
An Open Letter to Parents, Teachers & Administrators Now That School Is Officially Closed

So Now What? : Education During a Pandemic
Parents, Educators and School Administrators are beginning to realize that this isn’t a break or a blizzard. Many of them are hitting the ground running, some are laying as low as possible this week and hoping things will settle, a few are immobilized. And every teacher I know or talk to is trying to figure out a strategies. Teachers, you know it is true: You LOVE strategies. And I love you for it. But these are strange times, and if your strategies or lack of them are making you feel stuck, maybe some of this will help. I have my two cents and then a list of resources for you.
First, my two cents, based on working in special education, public education, higher education and clinically over the past 25 years. The most important thing right now for kids right now is to stay calm, connected and establish new flexible routines at home. No homework packets, no busy work to keep them “occupied.” As tempting as this may be to administrators, educators and parents, that does not really lend to good learning, in fact it is this adherence to the status quo that partly got us into this problem to begin with.
- Play is OK. There is a wealth of research out there on the benefits of physical and digital play on cognition, visuospatiomotor skills, social emotional learning, and more. Allowing kids to engage in stress-relieving fun will make them better learners, keep them in contact with their peers, & feel mastery at a time when all of us are feeling little.
- Look for the embedded learning in the activity. This is different than trying to structure learning too much. When you are able to focus on your child between other things you are doing as a parent or online educator, try to identify what learning is happening with the play activity and maybe share it when the child is done. I say maybe because first and foremost this is for you to reassure you and calm your anxiety that your child or student is falling behind and will end up living in a cardboard box on the highway because they are playing Portal 2 rather than doing math sheets. Instead, watch the game a bit, and ask yourselves, are there things about physics embedded in the game? Does Plants Vs. Zombies have an opportunity to discuss task planning, sequencing, or math skills (hint, it does: all of the above.) Try to see the things that kids are always learning in play. Now don’t interrupt and ruin it.
Ok, I know that’s not enough for many of you. So here’s a list of some things educational innovators are offering for parents, kids and schools as resources for online learning:
From Continuity with Care to Zoom Memes for Self Quaranteens–My Internet Responds to COVID-19
Parenting (in RL) during a pandemic
Resources For Teaching and Learning During This Period of Social Distancing
THE COLLECTION :Explore thousands of artworks in the museum’s wide-ranging collection—from our world-renowned icons to lesser-known gems from every corner of the globe—as well as our books, writings, reference materials, and other resources.
Coping With COVID19: Advice for Parents & Educators
Brown Center Chalkboard (Ed policy thinking)
Invitation: Continuity with Care During COVID-19: Curation & Conversation (Curated and Crowdsourced Teaching Tips)
Kind Words: Lo fi chill beats to write to
Creating Educational Experiences through Narrative in Minecraft with Stephen Reid
Educators can also join one of my free Zoom groups (download free software at (http://zoom.us )
Thursdays 3-4 EST
COVID19 Educator Support: Not tech support. This meeting is to provide psychoeducation and collegial support for educators adjusting their teaching to COVID19
Meeting ID: 906-040-691
Password: 02554
Coping With COVID19: Advice for Parents & Educators
As anticipated, I’ve begun to receive a few communications from therapists, parents and educators about the social distancing impact on them and their children. The first question I get usually is something like “I’m worried about my kid playing too much video games, should I be setting limits on this with them?” I’m going to give you an answer that you may not want to here, but may actually improve mental health.
First, as I mentioned earlier this week, we are all going through an adjustment reaction to a rapidly emerging situation that is impacting everyone you know at the same time. This alone is rare in that usually some of us are not dealing with psychological upheaval when some others are. But this time, whether you are denying, minimizing, remaining guardedly calm, scared, or overreacting, you too are on the same continuum that we all are. So welcome. 😊
Local governments and schools, comprised of similarly recalibrating individuals are doing what they can to get ready for the wave of shut-downs, and this includes for many teachers and kids a break for 2 or more weeks and then perhaps online learning. Many workplaces are closing and reducing hours, which means that families are about to spend more time together in closer quarters with less emotional and financial resources than usual.
So, what can you do?
Here are my suggestions which are based on my work, research and thinking about psychology and technology over the past 25 years:
- Focus on social distancing (skip ahead if you already have embraced this idea.) This is the most important way we have to #FlattentheCurve and mitigate against higher more rapid infectivity. As has been written at https://staythefuckhome.com/sfw/ the concept of self-quarantine works to mitigate the spread of infectious diseases. We have known this since the 1400s. This is hard on social creatures, and can start to evoke guilt in caregivers. Compassionate ideas like visiting elderly shut-ins in person; babysitting groups and play-dates; local support gatherings are all bad ideas when it comes to a pandemic.
