Archives for December 2011

How To Have An Epic Holiday With Your Child Or Teen & Video Games

As I write this, those of us in the US have 4 shopping days until Christmas.  So I wanted to share a few tips on both games to consider but also how to connect with the gamer in your life during this time of year:

1. Play with your child.  If it is a multiplayer game, join in.  If it is a single-player, ask to take a turn.

2. Sit and watch your child play, and ask them to teach you how to play a game.

3. For adolescents, don’t take no for an answer.  If they don’t want to show you how to play at that time, make an “appointment” with them for later.

4. Encourage boys and girls equally.  A recent study showed that girls who play video games with their fathers endorse fewer symptoms of depression.  Ask your children if there are different games they like.

5. Remember that multiplayer games are forms of social media and community.  Your child may be having a chat while they are playing without you even knowing it.  Be patient with them and ask if you are interrupting something.  This is good training for when they are interrupting you.  Remember social skills are a two-way street, and just because you don’t think something is important doesn’t mean they feel the same way.

6. Pay attention to ESRB ratings.  They aren’t perfect, but they can give you a good idea of what ages and levels of maturity are the best fit for your child.

7. Vet the online community.  If they want to join a server for Minecraft, search together for one that requires children apply and requires parental approval.  Ask the adult moderators questions about what kind of activities and conversations happen in-world.  Discuss how privacy is handled.

8. Sit with your child as they sign up for a game.  Discuss whether they should answer questions about where they live and their age.  If these are required, email the moderator if you don’t feel comfortable with that.  Your child’s digital footprint starts here, and will last for decades to come, so be careful and thoughtful about it.

9.  That said, don’t evoke a sense of anxiety and paranoia with your children.  There are plenty of normal or healthy people online, and they may be making lifelong friends.  If they want to chat or Skype with peers, don’t forbid it, but ask to have a brief introductory call with their parent, and have a week probationary period where all chat is audible before the headphones go on.

10.  Have fun!  Video games can improve your mood, sharpen your wits and fine motor skills, and even give you exercise.  But the most benefit for you and your child will occur if you take an interest and try to play yourself.

Ok, so now for some suggestions.  This is by no means exhaustive, and if you want to recommend others please comment below!

Multiplayer Games

These can often have a subscription, but sometimes they are free.  A good family game for younger children is Wizard101, which takes place in a world of wizard schools and magic duels.  Combat is turn-based card game style.  If your children like Magic:  The Gathering, chances are they’ll love this.

Another great one is Minecraft, which costs a one-time price of $26.99.  The game allows no end of possibilities, from mining to building to exploring to killing monsters.  If you join a multiplayer, the whole family can play together.

World of Warcraft is a perennial favorite of mine.  In addition to buying the software, this game has a monthly subscription, and there are lots of servers to choose from.  Try searching for child-friendly servers and guilds, there are plenty of them out there.

Eve Online is a MMO that takes place in outer space.  If your family is more interested in building and flying spaceships than fighting dragons this may be the game for them.  Like WoW there is a monthly subscription in addition to the software purchase.

Console Games

For your older gamers I recommend Dark Souls.  This is a very challenging game, which players can expect to last for hours.  There will be lots of dying and starting over, and lots of fun failure.  This game also has a strong RPG element and a dark mood.

Not quite as dark, but very challenging, is the new Elder Scrolls: Skyrim.  This game puts you in a Nordic-type environment as a “Dragonborn,” and the main quest has you fighting dragons and absorbing their powers.  But the fun thing about this game is that you don’t have to do any one quest if you don’t want to.  Players can focus on exploring, crafting, learning marriage or picking locks!  The graphics are beautiful, and the music is fun too.

If you are more interested in a game with a puzzle-solving element, check out Portal 2.  You wake up in an abandoned lab with only a wormhole gun to your name.  In order to escape players will need to strategize and learn a lot about physics on the way.  There’s a lot of fun humor in the game as well.

All of the above games are available for Xbox, PS3 and the PC.

For Xbox, you can also bring a bit of meditation to the family with Deepak Chopra’s Leela.  This game uses the Kinnect, and you’ll your whole body playing games to both actively exercise and stimulate the chakras or energy centers in the body; or meditate and keep an eye on your posture.  The game is easy to learn and very colorful, and you can even design your own mandala.

Also for the Kinnect and PS3 is Child of Eden.  This full body game has you trying to same the AI Lumi from a computer virus.  It’s a fast-moving game with some rocking music from the virtual band Genki Rockets.

