10 Nonviolent Video Games

Sometimes mental health providers, parents and educators get so caught up in the debate about video games and violence that we imagine all video games have violent content. They don’t.

So when I am feeling proactive (like now) I point out that there are dozens of nonviolent video games. In this case, I’ll give you a rundown of some of my favorites available on smartphones and/or tablets. You may ask, “Mike, how do you find all of these games?” I find them for free in several places, and you can too! One place in the real world is a certain coffee chain we all know and love which often has App of the Day cards to try for free. Another good source of freebies is App Gratis. App Gratis has 1-2 daily deals on free apps for iPhone, iPad, and Android. The app itself is free, so download it as soon as you are ready to go bargain hunting.

Without further ado, here are some games I’m enjoying lately:

1. Puzzlejuice

Ok, so the tag line is violent: Puzzlejuice is billed as a game “that will punch your brain in the face.” But there’s no punching or violence beyond that blurb. Puzzlejuice combines the spatial skills of Tetris with the wordplay of Scrabble. You rotate blocks to line up 3 or more blocks of one color, which turns them into letters. Spell words with the letters by dragging your finger across them and the blocks disappear. Sound simple? Please come back and comment on this post once you’ve tried it, heh.

2. Circadia

Circadia is all about timing and pace. The graphics are simple enough, where you try to tap expanding rings in order to time their intersection with a dot and other rings. But this game is all about impulse control, patience and learning from your mistakes. Different colors and musical tones indicate different speeds of ring expansion, and once you are through the tutorial you find yourself timing 3 or more rings, dots that move, and increasingly complicated sequences.

3. Denki Blocks!

This is a perennial favorite of mine. Move blocks with the swipe of your finger to connect all of the same color, avoiding obstacles that will get you stuck. Add to that timer challenges, special shapes and bonus mystery rounds and you have a simple, playful puzzle game that will challenge you for hours.

4. Ticket To Ride

Based on the German-style board/card game, you can now play TTR on your smartphone or tablet. TTR combines strategy, planning and blocking other players as they race to build train routes connecting different cities in the US, Europe or “Legendary Asia.” Play against the computer or online with other players, and if you’re feeling social, the built in chat feature allows you to chat with other players between turns.

5. Hundreds

Who would have thought a black and white (ok, and gray and red) game could be so beautiful and elegant? The website explains the basic premise of the game, but just dive right into the tutorial like I did and see what it’s like to learn a game from within it. Did I mention how beautiful it is? Minimalists take note..

6. Tilt World

Playful, but with a strong ecological message, this offering from game designer and thought leader Nicole Lazzaro makes use of the smartphone or tablet’s accelerometer to make Flip the tadpole help fight the Blight that has affected Shady Glen by eating carbon and planting seeds. The game is tied to a real world impact: For each milestone of player points in the world, more trees get planted in Madagascar. More than 10,000 trees have been planted to date, and players can see a real-world impact calculator here.

7. Carcassonne

Based on the classic tile game, Carcassonne is a game of building medieval towns, castles and monasteries. Build your cities, place your Meeples, and try to get the most points by the end of the game. Best part, you can share points with other players, so the game is about strategic alliances as well as blocking another player’s move. Play by yourself or on networked multiplayer. Note to therapists: The basic game can usually be played in the 10 minutes between sessions, just sayin’..

8. Osmos

If you like your games with ambience and an organic dreamlike quality, try this one out. In Osmos you play a single cell Mote who jets around and absorbs smaller motes to become the biggest cell on the block. But be careful, because the jet propelling you is made by expelling your own matter, so the farther you go the smaller you get! This game emphasizes patience and planning over speedy acquisition. Accompanied by some great electronic music.

9. Flower Chain

I disagree with the developer Joybean describing this as “a beautiful game for girls,” and exhort you to play this game regardless of gender! Tap on one of the small floating buds to cause a flower to burst open, touch a nearby bud and start a chain reaction. Easy when the early levels only require you to hit 2-3 flowers, but when you have to get a chain reaction of 50, choose where and when you tap carefully!

