched how
others perceived themselves.
To address this definition of empathy and the
techniques used to quantify empathy were broadened.
Much previous work that inspires this study uses
Likert-scale or Likert-style questions (e.g., “Strongly
disagree” to “Strongly agree”), the most notable
being Mehrabian and Epstein’s Empathy Scale
devised in 1972 (Mehrabian & Epstein, 1972). For
example, Ma et al. describe how they used That
Dragon, Cancer to teach empathy to 69 nursing
students, measuring empathy with a series of Likert
questions (Ma et al., n.d.). Chen’s study on That
Dragon, Cancer explicitly cite using the Jefferson
Scales of Physician Empathy to quantify empathy,
which also uses 7-point Likert-style questions (Hojat
et al., n.d.). This scale, used in health professions
education and patient care, is inaccessible in our
context, so we needed to create our scale for human
migration. Kletenik and Adler describe a game they
used to encourage empathy towards accessibility in
computer technology, specifically colorblindness
(Kletenik & Adler, 2022). This study seeks to
replicate and expand on a similar line of work with
Vida Migrante to see if games can create empathy
toward this topic.
3 METHODOLOGY
Due to empathy's qualitative nature, the research
deployed a methodology drawing on this previous
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research involving a user study that asked several
questions related to empathy before users played the
game and then asked the same questions afterward.
3.1 User Study Design
The user study had four sections. First, subjects
answered demographic questions about their prior
knowledge of the topics (Section 3.1.1). Second, they
answered “Cognition Questions” using Likert-style
scales to assess their initial empathy and
understanding of human migration topics (Section
3.1.2). Third, they played through the game and
vocalized their thoughts and decision-making to the
researcher (Section Section 3.1.2). Lastly, they
answered the exact Cognition Questions, which we
compared to their original responses (Section Section
3.1.2). The last section had questions about the game
and their feelings, allowing them to answer open-
ended questions about their experiences.
3.1.1 Demographic and Prior Knowledge
Questions
The user study first asked demographic and general
prior knowledge questions to get context for each
participant. The demographic questions include race,
gender, ethnicity, and education level. The familiarity
questions asked how familiar participants are with
migration and interactive games, even asking
questions such as if they know a migrant and how
many hours of video games they play a week.
Respondents were allowed not to respond to any of
the questions for privacy and comfort. However, in
the final discussion, these responses affect how users
interact with the game and their empathy towards the
topic.
3.1.2 Game Playthrough and Questions
The survey has eleven qualitative questions that allow
respondents to answer on a 7-point Likert-style scale
from “Strongly Disagree” to “Strongly Agree” for
each question (Cognition Questions in Table 3.1).
Each cognition question aims to answer either the
empathy research question or the understanding of the
issue research question (Section 1), and some
questions try to answer both. Despite the qualitative
nature of the questions, the response is quantitative
because the score is a numeric value from 1 (Strongly
Disagree) to 7 (Strongly Agree). We added up all the
scores for the 11 questions to determine a final
“Empathy Score” (E).
The third section is where participants explored
and played through the online simulation game Vida
Migrante. This section was the focus of the study, as
not only could users learn about and empathize with
human migration, but we could also get a glimpse into
how users approached the material. During this
section, we asked subjects to explain their thought
processes throughout the game. Participants could
comment on the material they were exploring, any
issues they saw with the game, and most importantly,
their thought process as they made decisions that
actual migrants may need to make. As seen in the
discussion section, these comments by participants
reveal particularly insightful findings on how users
gain empathy and understanding as they go through
the game. Because it is important to hear these
participant comments, this study section was
conducted as a one-on-one meeting in an in-person
setting.
The fourth section asked the same cognition
questions to compare participants’ feelings before
and after the playthrough. For instance, once the
empathy score had been calculated before the
playthrough (E
before
) and after the playthrough
(E
after
), we could calculate the change in empathy and
understanding, giving us our final quantitative results.
Note that these values' percent change (∆E/E
before
) is
used in the final results for a more meaningful
measure.
The survey asked additional follow-up questions
on the users’ experience with the game listed (Table
3.2). These questions provided us with rich, open-
ended feedback that we could use to determine how
successful the game was in generating empathy and
understanding toward human migration. As discussed
in the results section, open-ended question 1 was
particularly useful for gauging changes in
understanding (Section 4.2), while question 2 was
crucial to seeing changes in empathy (Section 4.1). A
total of fifty-two respondents were surveyed and
played the online simulation game. At a high level, all
respondents were college-aged students (ages 18-29)
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This
may introduce some biases, but the study results
provide great insights.