- Anticipate but don’t panic. It is very likely that more disturbing information and misinformation will happen in the next several days. If you note the way COVID19 is trending things are going to worse and scarier pretty quickly. Remember this is happening at a pace that is quicker than you may be used to and be prepared to change your mind and recalibrate family rules and limits much more rapidly and often. Be prepared to say, “I know I said X but now that I have more information it is Y, and I’m sorry that we keep changing the rules on you. Building that understanding with your child that things are moving quickly is part of the overarching message “I love you, I’m listening and I’m going to keep you safe.”
- Let kids play their games. I have mentioned elsewhere and will include below several posts debunking the common misconceptions that demonize video games. But here let me put it a different way: 2 or more weeks is a long time to be in your home nonstop with your children in a state of embattlement. Video games are a great way to practice social distancing: Kids can talk with their friends online, escape the heightened stress at home or in our communities, and feel a sense of being in control of something. It also provides you with the respite you know you are going to need after a couple of days. Lift restrictions if your authoritative parenting style can handle it. One exception here is helping kids build in 5 minute movement breaks every 45 minutes or so.
- Try to see it from their point of view. No matter how much your child or teen loves you, they are used to having several hours a day away from you too. Like you, they find being distracted from family life by work and friends reinvigorating, so please don’t frame this as an opportunity for more quality time. It’s disingenuous and sets everyone up to feel like a failure when the reality of quarantine sets in. Of course if they are open to spend time with you, accept the invitation as they deliver it: Now may be the perfect time for you to finally learn how to play Fortnite with them.
- No, YOU go outside and play. Often parents find themselves exhorting kids to go outside when they are secretly yearning for escape themselves. If your child can be left alone safely for a bit, go outside and take a walk, get some fresh air and calm down. You already believe that exercise will do you good, so focus on the one you can control, you! Of course, if your family walks/hikes/runs together and you are not looking for alone time, definitely invite them along with you.
- Get in the habit of zooming, calling, texting with others regularly. Your kids may be experts at this, but older family members may need help with the habit or technology. Or you might. Learn how to use Zoom, which is being offered for free for most kids. Call and help other folks learn how to set it up and test drive it. This week is the week to get practice before things get more hectic.
- Practice mindfulness games and meditation when possible. My colleague Chris Willard has some excellent suggestions on this here. Don’t force kids to do this though, as it will turn them off. If anything, trust that if they are intently playing a video game they may be engaging in a form of concentration meditation which isn’t bad either.
- Confront and redirect the inadvertent demonization of touch. This one is huge. This past week many have become acutely aware of how often they touch their face, or others without asking permission. To control the spread of infection this is crucial, and yet we need to also resist the urge to begin to perceive touch as unnecessary or lethal. Touch and reaching is a part of healthy infant development (Beebee, 2016.) It plays a significant role in focusing attention and attachment security in adolescence (Ito-Jager, 2017.) Children need to touch themselves as part of learning motor imagery (Conson, 2011) body ownership (Hara, 2015) and the assembly of “self” (Salomon, 2017.) Research has shown that adolescents in America already touch each other less and are more aggressive to peers than in another country sampled (Field, 1999); and for all of us touch quite probably helps us with emotional self-regulation (Grunwald, 2014.) Self-touch is a cornerstone of mindfulness and compassion meditation practices. Practice everyday precautions while at the same time but remember that touch is necessary for basic neurological and psychological well-being. Find adaptive ways to continue giving yourselves touch so we do not become a planetwide Harlow monkey experiment.
- Special note to educators: Relax your curriculum and pedagogy. Please push back on your administrators on this one. You are all home because there is a global pandemic with all its increased stress and uncertainty; this is not a snow day or break. Kids should be focused on social connection, play and reduced stress. You aren’t going to hit your benchmarks this semester. There, someone finally said it. You can encourage your parents to read to kids, spend more time together, offer fun reading lists or math sites, but please let go of your own overarching expectations and resist any arbitrary ones placed on you as much as possible. If someone starts talking about lesson plans, say “this is a pandemic.” If someone starts talking about kids’ grades, say, “this is a pandemic.” Part of your job as an educator is to educate kids and their families about adjusting in reaction to events, I’m sorry you got stuck with this event, but there you have it.
