EMPATHY MACHINE

As described in the ending, this game by Merritt Kopas was directly inspired by Sophie Houlden's response to Ben Kuchera's review of Gender Swap, which runs on a system called The Machine to Be Another. I don't know any of these people and haven't played Gender Swap, so already we're deep in the rabbit hole here.

Empathy Machine takes less than five minutes, if even that, to finish. The short length necessitates brevity, and I didn't like that you have to click each short line to progress, since repetitive clicking is hard on me. But the concept was interesting. There's an "empathy machine" that lets you experience life as a different gender; you're able to try it out and are asked if it worked. Are you more empathetic now?

The Machine to Be Another, as described by Sophie Houlden, is "a couple of VR headsets with cameras on them – each headset displaying the view recorded by the other". Gender Swap uses this technology to let you experience being the opposite gender in VR. Seems cool, but Kuchera got a lot of flak for essentially implying that playing Gender Swap would make cis men more empathetic to the trans experience because they get to experience what it's like to be in the body of a women. Houlden says:

"It’s not about swapping gender, it’s about tricking your brain into thinking you’re a different sex – for a few minutes, in a safe environment where you can quickly step out if things aren’t going how you please. Sure you can put your eyeballs in the head of another for a few minutes (and yes, this is really interesting stuff!) but you’re not in that head yourself. You don’t know what it’s like to have had to live with that body.

You haven’t had to experience with how people treat that body. You haven’t felt pressure to change based on the expectations of having that body. The bodies we are born with force us to have experiences which are outside our control. These experiences shape us as people and who we are in our minds is not so easily separated from them. You can put on the headset and look at a mirror, but you have no idea what life the body’s owner will return to when you take the headsets off. Like I say, it’s an interesting idea but it’s important nobody thinks “Oh, so this is what it’s like to be X” because your life is more than what you see – it’s also years of other people seeing you, speaking to you, touching you AND how they do all that. It’s what you see happen to people who are like you and people who are not. It’s your own head thinking for years on end trying to come to terms with all of this. You can’t be someone else without going through this."

All of this happened more than a decade ago and I'm sure the people involved have thoroughly moved on by now. But the internet, or the Internet Archive in this case, never forgets.

The overall message is that while it may be useful or educational to spend a little time in someone else's shoes, whether it's through reading a book or playing a game or what have you, it will never capture the full experience of what it's like to be someone else, and you shouldn't delude yourself into thinking it can. Especially when it comes to wanting to "emphasize with" and "help" vulnerable groups, it's better to talk to people from those groups instead of just assuming on behalf of your technology.