Case Study on VR Empathy Game: Challenges with VR Games Development for Emotional Interactions with the VR Characters Ekaterina Muravevskaia and Christina Gardner-McCune University of Florida, Gainesville, USA emur@ufl.edu gmccune@ufl.edu Abstract: Empathy development in young children (6 to 9 years old) sets a foundation for emotional regulation and social skills for children’s futures. Researchers from the fields of virtual reality (VR) and game design highlight the potential of VR technologies as a great tool to promote empathy. However, there is little empirical and systematic knowledge on how to use VR technology to help promote empathy in young children. To address this gap, we developed a VR Empathy Game prototype to explore how VR experiences can inculcate empathy development in young children. To evaluate this prototype, we conducted a qualitative study with 15 children from 6 to 9 years old. We used an interpretive case study to provide an in- depth understanding of children’s experiences with the VR Empathy Game. To guide participant selection, we used a purposeful sampling approach and intentionally included K-3 children with different empathy and social skills levels. This paper describes one case representing a challenge that children with a low level of empathy can experience while playing the VR Empathy Game. This case explains the game experience of a seven-year-old boy, Gabe. The case is entitled: “The VR Empathy Game Experience with a Focus on Exploring the Environment and Looking for Clues.” Gabe confused intrinsic and extrinsic game goals and played the game focusing only on the VR environment. He perceived the game characters as an information source rather than building relationships with them unlike the children with a higher level of empathy. This case represents the group of four boys who participated in our study. In comparison with other participants, Gabe’s case provided very little evidence of noticing the characters' emotions. Our findings suggest that game designers should provide additional scaffolding for children with little levels of empathy, including additional reflective questions and reminders to interact with the characters. We also suggest a follow-up study exploring how different storylines would help children’s game experience. Keywords: Virtual reality, empathy development, games for children, educational games, case study 1. Introduction Designing games for empathy development is a new research area. There are no well-tested theoretical frameworks for such games. The most recent research in this area proposed a circular iterative empathy development model for analysing gamification strategies, which includes affective, cognitive, and behavioral aspects of empathy (López-Faican, 2021). However, there were no recommendations or further studies evaluating this model. In addition, this model did not specify the aspect of players’ motivation and how it affects players’ empathic experiences with the game. Multiple researchers support using virtual reality (VR) as a promising tool for empathy development (Ang, 2008; Bayley, 2019). We found that children perceive and interact with VR characters as if they were interacting with real people (Muravevskaia, 2022). However, there is no clarity on how to design and scaffold such VR experiences to motivate young children to explore empathic interactions with VR characters. To address these research gaps, we developed and qualitatively explored a VR Empathy Game prototype (Muravevskaia, 2017). This paper describes our lessons learned about designing a VR game for creating empathic interactions with the game characters. This paper describes potential challenges with a player’s misinterpreting extrinsic and intrinsic goals of the game. To illustrate these challenges we used one case of a seven-year-old boy, Gabe, who was able to finish the game (extrinsic goal) without understanding the game characters’ feelings (intrinsic goal). This paper provides game designers and researchers with insights on how to avoid such challenges. 2. Background In this section, we discuss aspects of the educational game design, which relate to establishing the intrinsic and extrinsic motivation for the players. We then discuss the VR technologies related to the motivation of the players. Extrinsic motivation. Ang (2008) distinguished two types of game goals: extrinsic and intrinsic. The extrinsic game goal is established in the game explicitly for the player through the game structure and narrative. Using 412