- Pick one or two trusted sources to keep yourself and your kids informed. Two much information overloads kids and adults alike. Most of us don’t need to know what JCPenney or Walmart have to say about COVID19. On the other hand, I have found the info from Harvard very helpful. The Joan Ganz Cooney Center has some great thinking and writing for education and child development. Your Teen Magazine is very accessible to parents. Dr. Kristin Moffitt from Boston Children’s has a short but useful interview on how to talk to your kids about COVID19
If after all that you are STILL focused on screen time, please check out these items for your consideration:
- Yeah? Tell That to Squirtle: The Fallacy of “Screen Time”
- Dopey About Dopamine: Video Games, Drugs, & Addiction
- Improving Our Aim: A Psychotherapist’s Take On Video Games & Violence
- The Internet & Real Relationships
- 10 Nonviolent Video Games
- Innovation is Dangerous & Gaming Causes Asperger’s
- Finally! A Mindfulness Approach to Video Games for Play-Based Social-Emotional Learning, Just in Time for the Holidays
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Streaming, Path of Exile & The Repetition Compulsion
As many of you know I have begun streaming. My goal in doing this is to both have some fun, and reach a wider audience when talking about psychodynamic concepts. This is my latest attempt, in which I talk about the Repetition Compulsion in terms of farming for a unique sword in the game Path of Exile. Keep in mind that the conversation about the repetition compulsion during the stream if for a general audience, and should not be substituted for seeking out medical advice or a mental health professional. My hope is that you’ll share it with the gamers in your life, therapy practice, class, etc. And of course if you sign up to follow my Twitch channel I’d be delighted!
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Can’t We All Just Game Along?
I had a powerful reminder about the prosocial nature of video games this week, and it was nowhere near a console screen. I was on my way home and ran into a Dunkin’ Donuts, in a town I’d never been to before and was unfamiliar with. I ended up waiting in a rather lengthy line and was a bit grumpy. I happened to be wearing a T-Shirt which said this:
I hadn’t worn it for ages, and had forgotten in fact I was wearing it until the cashier called out to me, “I love your shirt.” Cue the endorphins.
“Thank you,” I said, and smiled (which thanks to state bound learning probably cued my body to produce even more endorphins.) Waiting in the line seemed much more pleasant by this point. I ordered my coffee and sandwich and while waiting for them received another compliment from a customer walking by.
The third person to compliment me was a man in his 40s, scruffy and in jeans and t-shirt. “I love that game,” he said. “I haven’t played it in a while though.”
By now I was in a mood that allowed me to initiate conversations, so I asked “What are you playing nowadays.”
He proceeded to tell me that his 14 year-old daughter had gotten him into Fortnite. She had enjoyed it initially for the crafting, he said, because she really enjoyed Minecraft; but now that they were playing together she was enjoying the combat as well. His face lit up as he recounted how much fun they were having together. I told him about a study that had been done by Brigham Young that indicated increased levels of protective factors against depression. He smiled at that, and we both went on our way.
We spend so much time debating the neurological impact of playing video games that we often lose sight of another dimension; that of talking about playing video games. Talking about arts and culture is a powerful social adhesive. It identifies commonalities, allows for compliments and increased levels of engagement with others, allows us to recall exciting moments and share them. All of these activities in turn facilitate attachment, and increase a sense of well-being on the neurological level. That was the best line I’ve waited in a ages!
We need to find a way to get that message to Salty Sally the Social Worker and Morose Martin the Mental Health Counselor, whose eyes grow dull at the mention of gaming when their patients bring it up. “How much time are you playing Candy Crush?” they say, in uninviting tones, and eye such T-shirts as a clear sign of video game addiction. The next patient, who comes in with a T-Shirt of Monet’s “Water Lilies,” will get a compliment on it and no such screening for an Impressionist Art Addiction. In fact, the WHO didn’t include Art Disorder this go round at all, unless you include the art form of the video game.
In this current political climate, where we are so polarized, I wonder how many bridges (Minecraft or other) might be built if we paused to ask strangers in line if they play any games? I imagine Republicans, Democrats and Independents alike play something.
If Teams Valor, Instinct, and Mystic can all get along together raiding in Pokemon Go, perhaps we can too..
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The Crisis Behind Crises
So far in 2018 alone, I have worked nationwide with the aftermath of one homicide/suicide in a video game server community; one threat issued over another; and 3 new requests for consultations from clinicians on how to improve their work with families and individuals related to online technology. Schools are now fielding multiple incidents of threatening language in chat rooms that get brought to their attention, and not necessarily handling them well. Multiple arraignments in district courts are pending because someone expressed violent language on gaming servers that was deemed threatening. Youth are ending up on probation for this.
I know, you’re probably thinking that I’m about to blame the technology, the erosion of family values, the rise of violence or some other social ill. I’m not. As I reflect over several of these cases, the common symptom I see is not mental illness or family dysfunction, but a crisis in digital literacy.
