What Medical Students Taught Me About Empathy

I came across a study recently that stopped me in my tracks.

Researchers in Taiwan were training medical students in empathy. They had students role-play as patients and caregivers. Some students just imagined being in those roles. Others actually enacted them, blindfolded and physically restricted, experiencing what it felt like to be dependent on someone else for basic needs.

The difference was measurable. Students who actually enacted the roles showed significantly stronger empathy and perspective-taking than those who only imagined them. When you inhabit a character, when you speak and act as them, something shifts in how you understand their experience. Imagination alone doesn't create the same depth.

That stuck with me because it changes how I think about what children are doing in open worlds. For better and for worse.

When your child spends an hour playing a character in an immersive environment, they're doing something different from watching television or scrolling through content. They're making decisions as that character. Responding to situations. Inhabiting a perspective that requires them to think about how someone else might feel, what they might need, how they might react.

But here's what the medical research also tells us:

Embodied experience cuts both ways. If inhabiting a positive role creates stronger empathy, then inhabiting negative experiences creates deeper wounds.

My daughter learned this trading in Adopt Me on Roblox. She'd spent weeks building up items, negotiating trades with other players. When deals fell through or people were dishonest with her, she would come to us in tears. Genuinely upset in a way that passive media wouldn't have created. Ian's had similar experiences with his daughters. These were more than just abstract frustrations. They were embodied disappointments that hit harder because she'd been genuinely invested in that character's success.

The medical education research calls this "embodied experience." You learn differently when you're actively doing something rather than passively observing it. The empathy that develops when you inhabit someone else's perspective creates cognitive shifts that watching simply can't replicate. But so does the hurt when that embodied experience goes wrong.

This matters for how we think about developmental value in digital spaces.

Ian and I are building oodlü as an open world children actually want to inhabit, rather than simply yet another educational tool. We're thinking hard about what kind of inhabiting creates genuine developmental benefit. Role-play that encourages perspective-taking. Collaborative challenges that require children to consider what their teammates need. Situations where embodying a character means thinking through someone else's experience.

But we're also thinking hard about protecting against embodied harm. When children are in curated groups with adults who know them, negative experiences can be contextualised and supported in real time. When a disagreement happens or a collaboration breaks down, there's an actual adult who can step in, someone who knows the children involved and can help them process what happened. The embodiment still matters, but it's not happening in isolation with strangers.

The research suggests these experiences accumulate. Medical students who engage in sustained role-play over time develop measurably stronger empathy skills. Children spending sustained time in well-designed immersive experiences might be developing similar capabilities. But children experiencing sustained negative embodied experiences in unmoderated environments might be developing something else entirely.

Does every game create developmental value? Obviously not.

Does every hour children spend in an open world build empathy? Absolutely not.

But the potential is there when the design supports it and when the architecture protects against embodied harm. When children are encouraged to truly inhabit characters rather than just control avatars. When collaboration requires genuine perspective-taking rather than just parallel play. When negative experiences can be addressed by adults who know the children involved.

That's what we're trying to architect. Experiences where the time children choose to spend actually develops capabilities that matter, whilst protecting against the deeper wounds that embodied negative experiences can create. Where engagement and growth support each other rather than existing in tension.

The medical students taught me something important. Embodied experience creates learning that imagination alone can't match. Children already know this intuitively. They're drawn to worlds where they can be someone else, see through different eyes, and make choices that matter.

That's the power of open worlds.

Traditional learning platforms can't offer this kind of embodied development because their format doesn't allow children to truly inhabit experiences.

But existing open worlds that do offer embodiment weren't built with developmental value or protection in mind.

We're trying to occupy that space in between. An open world that delivers the embodied experiences children are drawn to, with the adult oversight and developmental thinking those experiences deserve. Safer than platforms built for growth alone. More engaging than platforms that treat development as a checklist rather than an experience.

It's a narrow space to occupy, but we think it matters.

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