4 RESULTS
The data from our survey reveals that our game did
increase empathy in the people we surveyed, and this
chapter discusses several key takeaways and insights
made by respondents, showing how it generates
empathy both quantitatively and qualitatively, with
insights about how empathy and understanding were
generated and the respondent demographics and their
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prior familiarity with the subjects. Quotes were taken
from the respondents live during gameplay, not from
the written survey responses; some may be
paraphrased, but their intention is maintained.
4.1 Changes in Empathy
Overall, baseline empathy for the respondents was
already high, with general empathy/understanding of
the issue at 0.78, from of a 0 to 1 scale, before playing
Vida Migrante. (Figure 3)
Breaking this down into the empathy and
knowledge of the issue cognition questions, average
empathy started at 0.74 while average understanding
started at 0.82. Recall from Section 3.1.2 that 1
represents the most empathy, 0.5 represents a neutral
stance, and 0 represents the least empathy. Despite
these already high empathy scores, there were still
increases in empathy and understanding of migration
across the board. More exploration into the
“understanding” results is done in Section 4.2, along
with qualitative evidence showing how knowledge
increased. This section focuses on overall
empathy/understanding of the issue and empathy on
its own, as it is the crux of this research.
Figure 3: Summary of respondents’ empathy scores before
and after playing the online simulation game Vida
Migrante. Scores are broken down into 1) the final
combined scores of empathy and understanding (purple), 2)
the scores given just empathy questions (red), and 3) the
scores given just understanding questions (blue).
On a quantitative level, overall empathy/
understanding saw a significant increase from before
playing Vida Migrante (M = 0.78, SD = 0.11) to after
playing the game (M = 0.86, SD = 0.10), t(51) = 10.5,
p < 0.01.
As referenced throughout the rest of this section,
this corresponds to a 11.54% percent increase. On its
own, empathy increased similarly by 13.82% on
average from M = 0.74, SD = 0.13 to M = 0.83, SD =
0.12 (t(51) = 9.89, p < 0.01). As an important side
note, this distinction between increases in empathy
alone (compared to increases in empathy and
understanding) is calculated by only factoring in
questions specifically targeting empathy. To clarify
this, we broke down the change in the raw score per
question (Figure 2). Overall, empathy/understanding
factors were found in all 10 questions in the analysis,
while empathy alone factors were found in only the
questions indicated in the red and purple bars. Looking
at the distribution, most respondents showed increased
empathy after playing the game (Figure 3). Some
respondents showed rather stark increases in empathy,
showing that even respondents who previously had
high empathy still gained additional empathy towards
migration.
Additionally, the study shows an interesting trend
that appears to arise, where the lower the starting
empathy score is, the more significant the percent
change in empathy is. However, this may come
naturally partly because high-scoring respondents
probably won’t increase their empathy much because
there is not much more to increase by. Unfortunately,
while we tried to find survey respondents with a
starting empathy score below neutral (0.5) we were
unable to recruit them, so our data has some bias in
that most respondents already have some level of
empathy.
4.1.1 Familiarity with in-Game
“Characters”
The first key insight we found during the study was
that players connect to the migrant profiles in the
game. The primary example of this connection is in
the migrant selection process, where respondents
often chose to play as the character they related the
most to. This connection and relatability support the
“familiarity” facet of empathy generation, where the
more familiar they were with the characters and their
situations the more likely they were to activate certain
parts of memory that established an emotional
connection.
One of the leading examples of this during the
study we found is that many young women chose to
play as Génesis, the only young, single woman out of
the four migrant profiles they could choose from.
Statements like “She aligns more with me,” “I can
make the best decisions for her,” “[She is] more
relatable”, and “[She] feels like the closest one to me”
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show that young women may feel the most
comfortable playing as someone like them, affording
greater relatability and thus creating a stronger
emotional connection to them.
While not everyone picked a migrant, they related
to the most or were familiar with it. Many
respondents simply picked a migrant based on
“vibes” or whoever caught their eye without
explicitly stating why they chose that migrant.
However, we still saw increased empathy among
those respondents after playing. This emphasizes the
relevance of highlighting features of interactive
games to create empathy; one single feature may not
establish that strong emotional connection.
Figure 4: Average raw empathy scores before and after
playing the online simulation game Vida Migrante, broken
down by cognition question. Questions with an asterisk (*)
are negative and have been normalized, as explained in
Section 2.1.2.