What all of these cases have in common is that before they got to the emergent stage, there were several opportunities for kids to solve their own problems; for educators to teach; for parents to engage or for therapists to help; if they’d seen the opportunities and had some education in digital literacy. Too often we see the end result of our dismissing or demonizing tech use. “Just leave the server, or Facebook,” we say, unintentionally further isolating kids. “You need to stop playing so many video games,” we opine, citing sketchy research to take away the one thing a person may experience some competency doing.
As a therapist and educator who has worked for the past twenty-five years with emerging technologies in mental health, I have been helping schools, clinics and workplaces identify vulnerabilities before, during and after crises. I assure you that before is the most useful and least utilized. I’m hoping you and your administrators will consider doing this differently. I have started offering custom educational offerings on Healthy Boundaries in the Digital Age, and you can find out more about it here. I’m still doing my other presentations as well.
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Mindfulness, Minecraft & The I Ching
Video Games can be a form of mindfulness meditation, both playing and watching them. The Grokcraft Staff take you on a meditative creative session as we begin to build our I Ching Sculpture Park. Watch, listen, and enjoy..
For more info on joining the Grokcraft project, go to http://grokcraft.com . We are launching Grokcraft with an introductory subscription of $9.99 a month, & subscribers who join now will be locked in at that rate for as long as they are subscribed. If any of this appeals to you, please check out our new site at http://grokcraft.com & please spread the word to anyone you think might find this resource useful!
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Evocation and Mindfulness: Or, How to Think Better
Like other art forms, video games can be both a mirror and a candle held up to our culture, at times reflecting it and at times revealing things about it. Normally I direct my posts primarily at people: therapists, gamers, educators, parents. But today I want to include the company that produces World of Warcraft as well. We have a crisis regarding thinking, and although I don’t think WoW created it at all, it has reflected it in a recent game mechanic change.
I am referring to a change mages that happened recently, where the spell Evocation was replaced by Rune of Power. For people not familiar with the game, here’s a simple explanation. Mages cast spells, but spells require an energy called mana, which gets used up gradually as you cast spells. How much mana you start with depends on your character’s intellect, and once you have used up your mana, you can’t cast any more spells until it is replenished. To replenish it you can either wait and it will gradually return (not the greatest idea in combat,) or eat and drink (not possible while you are in combat.) Or you could in the older days cast Evocation, which meant you stood in place as the spell was going, gain 15% of your total mana instantly and another 45% of your total mana over 6 sec. Move or get attacked, and the spell broke.
This recently was replaced with Rune of Power, which places a rune on the ground, which lasts for 1 min. While standing within 5 yds of it, your mana regeneration is increased by 75% and your spell damage is increased by 15%. You have to keep remembering to replace it every minute, but that’s not the problem. It may even be an easier game mechanic, but that’s not the problem either. My problem with it is how it reflects our dysfunctional attitude about thinking, and specifically our tendency to think of thinking as separate from doing something.
We live in a culture where people frequently worry about things, and in fact have ruminations that are intrusive. Many people report feeling hijacked by their minds with worrying or intrusive thoughts. And yet at the same time, few of us seem to mark our time and set it aside specifically for thinking. We schedule appointments to do things, but thinking isn’t one of them. We treat thinking, which is intangible, as if it can occur in the same space as doing other activities that are more observable and tangible. And then we are surprised when our minds rebel and hijack our thinking with thoughts and feelings that come unbidden, when all along we have been failing to cultivate the practice of intentional, mindful thinking about things.
This is where I think Blizzard and Wow initially had it right with Evocation. It was acknowledging an important truth, that Thinking IS doing something, and when done intentionally it occupies time and has benefits. Sure you weren’t able to do other things while casting Evocation, but isn’t that the point? In the real world, when you want to think deeply and seriously about something, you really do need to be intentional about it, and make a space in your day to do it. Rune of power definitely embraces the multitasking model, which encourages you to set up a rune and then go about your other business while keeping half an eye on it to know when to refresh. Multitasking is not inherently a bad thing, but there are times and places that intentional thinking may be more appropriate and less anxiety-provoking.
Part of helping patients learn to manage worrying is often to help them set up a specific time for worrying about things. This “worry time” can be a placeholder in the day or week which the patient uses when an intrusive worry enters into their thinking: They can dismiss it by deciding to put that on the agenda for the scheduled worry time. This is a way of training your mind to be intentional about what you choose to think about and when. But implicit in this is the idea that training your mind to think about things intentionally is a learned skill.