As far as the Wii goes, there’s only one I want to recommend at the moment, and that’s Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword.  This latest addition to the classic Zelda series will take you back to history before the Ocarina of Time, and up into the clouds of Skyloft, as you help Link take wing to save his kidnapped friend Zelda.

iPad

Last but not least I want to direct your attention to a couple of games on the iPad.  Infinity Blade II.  This game is not for the faint of heart, there is a lot of melee combat, and a lot of dying.  If you like swordplay and battling monsters this is the game for you.  The world is 3D and dynamic, and there are lots of different weapons and armors to try.  Be warned, there is an option to “buy” more gold, so have a talk with your child about whether and how to do that.

A more playful game for all ages is Windosill from Vectorpark.  This is a short game, but the dreamlike quality and graphics make it feel more like having fallen into a picture book than playing a video game.  Get your whimsy on with this one.

These are only some suggestions, and are based on games I have test-driven.  For example, I haven’t recommended any Nintendo DS games because I haven’t played any lately.  I’m not affiliated with any of the above companies.  Have some other game suggestions?  Let us know below.  Have a great holiday!

Like this post?  There’s more where that came from, for only $2.99 you can buy my book.  I can speak to your agency or parent group in person too, check out the Press Kit for Public Speaking info.

 

If Freud Had Played Video Games

This post is dedicated to my supervisee, Alex Kamin, who inspired me to make the connections. I learn so much from my supervisees!

Last night I spent a great deal of time mining for diamonds.  They are fairly rare, and can only be mined if you have an iron pickaxe (or a diamond one).  This meant that I needed to mine iron ore first with a stone pickaxe, but I should start at the beginning.

Minecraft is a game which now rivals WoW in popularity.  It has been around in beta for a while, but now has been released to the general public.  The game takes place in what is known as a sandbox world.  What that means is that the game world can be effected permanently by the player.  Dig a hole and it stays dug, chop a tree down and it stays chopped, plant new ones and in time they grow.  As opposed to having a beginning, middle and end, Minecraft can be played for as long as you like.  You can play it in single-player mode or log on to a minecraft server and participate in a multiplayer world.

Starting with nothing but her or his bare hands, your character takes materials from the environment and fashions tools, houses, works of art out of these raw materials.  That is the crafting part.  Once you have fashioned the most basic pickaxe, out of wood, you start to do the mining part.  Which brings me back to diamonds.

Diamonds are very rare blocks in Minecraft, and are mostly found at the bottom layer of the world.  You have to tunnel through loads of dirt blocks, stone blocks, and gravel blocks.  Sometimes you tunnel straight into lava and get burned up.  Sometimes the ground beneath you turns out to be a giant chasm and you plummet.  Sometimes there is water that floods your tunnel, or monsters if you are looking in one of the world’s many caves.

A lot of time is spent underground, but a big part of the game is to bring the materials back up to the surface.  There you make your crafting table, house, and forge.  Days and nights pass.  At night the monsters from the caves come out and roam the surface, and you’d better be in your house with the doors shut!

This is a very brief synopsis of an amazing virtual world that is already being used in classrooms and by families to provide cooperative and fun learning. You can find one such example, The Massively Minecraft Network, here.

One group who could benefit from understanding and playing Minecraft is psychodynamic psychotherapists, especially psychoanalytically-oriented ones.

For decades, psychology textbooks have used the iceberg to explain Freud’s early topographical model of the mind.  It’s the one I grew up as a therapist with, and you probably did too.  One version is this one:

Photo found on Allpsych.com

The topographical model introduces the concepts of the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious.  Freud was ultimately dissatisfied with this model, and moved on to his structural theoretical model of Id, Ego and Superego.  I wonder if he would have done so if he’d been able to play Minecraft.

Two of the deficits of the topographical model as pictured by an iceberg are its static nature and its failure to locate where and how psychotherapy works.  The second deficit derives from the first.  Psychodynamic therapy is as the name suggests, a moving process.  Now imagine playing the game I described above, and you have a dynamic model.  There is the conscious surface that changes over time, is constantly changing and growing, where things are visible.  There are the caverns and depths which are the unconscious.  And there is the preconscious twilight and night, when the monsters and creatures from the unconscious slip up to the surface and terrify us.