4.1.2 Stepping into the Shoes of the
Migrants
Many respondents not only cited a strong connection
with the migrant profiles, but with the migrant
experience itself. This subsection outlines how users
“stepped into the shoes” of the migrants as they made
the decisions presented to them in the game. These
findings demonstrate the “simulation theory” facet of
empathy generation described in Section 1.2, where it
is clear that players were able to reproduce the
thoughts and experiences the migrants would have in
real life. What is fascinating about this finding is that
there is never a time in the game where migrants are
shown making decisions; instead the player makes all
those decisions on their own. Despite this, we were
still able to find empathy generation that reflected this
simulation theory. This may suggest that the
interactivity of games can be a potent tool for
empathy creation and connection with these
experiences, even if they are unfamiliar.
Quantitatively, we look to Cognition Questions 2
and 6 to see how the respondents’ empathy increased
after playing the game due to their emotional
connection with the migrant experience. Question 2
saw an 11% increase in the average raw empathy
score towards “wishing they could help the
migrants.” Question 6 saw a similar 11% increase the
average score where respondents would “try to help
migrants integrate into their new country if they had
the resources.” While not a particularly large change,
these increases show that people may be establishing
emotional connections with the migrants by playing
this game, hoping more and more that they could help
their situation. Note also that these increases occurred
even among respondents who already had relatively
high empathy.
Respondents also provided a lot of qualitative
insights into the empathy generated from stepping
into the shoes of migrants. One of the most revealing
findings was the heavy use of first person pronouns
(I/my/me) when describing their actions. Some
examples from the respondents included statements
like “I have a lung disease”, “I have a partner”, “Let’s
help my friend”, “Cash benefits me now”, and “I need
more money”. The heavy use of these pronouns as
people walked through the game reinforces this idea
that people really feel as if they are the migrant
making these decisions, which is possible precisely
because the game format allows you to do
that.Furthermore, some respondents indicated out
loud that the simulation game made them feel as if
they were experiencing a real situation, or if they
were reliving an experience. The vocabulary and
phrases respondents used hinted at the strong
emotional, empathetic connection with the migrant
situation and the decision making they need to do.
Despite the game being a simulation, many said
phrases indicating that the experiences felt real to
them. Some showed that they shared the risk that
migrants may take in real life, saying things like “I’m
not sure that I can take that risk” and “I’ll risk it and
borrow money, it’ll cost more down the line to treat
it”. Lastly, given this finding of player engagement,
one observation during the study was that many
respondents chose to play again as a different
character to see what their experience would be like.
While unfortunately we were unable to capture a
figure for the exact percentage of respondents that did
this, the observation similarly shows how people
were engaged in the game. Cognition question 9
reinforces this finding, with a 6% increase in
sentiment that people wanted to learn more about the
migrant experience.
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4.1.3 Shared Feelings of Distress and
Hopelessness
As we observed during the user study, we indeed
found that many respondents had empathy towards
such struggles. Not only is this shown in the
connection to the migrant profiles and the migrants
experiences, but also, as this section explores, the
recognition that migrants go through a lot of stress.
Given that Vida Migrante provides players with a lot
of context surrounding their situation, these particular
findings support how empathy is generated through
the “Perspective Taking” approach, where players
infer the mental state of the migrants given the
information provided to them, and then imagine how
they would feel in that situation.
Respondents often verbally exclaimed how the
migrant situation and the decisions they had to make
were stressful or upsetting. For example, one
respondent reacted with “It’s kind of sad” when
realizing they could not help a relative with remittances
because they did not have enough money. Similarly,
another noted how “It hurts” when they choose not to
help the community because they have no time. Many
other respondents cited feelings of hopelessness and
being in dire situations, saying things like “There’s no
way to survive”, “Life is so hard”, “Either I borrow
[money] or I die”, and “This is horrible”. Most notably,
some respondents indicated in the open-ended follow-
up questions that they themselves started to feel
stressed or hopeless, or at least acknowledged how it
might be easy for a migrant to feel that way, showing
large amounts of empathy.
We also asked respondents in a follow-up question
how difficult it was to make the decisions presented to
them as migrants. Some respondents mentioned this
difficulty in their open-ended responses, saying, "the
choices involved are a lot more difficult than I
expected” and “migrants have a lot of difficult and
unfair decisions.” This also contributes to the
understanding people gained after playing the game,
realizing the decisions migrants have to make when
facing tough choices. Six respondents found the
decisions not as difficult as expected. However, we
believe this may be because some of the scenarios in
Vida Migrante only allowed users to select a single
option, a limitation in the game.
4.1.4 Specific Mentions of Empathy
Generation
As final evidence that Vida Migrante successfully
created empathy, many respondents cited their own
increases in empathy and emotional connection to the
migrant experience directly from playing the game.
