I'm collecting the creepiest supernatural stories listeners have heard for an August podcast episode! We're talking ghosts at your school, houses you ran past because someone said it was haunted, loca...

The idea that reading fiction is central to our development of empathy, our ability to feel for and with others, is a common one both in literary criticism and in literature pedagogy. In the Norwegian school curriculum fiction is consistently positioned as a way of better understanding the perspectives and feelings of others, suggesting that, as cognitive critic Maria Nikolajeva writes, "[i]n plain words, reading indeed makes us better human beings" (2014, 228). But what does empathy really mean in this context? This video essay approaches this question through a textual genre that has a peculiar relationship to this term - small-scale, often text-based digital games that focus on capturing the creator's own experiences and that are sometimes, controversially, called empathy games, with the suggestion that these games give you a felt sense of an experience that might be outside the player's own. These games use text and game mechanics to evoke powerful feelings in the player - but do they actually make us feel with the game creator? Using text excerpts from the games and voiceover narration, A Story About You aims to play with the connection that we as readers and teachers of literature often make between reading and empathy.