You can apply this to many different aspects of your life and work. If you are growing your private practice, when was the last time you set aside an hour to think deeply about your business plan or clinical focus. I’m not talking about daydreaming here, I’m talking about sustained intentional thought. Clinically, do you set aside supervision time to think deeply about patients? As students do you take 15 minutes after each article to think specifically about the reading? As parents, when was the last time you said to your co-parent, let’s make a time to think together about how our child is doing in life at home and school. Classroom teachers, when was the last time you asked students to take 5 minutes and think quietly about the classroom topic?
Another challenge here is the confusion of tongues around the concept of thinking. Self-help gurus often exhort us to stop thinking about things and JUST DO IT. But I don’t think they are talking about intentional thinking, I think they are talking about reactive or intrusive thinking. Procrastination is reactive thinking, worrying can be intrusive thinking. Those are often roadblocks to success, but the form of thinking I have been referring to is perhaps better described as a form of concentration meditation. Concentration meditation has come to be seen by many of us as concentrating on an image, or a candle, or chanting, or a revered object, but that is not necessarily the case, and in fact it is limiting.
What if your idea is the revered object? What if your thought process about your work, child, patient, class is worthy of your undivided attention? What if you were to schedule a specific time to think about a certain project?
If you are one of those detractors who say, “I just don’t have time to think,” I don’t buy it. Thinking time is not a luxury item, although it may be a learned discipline to set aside a few minutes at a time to do it. So please take a second and schedule a time on your calendar to think about an idea that is important to you. Schedule a time to hold your random worries and thoughts and show up at that appointed time to seriously consider them. I suspect this will free up more mental space and time than you may imagine.
And please Blizzard, bring back Evocation. I miss it, and the important life lesson in mindfulness it has to teach us.
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Avatars & The Curated Self
If I ever meet James Cameron, I hope I will remember to ask him if it was a coincidence that he chose to the make the aliens blue. His movie, Avatar, garnered 3 Academy Awards for it’s epic tale of humanity’s encounter with the Na’Vi, largely through the creation of avatars, body forms that humans beam their consciousness into so they can mingle and fraternize with the locals.
The concept of the avatar comes originally from Hinduism, and refers to the concept of a God or Supreme Being deliberately descending to earth in a manifest form. One of the most popular gods for doing this is Vishnu, also blue. The concept of avatar in Hinduism is more complicated than this, but the piece of it that pertains to this post is the general concept of the attempt of a supreme being to incarnate part of itself to enter the world. There is an inherent diminution or derivative quality to it.
If you are more familiar with video games than Hinduism, you are probably more familiar with the concept of an avatar meaning the graphical representation of the player’s character in the game. When we play Pac-Man, our avatar manifests in the video game as a little yellow circle with a mouth that races around gobbling dots. Over the decades games and graphics have become capable of more sophisticated avatars ranging from the Viking-like Nords of Skyrim to the soldiers of Call Of Duty. As these video game worlds proliferate, players descend into them with avatars of many shapes, sizes and species. Some games, like Eve Online, allow you to customize the features of your avatar extensively; others allow you to pick from a limited number. We are always diminished by the process of taking on an avatar. Even if the powers an avatar has in the video game world are immense, it is derivative of the complexity of being human.
What is interesting is that most of us use avatars every day online, we just never realize it. Video games are just one form of social media, and avatars abound in all of them. The graphic may be as simple as our picture next to a blog post or comment, or a video on Youtube. But in the 21st century most of us are digital citizens and use one form of avatar or another. Some people in the world will only ever know us through our avatar in a video game or Second Life. And yet we know something of each other.
I think more and more of us are becoming aware of the connection between the avatar and the curated self, the aspects of our psychological self we choose to represent online. The curated self is the part of ourselves we have some ability to shape, by what we disclose, what graphics we choose, and how we respond to others. Like an avatar, the curated self at its best is deliberate. I say at its best, because although the curated self is in our care, we can also be careless with it.
Recently I posted a video of myself on my YouTube channel entitled “Should Therapists & Social Workers Post Videos Of Themselves On YouTube?” In making the video I chose to wear a bike helmet, and by the end of the post was using the bike helmet as an example of the risks we take when we opt to attempt innovation of our curated self. The video was designed to inspire critical discussion and thinking, and it did just that. In some groups where it appeared people described the video and points it was illustrating as “brilliant.” Other groups interpreted it as an instructional video on how to advertise your therapy practice and lambasted it. There was a myriad of responses, and I’m sure even more from people who opted not to comment on it. I received a number of likes of it, and a number of dislikes.