In terms of describing psychodynamic therapy, Minecraft makes that easy too.  I have often had a difficult time explaining to a patient what the unconscious is and why I think it is important.  But any gamer who has played Minecraft will understand the process of therapy and their work in it in the metaphors of mining.  During the week, our patients roam the surface of their psychosocial world.  Then one, two, or three times a week, they come into therapy and begin tunneling.  Week after week they mine dirt, stone, and occasionally strike a vein of insight.  Like iron ore, insight is a necessary but insufficient requirement for change.  Without smelting and crafting, iron ore can never become a tool we can use.  Likewise, without reflecting on our behaviors and changing them we can never improve our ego functions.

You can explain ego functioning via Minecraft as well, by discussing those above tools.  Tools in Minecraft include shovels, pickaxes, hatchets, swords, wool shears and hoes.  A hoe is excellent to use in gardening, whereas a sword will not function in the game that way.  You can chop down a tree with a pickaxe but it takes longer and wears down the pickaxe more quickly than if you were to use a hatchet.  Different ego functions do different things, and the ego defenses are only one subset of the ego functions.  Only one of the tools is explicitly made to be a weapon.

And if you lead with your ego defenses all the time you will be disappointed.  Take sheep for example.  If you kill a sheep with a sword you get one block of wool.  But if you shear it with the iron shears you get three wools, and the sheep lives to grow more wool.  By the way, if you craft a hoe you can grow wheat, which allows you to domesticate and breed sheep for even more wool.  Just so our ego functions, which provide a holistic and dynamic system that allows us to mediate the world and our wishes.

When you start mining you have a wooden pickaxe.  You mine stone so you can get a stone pickaxe.  You mine iron ore with the stone one.  Only iron pickaxes can mine diamonds.

Psychotherapy takes time and effort, lots of time and effort, if you are aiming for more than symptom reduction.  Patients begin with the raw tools they started out with, and build on each developmental gain.  Often our patients will feel very raw and discouraged, state that they despair of ever getting better, whatever better means to them.  When that happens we can remind them that therapy is minecraft.  It takes delving and work back on the surface in the real world outside the office.  It takes time and patience.  Sometimes they will feel consumed by feelings as hot as lava, or flooded by memories like water in a mineshaft.  Sometimes it will feel like they’ve lost everything they’ve been carrying and have to start over.  But with each set of tools they acquire they’ll find it easier to make their way in the world.

And sometimes they will find diamonds.

 

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Occam’s Oyster

The oyster has an amazing evolutionary trick.  When a microscopic particle of something or other gets into its soft tissue, it creates over time layer upon layer of nacre, a substance which creates a pearl.  What began as an irritant can go on to become a very valuable object.

You are not an oyster.

If something irritates you, you don’t always need to be stuck with it.  And although I am a big fan of the cognitive reframe, to use it all the time overlooks that you can often resolve whatever is irritating you by removing it.

 

Case in point, for the past several years I have used a billing service.  They’re great, but there has been something about the process of my patient intakes that irritates me.  I have patients fill out an intake form, which they bring in to me.  At the same time the billing office has a face sheet they use as well, but they need some information that is not on the face sheet but is on my intake form.

So for the past several years the patient will download my form off the site, fill it out and bring it in to me.  I then have to scan the form and fax it to my billing office.  To make things more complicated I have several computers and a scanner at home as well as an iPad.  You’d think this would make things easy, but I can not seem to get them all to talk to each other the right way to scan something and email it in under 30 minutes.  One laptop doesn’t get recognized by the wireless network.  The iPad can scan the form but not email it.  This has been going on for years, and I had grown accustomed  to the irritation as I tried putting on layer after layer of “solutions.”  I’d put off scanning the forms until my office asked me for them, which made their work harder, and payments from insurance choppy.

Then it hit me that I am not an oyster.  Whenever this irritation came up I had been so focused on trying to make things go more easily, that I had never really taken a few minutes to think about how to make this problem go away.  The answer in this case was simple.  Instead of having my patients email the form to me, my introductory email to them can instruct them to email or fax it to the office directly.  They need regular access to it, and I don’t.  They have all of my other administrative paperwork which they keep all safe and secure, so it is actually far easier to have them keep it since they are doing all the billing.  I rarely use that initial paperwork, and I’ll always know where it is.

I offer this as a nuts and bolts example of how your therapy practice needs to be evaluated periodically.  The whole craziness above is a vestige of when I was doing all of my billing, and something I now realize I was not ready to let go of.  And so I just got used to the irritant, ignored it, and hoped it would go away or become less irritating.

