I am entirely too cynical for my own good and this is something I'm working on. I think nearly everyone on the planet is out to stick it to the next person, and maybe they are, but I don't have to fall victim to the trap of believing it in my soul anymore. So, while I've been reevaluating my cynicism level, I took a look at my empathy level, and I have to tell you, it is low, and that keeps me up at night.
I can, however, claim with certainty that I have great empathy for video game heroines. I'm not even a video game player. To be quite honest, video games scare the hell out of me. Most video games I've seen are entirely too complicated for my Gen X brain to wrap around. A few years ago (I'm guessing almost 10 now), I saw a video game at Best Buy while I was shopping for other things, and I found the picture on the box so intriguing that I was compelled to by the game (even though I did not play video games). The name of this game: "American McGee's Alice." This is not Lewis Carroll's little Alice, I assure you. The box art featured a knife-wielding, blood-soaked Alice in Wonderland with dirty tangled hair standing next to a skeletal version of the Cheshire Cat. Set years after her travels through Wonderland, Alice is now older, creepy and quite possibly demented. You just have to read the description on Wikipedia (I included the link above) of this game or you won't believe me.
Buying the game was my first mistake (it wasn't cheap). Playing the game was my second mistake. Keep in mind, I hadn't played video games in years, not since my Atari at home, really. The graphics were complex (probably not by today's standards), and the game was difficult. I couldn't get past the first "task." I was constantly propelling Alice over a cliff (or the side of a castle or something), accidentally (due to lack of skill) causing her to land in a boiling lake of acid. The worst part of that would be her screams. When she fell into the lake, she would scream "Help me, help me" as she tried to claw her way up the side of the mountain. I'm not kidding! I got so upset being responsible for her falling into the lake that I felt sick to my stomach listening to her pitiful cries for help. I could never get her out of the boiling lake, she always died, and my game was over in less than a minute and I was an emotional wreck.
I was so distraught with killing Alice that after a few days, I couldn't do it anymore. My skin broke out in red itchy hives when I played the game. I was fully aware at the time that it was only a video game, and I wasn't really killing her, and I was a rational person being irrational, but her screams sounded real and I felt terribly responsible for keeping her safe. I had nightmares about this damn video game.
At the end of the week, I took the game CD out of the computer, put it back into its box, taped it up, and took it to work with me, giving it to a co-worker who was a gamer. He was thrilled with the game as he heard so much about it, and wanted to know why I was giving it away. I told him I was tired of curling up in the fetal position on the floor every night chewing the edge of my pajama sleeve for comfort until I cried myself to sleep. He thought I was kidding, of course. I wasn't.
So you see, I take comfort in my realization that I am not completely without empathy as I thought earlier this week. While reaching far back into the recesses of my brain for a sliver of evidence that I am capable of feeling something other than annoyance for others, I pulled this memory of the video game back out into the open and realized that I am capable of empathy; overwhelming empathy. Maybe the general people population will soon get on my empathy radar, but for now, I'll continue to feel the love for deranged, suicidal, pathetic animated characters. It's a start. A slow one, but it's a start.
--Fortuitous Observer