Character Driven Game Design

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Character-Driven Game Design
claims. Next, I introduce mimicry and empathy in more detail, because
they are the main concepts in my argument.
Mimicry and Empathy
Affective expressions are contagious: when a person sees an emotional
expression, the perceiver tends to imitate that expression. This imitation
can be a small muscle activation or a perceivable expression. (E.g.,
Ekman, 1993; Zajonc, 1985.) Imitation seems to be rather involuntary
and automatic (Dimberg et al., 2000). In addition to the imitation of
the expression, it seems that the perceived affects are also mirrored
(Niedenthal et al., 2005). Mimicry of the expressions and mirroring
affects form the basic mechanism for empathy (e.g., Decety, Jackson,
2004).
Decety and Jackson (2004) describe empathy as follows:
[E]mpathy involves not only some minimal recognition
and understanding of another’s emotional state (or most
likely emotional state) but also the affective experience of
the other person’s actual or inferred emotional state.
In addition, Shaun Gallagher (2005, pp. 65–85) posits that another person’s
actions—motor behavior—are understood in terms of one’s own
action possibilities, and this understanding is partly instinctive in human
beings. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1999) present a related
idea, when they argue that empathy is an extension of our ability to
imitate, project, and conceptualize oneself to the body of another.
Mimicry and empathy can explain, at least partly, why people react
to game characters affectively, and why people project human traits on
to the characters. Self-impelled and distinct affective expressions are
likely to trigger the parts of the brain that are used in social interaction,
and therefore trigger relatively involuntary empathic affects and motor
mimicry.
While imitation and empathy can be used to explain why and how
people react to characters, they are not enough to explain all the implications
of viewing something as a human agent. In addition, we need
to look at the general conception of the person or the human agent.
Person Schema
Schema (or prototype) theory is an attempt to explain concepts, and
how human beings judge that an entity belongs to a certain category.
Defining concepts using necessary and sufficient conditions seems to
fail in explaining categories people use (see, e.g., Wittgenstein, 1973).
Therefore, other theories are needed. The schema view assumes that a
category has representative examples or a set of typical features. The
theory proposes that when the people, for example, categorize an entity
as a bird, the category invokes assumption that the entity have wings,