We therapists take more irritation for granted than is necessary in our business.  We each have a different version of layering on the nacre.  One of mine is constantly adding new gadgets and trying to find ways to make work easier, rather than making it go away entirely.  I used to spend hours learning the intricacies of a billing software and calling insurance companies, and then I realized I wanted to get rid of the irritation.  I researched different services, and finally decided on one which cost a little more, but did a lot more for me.  Now I give them 9% of my fee, and in return they keep me credentialed with the insurances I take, send out statements, answer questions from patients and submit all my claims electronically to insurances.  Not only do they trap more of my revenue because they can focus on it with more expertise than I, they save me valuable time.

I didn’t value my time as much when I started out, and I am glad I changed that, because I know I wouldn’t have had the time or energy to write a regular blog, do speaking engagements, or write my book this year if I had been chewing on all that paperwork.

So why does it often take us so long to fix systemic problems like this in our practices, or our lives for that matter?  I would suggest that the answer is that we don’t value thinking.

I know, sounds crazy on the surface, therapists don’t value thinking?  Thinking and thinking about thinking is a big part of our profession.  But when was the last time you allotted yourself time specifically to think on something.  By that I mean dedicated time where you think through something single-mindedly, not answering emails, talking on the phone, watching television, etc.  Most people I coach can’t remember the last time they did that, in fact our coaching appointments are often the closest they come to it.

You don’t have to schedule a specific “thinking time” in your day, although you can certainly do that if it works for you.  But in the case above I didn’t do that.  Instead I noticed I was getting irritated for the umpteenth time and said to myself, “Ok, stop EVERYTHING, how can I make this irritation go away?”  Within a relatively short time of dedicated thinking I identified what the system was, what the problem was, and what the new system would need to be to make the form nightmare go away.  Not get less irritating, not more tolerable, but gone.

Look, I’m not saying that everything in life that irritates you can be removed, or even that that would be a good thing.  I’m just saying don’t settle for mitigating damage before you’ve tried making the problem disappear.  Ask yourself, “am I layering nacre over and over?  Is that the best I can strive for?”

Then ask yourself, “am I making time to think, and am I thinking about the things I want to think about when I do?”  Sure there are lots of times when you run a business that you’ll need to think about stuff you’d rather not think about; but if that’s how you’re spending the majority of your time then maybe you’re running the wrong business.

Like this post? There’s more where that came from, for only $2.99 you can buy my book. I can rant in person too, check out the Press Kit for Public Speaking info.

Not All Failure Is Epic

In gaming there is a concept known as the “Epic Fail.”  Roughly translated this means, a failure so colossal, so unbelievable in its nature, that it will go down in history as epic.  Epic failure can be extremely frustrating in the moment, but is almost always funny in retrospect.

Recently I was playing Dark Souls, and I was trying to down two bosses known as the Belltower Gargoyles.  Just as you get one down to half health, the other, who likes to breathe fire on you, shows up.  Oy.  I kept getting killed, which sent me back to a save point, running back up the belltower, and trying again.  What kept me going up there was that each time I was surviving a few seconds longer, and each time I was getting the gargoyle’s health down a little more.  At one point I started to consistently kill the first gargoyle before the second one finished me off.  Finally, through an unbelievable feat of mashing all the buttons, luck, and strategy, I beat them both.

The failure that kept happening was not what I would call Epic Failure.  It was certainly what Jane McGonigal et al call fun failure though.  It was failure with just enough progress mixed in that I’d say, “Oooh, you’re going to get it,” to the gargoyles and try again.  And again.  Fun failures in video games are designed to work that way.  The game can’t be so hard that the person gives up, but can’t be so easy that you don’t feel challenged.  Because if you don’t feel challenged then there is little or no sense of accomplishment.

Heinz Kohut, one of my favorite psychoanalytic thinkers, would probably have a lot to say about video games if he were alive today.  Kohut knew that failure was a part of life and human development.  In fact, he thought that therapy was full of failure.  He talked about empathic failure, when the therapist fails to respond empathically to the patient in some way.  Maybe we don’t pay attention enough to a story, or don’t remember something, or start 5 minutes late.  These are all parts of the therapist being human, and therefore being unable to stay absolutely in empathic attunement with the patient.  This kind of failure is inevitable.