10. Nintai 2

The Japanese term “nintaii” means “patience, perseverance, or endurance,” and you’ll need it to get through all 100 levels of this puzzle. Flip a rectangular block through a 3-D platform landscape to get to the end of the maze. Each level is accompanied by trippy music and seemingly random titles like “Joy,” “Bravery,” and “Wealth.” This game has a high “Huh?” factor, but is a compelling experience and best of all, non-violent.

Versions of these games range from free to $9.99 for most smartphones and tablets, and nothing is shot or slashed, not even watermelon (sorry, Fruit Ninja.) Many of these games emphasize one or more social and cognitive skills, from cooperation to word-building to problem solving and impulse control. But don’t let that discourage you–have fun!

Have a favorite non-violent game? Let us know below!

Like this post? I can speak in person too, check out the Press Kit for Public Speaking info. And, for only $4.99 you can buy my book. You can also Subscribe to the Epic Newsletter!

Empathy (Re)Training

Last night I was mining Gold Omber in the asteroid belt near Erindur VI, and I can’t begin to tell you what an accomplishment that was. (This post is not just about spaceships, but about pacifists, Ethiopia and education, so non-gaming educators and therapists keep reading.) OK, let me tell you why it was an accomplishment. I am talking about playing the MMO EVE Online, which involves piloting spaceships across vast amounts of space in order to mine, trade, build or pirate among other things. In essence, your spaceship is your character, with the ship’s parts being the equivalent of your armor and weapons in games like World of Warcraft. But you can only build or use these parts as your pilot acquires skills, ranging from engineering to planetology to cybernetics, so in that way the player’s pilot is the character in the game. But at the start of the game you’re told that the pilot is actually a clone (this becomes important later on) and as someone was explaining to me last night the whole cloning thing has its own complications once you start using implants to modify individual clones, which you can only do after you’ve trained the skill of Cybernetics. And why all that is important is because once you use implants you can learn skills more quickly.

If you think that is confusing, try learning how to use the sprawling user interface or UI, which one of my friends says “was made by demons who hate people, hate their hopes and dreams. Know that you are playing with toys made by demons for their amusement and tread lightly.” Another way of putting it is that you have keep trying to remember what window you opened in the game to do what, and often have multiple windows open simultaneously in order to figure out what you’re doing or buying or training. There is a robot tutorial program in the game that helps somewhat, but the whole thing is very frustrating and intriguing for the first several hours of game play. During this time I was ganked repeatedly, lost lots of loot and ore I had mined, as well as a nice spaceship or two. So to get to the point where I had learned enough skills to be able to warp halfway across the galaxy, lock onto an asteroid, orbit and mine it while defending myself from marauders was extremely exciting. I was only able to do this because my above-mentioned friend had given me a much bigger and safer ship than I had started out with, as well as lots of instructions on how to do things; and because I was chatting with people in the game who offered great tips. Of course one of those people then clicked on my profile in chat to then locate me and gank me again (bye-bye nice ship,) but the knowledge is mine to keep.

By now you may be asking “what has any of this got to do with psychotherapy, social work or education?” so I’ll explain. I had tried EVE months ago, and given up after about a week of on and off attempts, but this past month I have begun teaching an online course for college educators and MSWs about integrating technology into psychotherapy and education. One of the required exercises in the course is for the students to get a trial account of World of Warcraft and level a character to 20. There has been a lot of good-natured reluctance and resistance to doing this, in this class and others: I have been asked to justify this course material in a way I have never had to justify other learning materials to students. This included several objecting to playing the game because of violent content prior to playing it much or at all. It’s as if people were not initially able to perceive the course material of World of Warcraft as being in the same oeuvre as required readings or videos. It is one thing to bring up in your English literature class that you found the violence in “Ivanhoe” or the sex in “The Monk” objectionable after reading it, but I’ve not heard of cases where students have refused to read these books for class based on those objections. So I was curious, what made video games so different in people’s minds?

