Game psychologists are looking to a relatively new gaming medium to explore the effects of in-game experiences on the real lives of gamers: virtual and augmented reality. According to the Virtual Reality Society, virtual reality gaming is “where a person can experience being in a three-dimensional environment and interact with that environment during a game.” In contrast, augmented reality gaming is “the integration of game visual and audio content with the user’s environment in real time. … While virtual reality games require specialized VR headsets, only some augmented reality systems use them.”
What these two forms of new gaming have in common is the integration of the gamer into immersive storytelling. Rather than watching the effects of gameplay choices play out on a flat screen using a controller, the gamer becomes the controller and experiences the impact of their in-game decisions in real time.
In the case of augmented reality, gamers can even experience the impacts of their decisions on their real environment through a camera. This leads to a sensation gamers call TINAG, or “This Is Not A Game,” in which one of the main goals of the game is to deny and disguise the fact that it is even a game at all (Virtual Reality Society).
Because of the real-world, real-time feel, gamers often feel there are higher stakes to their in-game decisions. Game psychologists argue that “VR experiences can impact the empathy of their users and immediately translate to positive real world behavior.” One example of this comes from a study done on VR gamers who were instructed to cut down a virtual tree. After cutting down this tree in the game, the gamers used an average of 20% less paper in real life.
Another study suggests that the more a gamer immerses in the environment of the game, the more likely they are for in-game choices to affect their empathy outside of the game. For example, when a gamer picks and customizes an avatar, they often bring traits from their real life into their game life. This causes them to identify more strongly with their in-game persona and blur the line that separates gaming from real life.
AR and VR games are the final frontier in eliminating that line completely. When your in-game character is no longer distinguishable from your true self, your choices in and outside of gameplay affect one another inherently.
The implications of this empathy-building through gaming are massive. Some game psychologists argue that it is the moral responsibility of AR/VR game developers to consider the empathic development of their gamers when creating storylines, often with a focus on empathy for other persons, animal rights, and the environment.
Whether or not you believe the onus of creating a more empathetic generation falls on game developers, the impact of these AR/VR games on the emotional development of gamers is undeniable and will likely only grow as the technology flourishes.
Kathleen Shea
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563214003999
https://www.vrs.org.uk/virtual-reality-games/what-is-vr-gaming.html
https://venturebeat.com/2018/09/24/augmented-reality-can-foster-empathy-and-games-can-take-advantage/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563217305381
New Media: Storytelling in Literature, Films, and Games 
Great article Kathleen! This article made me wonder if these studies could one day convince the government to implement augmented reality into education. Right now, VR/AR is mostly restricted to gaming, but I believe that there is an opportunity to create learning experiences through AR. Immersing oneself in another world is, as you’ve argued, a great way to build empathy. AR experiences can place foreign language students in other countries or place medical students into surgery rooms. There is no limit to what AR can become and I can’t wait to see what businesses do with it.
There are a number of projects underway at Peabody to create augmented reality and virtual reality experiences for Middle School, High School, and university instruction, both inside and outside the classroom.
Jay Clayton
This is a great breakdown of the psychological aspects of VR & AR. I think we are really close to a breakthrough with it, and if developers and writers, &c. were able to create meaningful and immersive content, society as a whole could take some major steps forward. We are just scratching the surface of the capabilities, if Apple can come up with an AR app that can measure real world objects through our phone cameras, imagine the creative capacities for storytelling…
This was an amazing article, and I really like the fact of looking at the different applications of VR/AR use outside the game world. Using VR/AR in the real world can have a variety of benefits to society, and the psychological aspects of this technology is something that I had not really thought of. This technology can be utilized in immersion in education, especially for training people with dangerous jobs, that way it will be safer for them in the field when a real situation happens.