What I think is important and instructional here was how people began to comment through their avatars as if they were addressing the whole person I am rather than an avatar. And they made incorrect assumptions ranging from my age to my motives. The bike helmet and my posture on the video became the target for some incredible nastiness disguised as constructive criticism. From the safety of their own avatars they hurled some invectives at who they thought I was and what they thought I was doing in front of an audience of other avatars who alternately joined in, were silent, emailed me privately to offer words of support, or publicly commented on what they saw. The irony to me was that people began to demonstrate all of the roles we encounter in “cyberbullying,” which was part of what the video also touched on. In a perhaps not surpising parallel process, we got to see and play out the sorts of dynamics that our patients and children experience all the time.
We need to remember that every avatar is a derivative of the person. It is connected enough that we have attachments and responses to it. We can feel proud or ashamed, hurt or healed through our avatars. In fact, research from Nick Yee on “The Proteus Effect” has shown that playing a game with a powerful avatar for 90 seconds can give the player increased self-confidence that persists for up to 6 hours. It stands to reason that if someone experiences their avatar as weak or socially unacceptable for a brief time there may be lasting effects as well. Behind the guy in a bike helmet is someone else. He may be a faculty member at Harvard, a sensitive fellow, a father, a student, a man who just lost his partner, a person with a criminal record, or any, all or none of these. But he is always more than the derivative of his avatar. We need to practice being mindful of this and model it as we train others to be digital citizens. It is counterproductive to sound off on cyberbullying to our children or grandchildren, when they can Google us online and see us doing it ourselves.
We also need to help our patients, their families, and colleagues understand the active role we need to take in curating ourselves online. We need to understand what may happen when we put certain things out there. For therapists this includes the dilemma of putting out a curated self that resembles what kind of work you would do, while not disclosing or conveying more than you want the world to know. The example I always use with students and consultees is how I talk about my family but never who they are in particular. This is deliberate, because it is no big disclosure that I have a family, everyone on the planet has one of sorts with the possible exception of Dolly the cloned sheep. But beyond that I curate a private self, and let folks project what they may. If we put out comments describing patients or coleagues as “screwed up,” we are also curating ourself, I suggest poorly. We need to be mindful that most groups we participate online in are open and searchable. Many of my colleagues became therapists at least in part because they didn’t want to be known and thought the best defense was a good offense (“We’re here to talk about you, not me.”) They’re used to sharing the gallows humor with the team, and think the same applies to online. I’m with Rilke on this one: “for here there is no place/that does not see you. You must change your life.”
To paraphrase Wittgenstein, “our self is everything that is the case,” not just one avatar, blog, string of emails or video; not even the composite of all of them. Nor is our curated self everything that is the case. We’re more than our Facebook likes or our Twitter following. Human beings are so much more, much more wondrous and tragic than the curated self. We descend into the Internet and are diminished, but do bring some deliberate part of ourselves along. We will only ever know hints and glimmers of ourselves and each other online. As for the rest:
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” –Wittgenstein
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Bio Breaks
If you’re a therapist looking to join a group of innovative colleagues for supervision, you may want to take advantage of this. 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. Subscribe to the Epic Newsletter!
Minecraft & The Uncanny, Part 2
This is the second of a two part series on Minecraft. Up until now you could only read it if you bought my book, but I am posting it here to give you a sense of what the book is like. You can buy it here. More importantly, I’m hoping you will find the topic interesting enough to vote for my presentation proposal on Minecraft & Mindfulness for SXSW this year. You can do that here.
In Minecraft, nothing is present-at-hand, at least initially, until you realize that the ground you are running on or the mountain you are climbing aren’t just that, they are materials. You can dig up stone to make a furnace, then bake bricks out of clay, build a house and so on. The world gradually becomes ready-to-hand.
There is no avoiding the sense of throwness when you begin playing Minecraft. It comes with very few directions, although there is plenty of info on the web to be had. The downloadable beta allows you to play single and multi-player, with the single being a good way to practice the basic mechanics. The multiplayer version opens up a whole new vista.
The multiplayer game is hosted on individual servers all over the world, some of which you can log into for free, others for a small fee. Once logged in, the virtual world is a huge massively multiplayer sandbox, which can be a very social experience. The cooperative building in some of these worlds is incredible. My first journey to a server in France threw me into a world which included a vast underground city beneath a dome of molten lava. Players are allowed to explore the world, and at a certain distance from their neighbors mine, farm and build. Like Second Life, you can port to various places on the server, and encounter anything ranging from a Waterslide Park to a model of Hyrule, all built out of the game materials by the players.
Once in the multiplayer world, the social element of the game can become compelling. People on chat are offering to sell gold ingots, suits of armor they crafted, or tracts of land they have developed, for both in-game and out of game monies. You can have as much or as little to do with that as you like, and you can teleport to far-off corners of the map if you want to build and play in undeveloped lands.