Things became easier for several folks after I set up times to meet them in the game world, and help them learn and play through the first few quests. As I chatted with them and tried to explain the basic game mechanics I realized that I had learned to take for granted certain knowledge and skills, such as running, jumping, and clicking on characters to speak with them. I started to suspect that the resistance to playing these games was perhaps connected to the tremendous amount of learning that was having to go on in order to even begin to play the game. In literacy education circles we would call this learning pre-readiness skills. Being thrown into a learning environment in front of peers and your instructor was unsettling, immediate, and potentially embarrassing. And I think being educators may have actually made this even harder. Education in the dominant paradigm of the 20th and 21st century seeks to create literary critics and professors as the ultimate outcome of education, according to Ken Robinson. So here are a group of people who have excelled at reading and writing suddenly being asked to learn and develop an entirely new and different skill set within the framework of a college course: Of course they were frustrated.

So I started playing EVE again not just to have fun, but to have a little refresher course in empathy. I have leveled to 90 in WoW, so I know how to do things there, and had begun to forget how frustrating and bewildering learning new games can be. In EVE I have been clueless and failing repeatedly, and getting in touch with how frustrating that learning curve can be. I have also been re-experiencing how thrilling it is the first time I make a connection between too concepts or actions in the game: When I realized that there was a difference between my “Assets” and my “Inventory” I wanted to shout it from the rooftops. I have begun to see and help my students reflect on similar “learning rushes” when they get them as well. They are now , in short, rocking the house in Azeroth.

We forget how thrilling and confusing it can be to learn sometimes, especially to the large population on the planet that doesn’t necessarily want to be a college professor or psychotherapist. We forget that our patients and students are asked to master these frustrations and resistances every day with little notice or credit.

There is a village in Ethiopia, where 20 children were given Xoom tablet computers last year. The researchers/founders of One Laptop Per Child dropped them off in boxes to these children, who had never learned to read or write. They were offered no instruction and the only restriction placed on the tablet was to disable the camera. Within minutes the children had opened the box and learned how to turn the computers on; within weeks they were learning their ABCs and writing; and within months they had learned how to hack into the tablet and turn the camera back on, all without teachers. This story inspires and terrifies many. It is inspiring in that it tells the story of what children can learn if they are allowed to be experimental and playful. It is terrifying because if all this was done without a teacher to lecture or a therapist to raise self-esteem, it raises the question “do we still need them?”

Having played EVE, and taught academics in World of Warcraft, let me assure you that the world still needs teachers and therapists. But the world needs us to begin to learn how to teach and help in a different way. If EVE had nothing but online tutorials I would have probably struggled more and given up. I needed to remain social and related to ask for help, listen to tips, and get the occasional leg up. We need to retrain ourselves in empathic attunement by going to the places that scare or frustrate us, even if those places are video games. The relationship is still important; to inspire, encourage and enjoy when learning happens in its myriad forms. But we need to remember that there are many literacies and that not all human beings aspire to teach an infinitely recurring scholasticism to others. We need to remember how embarrassing it can be to “not get it,” and how the people we work with every day are heroic that they can continue to show up to live and be educated in a system that humiliates them.

What’s exciting and promising, though, is this simple fact: Learning is happening everywhere, all the time! Whether it’s a village in Ethiopia, Elwynn Forest in Azeroth, or in orbit around Erindur VI; learning is happening. Across worlds real and imagined, rich and poor, learning IS happening.

And we get to keep all the knowledge we find.

Like this post? I can speak in person too, check out the Press Kit for Public Speaking info. And, for only $4.99 you can buy my book. You can also Subscribe to the Epic Newsletter!

You’re The Reason Building Your Business Is So Hard

Recently I was asked by a student to take some time and talk with her about her career options. She was trying to plan for her career post-graduate school, and struggling some with the vicissitudes of a graduate program in mental health. Such vicissitudes, once you commit to studying in the field of your choice, are out of your control. Students are often told what to learn, how to learn it, where to intern, and what kind of internship they can have. Want to learn psychodynamic theory? Sorry, school X doesn’t believe in it, so if you go there there may be one or no mention of it in your foundation work. Want to work at a leading hospital? Sure, you and 100 other students from the schools in your area; so apply, but don’t count on it. So, in graduate school, students like my student often have to like it or leave it.

This disempowers the budding therapist in many ways, not the least of which is that it conditions her to take her cues from others even beyond graduate school. It is hard to learn that you have the power to build your career and business after having been taught that the schools, placements and agencies are the ones who make the rules.