On the emotional aspect, many people mentioned
how the situations were sad or upsetting. Sympathy
can be considered a result of empathy when someone
is going through difficult or stressful situations, as is
often the case for migrants. Many respondents wrote
in the open-ended questions about how the game
made them “feel sympathetic to the migrant
experience.”
There were also mentions of empathy generation,
not only because of the content presented but also due
to how it was presented in the form of a game. For
example, Respondent 4 wrote, “The game made me
experience and empathize with the difficulties that
migrants face more tangibly,” citing specific reasons,
such as how the game put them through “emergency
situations” that prevented them from making personal
progress.
To specifically assess empathy generation, we
wanted to see how users would perceive the migrant
data, given that Vida Migrante visualizes real data
from real migrants in a game format. Inspired by
William Allen’s adaptation of Andy Kirk’s typology
of data visualization, we asked four questions in a
Likert-style format to gauge how much the game
helped players 1) feel the data, 2) explore the data, 3)
read the data, and 4) explain the data(Allen, 2021;
Kirk, 2016). While not entirely clear, results indicated
that players were more likely to explore and feel the
data than read or explain it (Figure 5). We hope future
work can expand on this type of analysis when
examining how games can be used to communicate
data. Regardless, this notion of “feeling” or emotional
connection, which inspired the game’s development
in the first place, supports the conclusion that the
game was successful in creating empathy.
Figure 5: Distribution of responses towards how the
affordances the game provided towards interacting with the
data, inspired by William Allen’s data visualization
typology. The mean response for each of the four categories
is shown as a gray dashed line.
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4.2 Changes in Understanding of
Migrant Issues
Similar to the previous section, this section covers
quantitative and qualitative evidence on the game's
impact, this time diving into the increases in
understanding the respondents' issues after playing
the game.
Overall, we saw an increase in understanding
from before playing the game (M = 0.82, SD = 0.09)
to after playing the game (M = 0.90, SD = 0.07), t(51)
= 6.9, p <0.01. This corresponds with a percent
increase of 10.25%. This increase was smaller than
the increase in average empathy alone, possibly due
to the factors we noted in the respondent
demographics (Section 3.2) and the caveats (Section
3.1). As previously mentioned, initial understanding
score was already extremely high at 0.82. This may
explain the smaller increase, as there was little room
to grow in knowledge of the issue. Nevertheless, we
still found a plethora of qualitative evidence from the
respondents supporting the conclusion that
knowledge of the topic increased, with reactions from
respondents such as “migrants have no control over
their situation” and the fact that there was still a non-
trivial increase in the normalized score is notable.
Additionally, one of the questions we asked as a
follow-up after playing the game was whether or not
respondents felt like they learned something new.
Forty-eight respondents (
≈ 92%) said they learned
something new. Although learning something new
does not necessarily equate to understanding, it does
Figure 6: Distribution of how difficult making decisions
was within the game.
give a glimpse into how respondents were able to
make some meaningful takeaways from playing the
game. We also asked an open-ended follow-up
question on what respondents learned (Question 1 in
Table 2), which is the source of much of our analysis
into the generated understanding. The following
subsections dive into four overarching categories in
how understanding was achieved, which we derive
from responses to this question and the overall
sentiment observed from respondents. Note that this
section is less substantive than the empathy results
because our primary focus was on empathy.
4.2.1 Difficulty of the Migrant Experience
The primary area where respondents showed
increased understanding was in seeing how difficult
the migrant experience is. Most respondents found
the decisions they had to make as migrants rather
difficult. However, this section explores the overall
difficulty and struggles in the situations conveyed to
respondents; respondents began to show signs of
understanding that being a migrant trying to integrate
into a new country is extraordinarily difficult, not
only because of the decisions you must make.
The study drew insights into how respondents
gained understanding from one of the open-ended
questions we asked, “If you felt like you learned
something new, what was it?” Note that the responses
we discuss here are related to the difficulty of the
migrant experience, though there are many other
responses related to themes described in the following
subsections. One of the ways respondents recognized
the difficulty of migrant experiences came in the form
of seeing the large families that migrants had to take
care of. One migrant profile in Vida Migrante, in
particular, Luis, was the head of a family of 6,
eliciting shock at how he could care for his family
given the conditions they lived.
4.2.2 Illusion of Choice
Another facet of the migrant experience that players
gained an understanding of was the illusion of choice.