In its simple mechanics, Minecraft allows us to glimpse the uncanny experience that I would suggest all video games have. Video games are a unique art form in that they are both interactive and aesthetic by nature. In fact they are far more stimulating and less anergic than watching television, and stimulate more regions of the brain.
Video games allow us to experience our throwness in a new world, and the animistic state of being inherent in the uncanny. We are never completely at home in the world of the game, although the game may become more familiar over time (or not, in the case of the indie game Limbo.) We are always just visiting, strangers in a strange land. But within the game world, mana and magic are also real, and our thoughts and strategies can quickly and permanently change the world.
Psychotherapy is in many ways, another sandbox game. There really is no way to win in it. The office becomes a setting for a potential space that can be shaped and altered by the patient and something new created. Psychotherapy is also an uncanny space, one that resembles the world outside the office and yet does not. It is a place for “everything that ought to have remained … secret and hidden but has come to light.” Within that space, the patient experiences hauntings by ghostly relationships from the past, encounters the internal monsters of the drives, and explores the wishes behind their secret injurious powers. Unexplored and avoided, these have calcified into symptoms, and the anxious, exciting, process of therapy helps the patient break down that calcification for a more flexible psyche.
Any child or gamer knows that play is a serious and dangerous business. There is always the risk of annihilation, and no place worth going to doesn’t have its hazards. But there are great treasures to be found in the game. Further, the emotional and intellectual changes encountered within the game can then be taken out of it into the daily life of the gamer. This is one of the reasons that video games are so compelling. Why else would people spend hours making houses out of pixel bricks?
Both psychotherapy and video games create very real thought and feeling states in people, and that is part of their curative power. In this book I hope I have shown that they can restore a sense of purpose and achievement that our patients have lost. I have discussed how they can help people stay connected with others over great distances in times of duress, help us feel the sense of achievement necessary to learn and change behaviors, and explore aspects of their personalities that may be less easily seen or developed in their daily lives. I have also explored how we can use the experience and metaphors from video games with patients to help them understand ego defenses, communication patterns and strategies that impact their relationships, and apply game mechanics to their lives to change them. I have tried to discuss the stigmatization of gamers and technology in terms of diversity, in particular social class. Finally, I hope I have shown how therapists can apply the principles from video games and gamification to impact both their clinical work and business skills.
All of this pales in comparison to doing the actual work, and by this I mean two things. The first and most obvious one is the practice of psychotherapy. Theory is a necessary but insufficient precursor to clinical practice and healing. The second piece of actual work will be for the therapist to begin playing some video games. Reading is not the same as doing, and it is only by entering the uncanny and enriching world of the video game that therapists can hope to truly understand them. Never has play been more important in our work, and never has understanding video games been more urgent in healing the world. To do so we need to rethink our attitudes and reconsider our biases towards gaming and technology.
It’s time to reset.
Gamer Therapist is on vacation, so we’ll see you in two weeks! In the meantime, please vote for our minecraft panel at SXSW!
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Tower Defense & Executive Functioning
Some of the most important tasks the human brain performs are known as the executive functions. According to the National Center for Learning Disabilities, executive function is “a set of mental processes that helps connect past experience with present action. People use it to perform activities such as planning, organizing, strategizing, paying attention to and remembering details, and managing time and space.” As such, the executive functions are crucial to the learning process over the life cycle.
Like many phenomenon in mental health, executive functions were focused on initially in regards to populations that had some deficits in them. With the advent and prevalence of the diagnosis of ADHD, as well as the study of learning and learning disabilities, educators and therapists began to become familiar with a concept that had previously been of most interest to neuroscientists. We still tend to think of executive functioning from a pathology-based approach, only paying attention to how they work when they don’t work.
The truth is everyone has executive functions, which are a combination of nature and nurture, and can develop well into adulthood. They can also deteriorate for a variety of reasons, from traumatic brain injury to Alzheimer’s disease. And there is a body of research which suggests that mental and physical exercise can help maintain, if not improve our executive functions as we age. Not surprisingly, as the Baby Boomers age, interest and research grows in this area. At both ends of the life cycle, our focus on the executive functions are widening beyond pathology to the optimal environments for human learning. How might we get better at planning, attending, strategizing, and managing time and space?
My suggestion: Start playing more tower defense games.
Tower defense is a particular genre of video games, one which in general focuses on on preventing the progress of an enemy army across a map. This is done by the use of towers which have varying abilities, costs to build, and points earned from downing enemies. You don’t necessarily need to have towers in the game: Plants Vs. Zombies for example is an example of a tower defense game where the plants are the equivalent of towers, with special abilities used to defend against the march of those pesky undead across the lawn.