If you are out of school, you have more power than you think, and therefore more responsibility than you may want.

Many therapists want to avoid taking responsibility for their businesses. No sooner do we get out of a school or agency then we start to recreate an agency of our own devising. We create our own set of disempowering expectations, and there are usually plenty of people around to collude with us in this. I call them disempowermentors.

Disempowermentors in the mental health field are the ones that tell you all sorts of rules about how things work. They’ll tell you you can’t build a practice without being on insurance panels. They’ll tell you you need to work in our field for 10 years to build up a reputation before you can open a practice. They’ll tell you you should sublet a few hours and not jump in to a full-time practice. None of these things are true, but most of them are usually fear-based. They are usually the way the disempowermentors did things, either because they recreated their own inner agency and/or because they listened to disempowermentors themselves. If my student isn’t careful, she’ll end up listening to one of these folks, and set herself and her future business back a few years. She’ll have a structure, but it will be one that restricts her choices rather than increases them.

Take a look at who you are listening to: Are they disempowermentors? (One sure clue is that disempowermentors almost always look more tired than happy, more miserable than inspirational.)

One example of someone whom the disempowermentors would say is doing everything wrong is my consultee Lindsey Walker. Lindsey is going right into private practice after finishing graduate school. Lindsey is working on building a full-time practice. Lindsey isn’t in any insurance networks. And things are starting to happen for her. This is largely because Lindsey is very creative and responsible. She has started a blog, Waking The Image, which combines photography and essays on psychodynamic theory. She also just finished writing her first e-book Love Over Trauma: Healing With Your Partner on helping couples recover when one or both of them has trauma in their past.

None of these projects occur in a separate pocket universe: Lindsey works daily on these projects and other tasks that we come up with in the course of our work together. I send her a list of things she’s committed to, and within the next several days she does them. That is why her work is slowly but surely getting noticed and her practice growing. She isn’t waiting passively in her office sublet for the phone to ring. She isn’t waiting passively for insurance panels to accept her, or accepting the fee they want to pay her. Lindsey knows that she is responsible for the success of her business. She is investing time and money into building it, not subletting 2 hours somewhere cheap and hoping she’ll get a client or two after her “day job.” Lindsey made the decision to make building her business her day job. I should also mention that she is not independently wealthy, and that this venture has been a risky and courageous one.

So take a look at your career. Are you happy with it? Is being safe worth it? Are you investing time and money into building your business? Are you taking risks?

If you answered no to those questions, then you are the reason building your business is so hard. You aren’t in grad school any more. You choose to apply for a job, accept it, or strike out on your own. You choose whether to make building your business your day job and make whatever sacrifices you need to make to do that. You decide whether or not to invest in an office, a consultant, or other business expenses. You decide to wait passively for someone to pay you a fraction of your fee, or actively market and network for hours and days and weeks. You decide whether to contribute a blog, book, talk or idea to the world like Lindsey; or not to contribute anything without permission from somebody else. You decide whether to confuse worry with effort and wishing with doing.

Lots of things are possible for you. Owning your own business is neither easy or safe, but it is possible. It takes lots of effort and doing. It’s risky, but no one is making you do it or holding you back. It’s up to you to decide.

Like this post? I can speak in person too, check out the Press Kit for Public Speaking info. And, for only $4.99 you can buy my book. You can also Subscribe to the Epic Newsletter!
<a

Want To Help Stop Youth Cyberbullying? Let Your Kids Raid More.

The above title is misleading. In fact it is as misleading as the term cyberbullying, which is an umbrella term used from experiences which range drastically. ”Cyberbullying” has been used to describe the humiliation of LGBT youth via video; the racial hatred of Sikhs on Reddit, the systematic harassment and suicide of a teenage girl by a neighboring peer’s mother; a hoax wherein a Facebooker pretended to be a woman’s missing (for 31 years); and the bad Yelp reviews of a restauranteur in AZ.

Wait, huh?

