First Person vs. Third Person Perspective in a Persuasive Virtual Reality Game: How Does Perspective Affect Empathy Orientation?

Persuasive games, which use immersive technology to address social issues, appeal to player empathy by making them feel and understand the suffering of others. However, it remains ambiguous what type of empathy the player feels and for whom when experiencing a specific situation. We hypothesized that visual information regarding a distressed person obtained by the player influences the player’s empathic orientation towards the person, whereby we note that other-oriented empathy is a more useful psychological state for developing prosocial attitudes than self-oriented empathy. The purpose of this study was to preliminarily investigate which player perspective (first-person perspective vs. third-person perspective) is more effective in promoting other-oriented empathy towards a virtual character in persuasive VR games and to provide insight into the design of such games. In a between-subjects experiment (N = 12), participants played a persuasive VR game from each perspective, and their empathy orientation was investigated using a questionnaire. The results show that there was no significant difference in empathy orientation between the two conditions. The explanation may be that self-oriented empathy is mixed with attitude as a player, such as paying attention to the progress of the game.