Building a canon of empathy examples

This week's entry is really a pointer over to Grand Text Auto, where Noah made a great post on the merits of Indigo Prophecy, a 2005 release for the Play Station 2.

Noah, and some of his respondents, discuss play mechanisms like the timed dialog choices and the forced switching of point of view between the murderer and the investigators, and the impact these design choices had upon their experience.

In my classes on character design, I have students play through games that are known to have really well executed characters. I gather these examples informally by asking developers and players what they've seen and appreciated. But I think it would be great to have a more systematic and broader collection of examples. Something like Indigo Prophecy had some issues, but also had some very interesting innovations. All too often all the pieces don't come together for a game and yet there are some valuable insights for designers.

We got at some of this at my round table at GDC this year, and hopefully Corey's survey (that I blogged about last week) will gather some additional helpful input. But a taxonomy of interesting techniques is yet another needed resource.

Anyone out there know of such a thing? If not, maybe I should create one here...