My point, exactly: All of the things described above are different in scope, intentionality, form of media used, duration, and impact. We need to keep this complicated. This is not to take away from the horrific acts that people have perpetuated with social media, or excuse them. Rather I think we need to help kids and their parents find more nuanced ways to make sense of the way newer technologies are impacting us.

Social media amplifies ideas, feelings, and conflicts. It often dysregulates family systems. Growing up, many family members didn’t need to learn the level of digital literacy that today’s world requires. Parents may be tempted to put their children in a lengthy or permanent internet lockdown. I hear the threats, or read them, all the time: No screens. You’re unplugged. She’s grounded from Facebook.

Please don’t do that.

I’ve worked with a number of young adults who have had the experiences of being on the receiving end of hatred, stalking, harassment and intrusion delivered via the internet. And thank goodness that their parents didn’t unplug them as kids. Because they stayed online they got to:

learn how to ignore haters
see/hear others stand up for them in a social media setting
come to the defense of a peer themselves
increase their ability to meet verbal aggression with cognition
make the hundreds of microdecisions about whether to “fight this battle”
seek out support from other peers
form strong online communities and followings that helped them cope with and marginalize the aggressors

More and more, online technologies are becoming a prevalent form of communication, and to take away access is to remove the hearing and voice of youth. To do this is disempowerment, not protection.

I’ve said before that parents need to take an engaged approach with kids in order to be there to help kids understand and process the conflicts that are communicated through and amplified by social media. But this time I want to go further, and suggest that one way to help kids achieve digital literacy in terms of social skills is to let them play more multiplayer video games.

Many of you probably saw that coming, but for those of you who didn’t, let me explain. 21st century video games are themselves a powerful form of social media. Multiplayer games allow individuals to band together as guilds, raids, platoons and other groups to achieve higher endgame goals. Collaboration is built into them as part of the fun and as necessary to meet the challenges.

There are exceptions to this, but it has been my experience that people don’t begin systematic personal attacks on each other when they are in the middle of downing Onyxia. They are too busy joining forces to win. I am convinced that much hatred we see in the developed world is there in large part because of boredom and apathy. Games provide an alternative form of engagement to hatin’

Look, I’m not saying that people playing games never say sexist things, swear, or utter homophobic comments. But I can say that I have heard more people, adults and children, stand up to hatred in World of Warcraft than I ever have in the 2 decades I worked in public school settings. I’ve seen racism confronted numerous times in guild chat, seen rules for civility created and enforced over and over, always citing a variation of the same reason: ”We’re all here to have fun, so please keep the climate conducive to that.”

Video games provide powerful interactive arenas for diverse groups of people to collaborate or compete strategically. They capture our interest with a different sort of drama than the sort that we see our youth struggle with in other settings. In fact, for many individuals video games provide a welcome respite from the drama that occurs in those other settings.

Social media does indeed amplify nastiness, harassment and hatred. It also amplifies kindness, hope, generosity and cooperation. If we don’t lean into social media with our kids, they’ll never know how to use it to amplify goodness in the world. Worse yet, if we cut them off from connecting with the world online we’ll deprive them of the necessary opportunities to recognize and choose between good and evil.

Like this post? I can speak in person too, check out the Press Kit for Public Speaking info. And, for only $4.99 you can buy my book. You can also Subscribe to the Epic Newsletter!

Alphabet Soup: The Perils & Promise of E-Learning

CMS stands for Content Management System, which Wikipedia defines as ”a computer program that allows publishing, editing and modifying content as well as maintenance from a central interface.” Several of the universities I have taught or teach at use a CMS called Blackboard. It has several iterations; Blackboard Vista, Blackboard 9, etc. Faculty are encouraged to use Blackboard by many college administrators, but I have yet to talk to a faculty member who has enjoyed using them.

Blackboard is the latest skirmish in a struggle between faculty and administration that I have seen go on for 2 decades in educational settings from Pre-K to PhD. It usually goes like this:

Technology A is developed in the private sector. Some enterprising developer of Technology A decides to take it to Educational Setting B. This takes a while, as it is often hard to find the decision maker in Educational Setting B. An administrator or administrators finally see the potential of Technology A, and Educational Setting B buys a very expensive version of Tech A.