Because of limited resources, they often can only
make one possible decision. Most notably,
respondents noticed that the challenges migrants face
are often not their fault but a structural failure of the
environment in which they live. This was
quantitatively captured by cognition question 7,
where there was a 15% increase in understanding that
challenges are due to structural issues rather than
personal issues, the second highest increase out of all
cognition questions. As always, this numeric
evidence is supported with quotes and open-ended
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responses. For example, respondents noted
realizations of how “some of these choices aren’t
even an option in real life”, or “just how many things
are out of a migrant’s control”/“migrants have no
control over their situation” or “much of the time
[migrants] don’t even have a real decision.” There is
arguably no better way to understand what migrants
go through than to experience it yourself, an
experience this game hopes to provide.
4.2.3 Trade-Offs in Decision-Making
The third major insight respondents gained was an
understanding of the tradeoffs migrants must make
during decision-making. One of the game's goals was
to communicate the sacrifices migrants make to
survive in Ecuador, and the study found it was
successful in doing so. Looking at the quantitative
data, cognition question 3 asked whether respondents
believed that migrants must make tradeoffs to cover
their basic needs, and there was an 11% increase in
this sentiment. Although the raw empathy score was
already high at 6.09, this question significantly
jumped to 6.76.
The study identified three subcategories of
tradeoffs that players noticed and understood. First,
many noted tradeoffs between long and short-term
decisions, which aligned with our goal of depicting
the "assistance" from governments and NGOs.
Respondents described these choices as “Immediate
versus Long-term” or “Short-term needs versus long-
term needs.” Some, especially those with larger
families and high expenses, discussed prioritizing
short-term needs. One respondent, frustrated by
delaying long-term growth, exclaimed, “Ugh, I keep
putting this off,” referring to forgoing the training
assistance. Second, some respondents recognized the
difficult tradeoff between helping others and helping
their own families. A common scenario involved
community support cards, where players had to
choose between helping the community and taking
time off work. One respondent initially focused on
family, saying they “want the family to be healthy,”
but later acknowledged that “community is
important” when faced with the decision. Another
respondent firmly prioritized their family, stating, “I
would not” help someone “to the detriment of my
own family.” Finally, when asked what they learned
by playing the game, many respondents explicitly
mentioned tradeoffs in decision-making. One
respondent mentioned, “Going through the
simulation, my involvement in many of the difficult
financial decisions taught me more about the trade-
offs migrants have to make to put themselves in a
better situation.” Others mentioned how they learned
about “the need to balance between different options”
and “the types of tradeoffs migrants have to make
daily.”
5 CONCLUSION
5.1 Conclusion
This study shows that the empathy game Vida
Migrante effectively generates empathy and
understanding towards human migration in Ecuador.
On a quantitative and qualitative level, respondents
indicated that they were able to better empathize with
the migrant experience and understand the decisions
migrants have to go through daily to survive in their
new home. Furthermore, this research contributes
evidence to the existing literature that games can be
an extremely effective tool for empathy generation,
even for communicating real data in a highly
engaging manner. We also outline a unique method
for measuring empathy in data visualization and
games, which we hope others can build upon.
Interactive games are indispensable for putting
players into another’s shoes and simulation the
experiences that create empathy. Through the
process, users learn about other’s experiences
firsthand and have a greater connection to
information. This research helps establish how data
visualizations can create empathy, helping to develop
a critical literature framing for future developments in
the field, especially for how data visualizations can be
deployed in the humanitarian sector.
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APPENDIX
Table 1: Cognition Questions (Empathy and
Understanding). Questions are answered on a 7-point scale
from Strongly Disagree (1) to Strongly Agree (7). If the
question is “Positive,” the higher the agreement level the
more empathy the user has.
Question Details
If you felt like you learned
something new, what was
it?
Respondents first answer a
yes or no question on
whether or not they
learned something new,
then answer this optional
question.
How did this game make
you feel about the migrant
experience?
Aimed to get a qualitative
measure on whether or not
empathy and
understanding was
generated.
Feel free to include any
additional notes/follow up
questions here
Respondents could leave
any comments about the
game here, particularly on
game quality and
suggestions for
improvement.
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Table 2: Open-Ended Questions.
Question Posit
ive
Migrants may face many challenges after
making it to their destination.
Yes
I wish there was something I could do to solve
the problems migrants face.
Yes
Migrants must make a series of tradeoffs to
cover their basic needs.
Yes
Migrants are treated the same as citizens of the
country they live in.
No
Organizations should help migrants integrate
into the country they are now living in.
Yes
If I had the opportunity and resources, I would
try to help migrants integrate into a new
country.
Yes
The financial challenges migrants go through
are more structural issues than personal issues.
Yes
Stories about migrants and the decisions they
make makes me upset.
Yes
I am interested in learning about and
understanding the migrant experience.
Yes
It is hard to see how migrants could face
difficult experiences.
No
The situations that migrants go through may be
exaggerated.
No
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