Empathy displayed by healthcare practitioners is linked to improved treatment outcomes for patients. Current methods for developing empathy in healthcare students include narrative medicine, an arts-
based program used to inform students on how to reflect on and react to the experiences of their patients. An alternative arts-based approach may be through playing digital games, which have been used successfully in healthcare communication education. This research undertakes a review of the academic literature to show the current understanding of the use of digital games to promote empathy towards suffering, illness, or hardship and to outline potential serious game design considerations for this area. We demonstrate that commercially available “empathy games” have potential use in developing clinical empathy, but only one game has been shown to achieve this experimentally. Meanwhile, serious games used in healthcare education to increase empathy do not utilise the same game design elements found in commercial games. The theme of loss in serious games is underexplored, and walking simulators are a genre of game that seems
to be particularly suited to the narrative medicine pedagogical framework.