Tech A is presented to the faculty of Setting B. ”This is a great resource,” they are told. They are encouraged to use it. Some enterprising faculty try it, but become confused or bored with it and stop. The rest of the faculty never try it. Administrators of Setting B get frustrated, and often mandate the use of Tech A. They invest more money in consultants to come in and offer training. This often consists of scripted powerpoints, or nowadays video tutorials. Sometimes an in-house Tech A supporter is hired. The supporter is avoided, because s/he is associated with a top-down administrative initiative. Slowly the faculty begins to use Tech A as little as possible as rarely as possible. Administrators get frustrated, and begin to answer every Faculty complaint with a thinly veiled, “if you only used the expensive solution we bought you you’d have more time to do X,Y or Z and there would be no more problems.”

Meanwhile, in the outside world, Technology A is now obsolete, because in the time it takes educators to change we have developed, beta-tested, and marketed better stuff. We’re now on Technology Q, but when Educational Setting B is approached by the salespeople for Technology Q, they are rebuffed by administrators, who say, “Look, our faculty never used Technology A, so we’re not going to waste money on Technology Q.” Technology Q folks stop trying to design a product that would work really well for educators, because if no one buys it, well, what’s the point.

OK, back to the particular brand of technology called CMS, content management software. In this case, people have begun to confuse the software, which allows you to upload content into a course shell, with E-Learning. At its worst, this stifles creativity, because it misses the point that education is not about content but about facilitating learning. In a recent TED Talk, Sir Ken Robinson put it this way: ”Teaching properly conceived is not a delivery system.”

By now, many educators and learners, will have heard of MOOCs, Massively Open Online Courses. The Pros of MOOCs for E-Learning are several, most notably the provision of access to educational resources to people who may be disenfranchised in some way. People can enroll in MOOCs for little or no money, take them after their workday or on weekends, and view and review material at their own pace.

But their are costs, literally and figuratively. Many MOOCs require entire production teams to create “professional” looking media. (The Khan Academy does a great job with less polish, but it often produces less formal media which some may consider less professional.) And ultimately, MOOCs are not going to be free, and seed money will need to be replaced. In my hometown for example, EdX is beginning to look at ways to generate revenue from future courses.

Not all E-Learning should or does take the shape of a MOOC. Not all E-Learning is scalable, at least not at first. Perhaps most importantly, not all E-Learning needs the same kinds of technology to make it good education.

There is a lot more to creating a good online educational experience than converting a syllabus into learning modules. The content management software can be used to powerfully enhance E-Learning, but in many cases it lends itself to being used as “pedagogy management software” instead.

I was reminded of this recently as I have been developing an online course. And the ironic part was that I was being stifled not by the administration but by myself. I had been given free rein to produce a course by the university administration. They were and are extremely supportive, encouraging and confident that I can teach something well. But I let myself get sucked into Blackboard. I started thinking that I had to produce a certain size and shape widget. The fact that I could create class modules became an internal mandate to fill them with material. I began to feel oppressed.

It wasn’t until I noticed that the only one expecting me to do that was me, and maybe the software, that I realized I could get off the treadmill. And I had to, because for me education is about facilitating learning, not putting content into student’s heads. In this case, a large part of the course is about social media and gaming, so a large part of my work will be about using social media with the students, playing games with them, and then discussing those experiences. I’ll certainly use Blackboard when it makes sense, but I’m not going to be assimilated by it.

I’m one of the lucky ones. Many educational settings wouldn’t be so encouraging of faculty creativity and thinking outside the box. Many of my colleagues instead find themselves scolded and asked, “why aren’t you using the box?” I have several colleagues who are engaging educators who have been avoiding E-Learning because they like the interaction with students, as if E-Learning has to be inherently non-interactive.

Fortunately a lot of administrators in higher education are also instructors, so hopefully we can begin to bridge this divide. These technologies are all relatively new to us, so there really shouldn’t be any hard and fast rules on how to educate students online. We’re pioneers, and we’re going to make lots of mistakes, but if we can remember to think of education as a laboratory for innovation rather than a delivery service, we may have some epic wins as well.

Gamer Therapist

Psychotherapy Meets Web 2.0