When Interactivity Does Not Directly Trigger Empathy: How Interactive Narrative Experience Shapes Multidimensional Player Empathy in Online Murder Mystery Games.

Interactive narrative experience has become a dominant form of contemporary narrative consumption. Because of its real-time participatory nature, it is widely regarded as an important means of eliciting empathy. Although prior studies have examined the net effects of interactive narrative experience on empathy, they have largely overlooked the configurational pathways associated with empathy formation. Using Online Murder Mystery Games (OMMGs) as the research context, this study surveyed 570 players to examine the relationships among perceived interactivity, perceived narrativity, perceived integrity, narrative transportation, and multidimensional empathy. Empathy was conceptualized as affective empathy, cognitive empathy, and associative empathy, and the study adopted an integrated PLS-SEM and fsQCA approach. The findings show that perceived interactivity, despite long being considered a key driver of empathy, does not directly influence player empathy in OMMGs and only becomes important under specific conditions. In contrast, narrative transportation exerts a significant net effect on empathy and consistently serves as a core condition across high empathy pathways and their subdimensions, suggesting that it plays a more consistently important role than perceived interactivity across the identified configurational pathways. Furthermore, overall empathy and its subdimensions exhibit differentiated configurational patterns, with affective empathy being associated with a more comprehensive configurational pattern than cognitive empathy and associative empathy. The paper develops the theoretical framework, reports the empirical findings, and discusses their theoretical and practical implications.