Cultural differences and touch

Our family booked a train trip to see my husband's family in Bremen, and he was complaining about how crowded the train will be... this brought back memories for me of riding the trains in Japan. I remember one rush hour trip between Kyoto and Osaka where there really were men with white gloves shoving us all onto the train, similar to what you can see in this photo:



We were so densely packed that there was no way to hold a hand rail. Instead you were held up by other bodies all around you. You had to sort of wriggle your way to the train doors one stop ahead of where you needed to get off the train. The experience was extremely overwhelming to me, as someone used to US notions of how crowded in it's acceptable to be.

Wikipedia actually has an entry describing cultural differences in notions about how close we can get, which is termed 'spatial empathy'. The idea being that in some cultures there's a notion that a person 'owns' a certain amount of space around him/herself, and others should not enter it. It's quite shocking to suddenly be pressed against strangers in a train if one is operating under these notions!

Considering the space between people, and how it influences emotion, is hard enough when designing characters in a game for one cultural market. After all, there is a whole research field (proxemics) devoted to the understanding of interpersonal distance.

There are some games that have explored proxemics in interesting ways (remember Ico's hand-holding game mechanic?), but designers have barely scratched the surface of the possibility space.

When I'm supervising Ph.D. students, I tell them that the moment they realize how little they know and get a bit depressed is the moment when they've just started to become good at what they do. I think this may also be true for game designers hoping to create true empathy in games. There are so many facets to the experience to be mastered. It can feel overwhelming, but it is a worthy goal that is achievable...