Kohut goes on to say that it is not necessary to deliberately make mistakes and empathically fail our patients, because we are going to do so naturally in the course of our work with them.  In fact, to deliberately fail our patients is rather sadistic.  But usually we aren’t being sadistic when we forget something, or run late a few minutes, even though the patient may experience it that way.

So first a note to therapists here.  In the course of your work with patients you are going to fail a lot.  But not all failures are epic.  That is not to say that your patients won’t experience it that way.  That vacation you’re going on may be an epic failure on your part, as far as they are concerned.  Does that mean you cancel your flight plans?  Of course not.  Our job is initially to help the patient by understanding by empathy the epic nature of our failure from their point of view.  We try to imagine ourselves into that moment they are having.

But that doesn’t mean that we stay there.  We need to maintain some perspective, have some sense of fun failure, to keep doing our work.  By that I don’t mean have fun at our patient’s expense, but rather be able to be lighthearted enough in our introspection to say “Oops, I missed that one,” or “there I go again.”  If we can do that we are able to then refocus on the patient.  If we instead get sucked into the idea that this is an Epic Fail we will lose all perspective, and actually start focussing on ourselves rather than the patient.

Do you ever say to yourself, “I’m such a bad therapist?”  I don’t.  Of course, I also don’t say, “I’m such a perfect therapist” either.  I do frequently think, “I was not at my best today,” or, “oooh, how come I keep missing that with patients!”  This helps me keep perspective so that I can get back in the game as soon as possible.

Whether you are a therapist, a gamer or someone else who is still breathing, chances are that you are failing sometimes.  In fact, this time of year with all its’ hype and expectations about being joyful and loving families can make you feel even more like a failure.  Some examples of Epic Fail statements that we think consciously or unconsciously include:

  • I’m a terrible parent.
  • I’m a terrible daughter/son.
  • I’m a terrible sex partner.
  • I’m a terrible worker.
  • I’m a terrible cook.
  • I’m a terrible student.

and the list could go on.

If any of those sounds like you, take a moment to reflect.  Is this really an Epic Fail?  Or are you distorting things?  Chances are you are not a perfect parent, child, worker, sex partner, student or anything else.  But if you really identify this as an Epic Fail, chances are you are solidifying a form of self-identity rather than accurately appraising yourself.

Why would we do that?  Well, one reason is that we learned those messages of Epic Failure as a child.  You probably still remember a few failures that can make your stomach churn if you think of them.  But as often, I think we grasp on to solid identities, even negative ones, so we can stop working on ourselves.  I’m just X, I’m the kind of person who can’t Y, Nobody ever thinks Z about me:  These all kill our curiousity about ourselves and help us stay stuck.

Mindfulness is about fun failure.  It is about being able to look at ourselves and reflect on ourselves without going to extremes.  Mindfulness is about being able to be curious rather than judgmental, having roominess in our minds and souls rather than rigidity.  This perspective leads to “Ooooh, I’m going to get that boss down this time.”  The other leads to hopelessness.

So try to remember this as the days are getting shorter and tensions may be rising:  Not all Failure is Epic.  And if we can be right-sized about our failures we can learn from them.  We can take an interest in our thoughts, feelings and behaviors rather than judge ourselves.  If we catch ourselves saying “what kind of monster I must be to hate Aunt Myrtle,” we can perhaps think, “oops, there I go again. Isn’t it odd/interesting that I feel hatred towards Aunt Myrtle, what’s THAT about?”

Eighty-five percent of the time gamers are failing.  And yes some of those are Epic, but the gamer attitude is to view those Epic Failures as moments of camaraderie and learning.  In life outside the game, do you treat the Epic Fail that way?  Do you seek out others and try to learn from the experience, or do you isolate?  There is always some observing ego in the game Epic Fail that is often lacking in our non-game life.  And in some ways that is understandable, you can’t always reset in life outside video games.

But consider this:  Where there is life there is hope.  If this was a true Epic Fail in your life you can still learn from it in time.  Failures are inevitable, but with time and perspective they can be instructive as well.  In the end I’d say that whether you think you’ve had an Epic Failure or not what matters most is how you move on from it.  Who knows, maybe the only real Epic Fail is the one where you give up..

Note:  No real Aunt Myrtles were hated in the writing of this post.

Like this post? There’s more where that came from, for only $2.99 you can buy my book. I can rant in person too, check out the Press Kit for Public Speaking info.