More recently I have been fascinated with one of the latest iterations of tower defense games on the iPad, Kingdom Rush. You start out with a variety of maps and coins for building. You can use one of 4 basic tower types. There are barracks which have soldiers who can fight and slow down the invaders. There are artillery towers which drop bobs for an area wide (AOE) damage. There are marksman towers which target individuals and fire arrows or guns. Finally, there are magician towers with wizards firing spells of various types.
Each invading monster has different strengths and vulnerabilities, which are discovered by trying out different towers and noting their effects. As the invading army is always moving forward in waves, the time element requires you to plan which towers to build first, where to place them, and what upgrades to focus on. To do this requires a tremendous amount of strategy, organization and time management. You also need to make decisions, including how long to delay gratification. The more powerful towers require you to save up many more coins to buy them. Upgrades that you can select from a talent tree add another layer of choice and complexity.
In short, to succeed in Kingdom Rush you need to have good executive functions. It isn’t enough to have good hand/eye coordination or reaction time. You need to be able to learn from your past experiences, and often switch strategies midway through the game. You need to recall which towers are best for different situations and monsters. There is a map to be managed in space and a marching army and builders to manage in time. You need to recognize both immediate feedback and notice trends. And there are multiple towers and units to keep track of.
The more I play Kingdom Rush, the more struck I am by how many if not all of my executive functions are required to succeed. I can see where using this game could be both a useful assessment tool and intervention for deficits in EF. It also has reminded me how necessary executive functions are in terms of managing money as well. The ability to recall prices, to budget and pace spending, and set up investments that accrue value over time–all these economic experiences are embodied in the game.
Speaking of economy, you can try this game for free if you have a computer in your office or classroom here. And you can buy it for a whopping $2.99 for your iPad. Check it out, and see if you agree that it might be a fun, feedback rich way to challenge your executive functions.
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Unplanned Obsolescence: Rethinking Play Therapy
Recently I ordered a copy of Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, which I plan to try this week. As I have mentioned in a previous post, I am not easily interested by first-person shooters, but as a gamer-affirmative therapist I can’t let my low interest get in the way of educating myself.
I once calculated that by a conservative estimate I had played approximately 27,000 games of Uno in my decade working in a public school as a clinical social worker. I drove around with a ton of board games and a sand tray as well. I had learned the value of play therapy at the first placement I ever had as an intern, from Winnicott’s squiggle game to the infamous Talking, Feeling, Doing Game. This is all a roundabout way of establishing my “street cred” for valuing play therapy.
Back then, I would go home from work, and many times play Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask on the Nintendo 64. My roommate at the time liked to hang out with me while I played and we chatted about life, education (he was a teacher) and politics. He also liked to imitate the fairy guide in the game, and would often cry out, “Listen!” and offer a couple of tips.
In all those years, it never occurred to me that I could have played those games at school if I’d had an office (and some years I did) or that there was a disconnect between what I was doing with the students (card playing) and what they were talking about (Nintendo, XBox, Playstation.) I could hold a conversation with them about these things because I played them in my spare time, but the idea of playing them with my students didn’t register as, well, therapeutic.
I am not alone in this. Many if not most play therapists are not inclined to play video games with their patients, and it is time to rethink this. When 97% of the boys and 94% of the girls we work with play video games, it is no longer an outlier. But there are a few fallacies which I think get in the way of play therapists integrating play therapy into the 21st century.
One I hear frequently is that video games don’t require imagination, or offer projections to explore. But I think this is contempt prior to investigation for the most part. The proliferation of video games is itself the best evidence that there is imagination going into each generation of games, which are produced by imaginative people who must have been able to develop their imagination in part through video games. And we don’t start each session making our children build their own dolls and dollhouse from scratch. We use available tools that do to an extent always structure and limit the imagination. For example, why does the dollhouse have a pointy roof and two floors? This is limiting, and in fact didn’t represent 90% of the urban population I worked with at all. And few play therapists would avoid using Elmo puppets on the grounds that it limits the imagination of the child, even though Elmo is clearly an icon of popular culture.
In fact, play has often had its inception in the popular culture of the time. We may take chess for granted now, but when it came into being it was a reflection of a medieval monarchy, with kings, queens, and bishops. Yet play therapists often fall prey to nostalgia, if not luddism, and maintain that there are certain games and play that are relational and therapeutic, and others, usually the modern ones, are not.
This brings me to what I suspect is another reason we resist using video games in play therapy, which is the therapist’s fear of being incompetent or failing at the unfamiliar