It is time to start calling the emotions and experiences that currently cluster under the umbrella term “empathy” by their names. Out in the open, without the cover of empathy as a catchcall buzzword, sympathy, depth, and allyship become more visible and therefore more accessible for critique. Caring, compassion, sorrow, loss, and queer entanglement are powerful concepts that deserve to be spoken out loud, not lost in the rhetoric of empathy. . . . More valuable than a video game that allows players to identity with someone else is a game that requires players to respect the people with whom they cannot identify. (Ruberg 68)

In Ruberg's "Empathy and Its Alternatives", empathy should not be used as a term to describe a broad category of games because those games deal with more than empathy. Complex topics such as mental health and queer identity are obscured under the definition of empathy. For example, Gone Home could be interpreted as an empathy game due to the character Sam and her struggles with coming out to an unsupportive family, however, by using more specific terms such as "compassion, sorrow, loss, and queer entanglement," we dive deeper into the struggles of queer identity (Ruberg 68). The relationship between Katie and Sam more specifically shows the familial connections in the game, yet the term "empathy" includes themes that aren't conveyed in this theme, such as "sorrow." The discourse under empathy fails to convey the strife between an ideal family, as shown in the photo above, and the reality of parents unwilling to accept their child's identity. Empathy is used as an catch all term for many emotions, such as compassion, sympathy, and ally ship. Even though all this terms have different meanings readers minimize a variety of experiences by using empathy as a description.

Family Portrait