games

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

April 23, 2020 by langloimsw Leave a Comment

The following is a letter I wrote in response to Massachusetts’ School Closures Due to COVID19. It may or may not be applicable to your school system.

Hello all,

I decided to jot down a few thoughts, which you can take or leave with a grain of salt, as someone who has been a teacher, special educator, school social worker, psychotherapist, special needs foster parent and researcher over the past quarter of a century. I have been a Gen Xer since birth. I have heard how stressed parents have been getting trying to deal with online learning and although I can’t dispense clinical advice online, I have some informed opinions. This may not be what you want to hear, but here goes nothing:

For parents:

1) Please stop trying to be so productive. Our country is obsessed with productivity, it is part of what makes so many kids and adults so anxious. Let your kids eat untoasted pop tarts, sit and watch their iphones, hum to themselves, whatever.

2) Do not cook for your children all the time. Color code microwave speed buttons and have the oldest learn to “cook” for the youngest when possible. Leave out bread and some plastic knives and forks and materials for PBJs. They will be fine if they only drink milk for a day or three. They are in home quarantine not on a cruise ship, and you are not “the help.” If you refuse to let them fend for themselves and become resentful it is ON YOU.

3) Stop worrying about online learning, schools are going to need to assess kids’ academic baseline when school commences in September and reteach anyway. I give you permission to ignore the constant emails from school. They are anxious too. Consider sending your teacher a courteous email saying that your family has determined that your family’s emotional health and domestic harmony takes precedence over math and science facts, but that you may have your kiddo record a brief Youtube explaining a principle in Physics they learned playing Portal 2, or the concept of sequencing as evidenced in Plants Vs. Zombies. Assure their history teacher they will do the same for someone in Assassin’s creed. What are they going to do, suspend your child? THERE’S. NO. SCHOOL. Please don’t worry about this. If your child is an overachiever and feels more secure or relevant doing all assignments disregard the above. If your child had frequent suspensions or school phobia because education WAS their primary stressor please do not try to recreate the stress at home, but instead embrace this divine gift for the next few months.

4) Try to throw money at problems if at all possible. If everyone is online at home invest in the highest speed internet plan available. Get an extra iPad or PC or if possible get one for everyone. For every article about too much screen time I can send you two that discuss the benefits of screen time. If you all can Netflix/game/chat simultaneously without lag you will get along much much better.

5) Please don’t worry about screen time. Please don’t worry about video games causing violence. That is a moral panic and poorly correlated research concept. In fact, more of us have been on screens/gaming this year than ever, and it is the first March in 18 years we haven’t had a school shooting in the U.S. There are lots of articles which can show you how to use video games for educational purposes I can share with you: This is only to calm you down—play is inherently beneficial to cognitive development, so ideally you would just let kids play the games they like.

6) That said, if your family wants to sleep in the traditional fashion, i.e., at night, please switch from visual things (screens, reading, staring contests) to auditory ones (Audible stories, music, campfire songs) 90 minutes or so before your target bedtimes. When our eyes are working they tell our brains to stay awake. Listening to talking puts them to sleep—you probably know this already if you still attempt talking to your teenager.

Teachers:

1) Be subversive. Please try to avoid passing on institutional expectations if you think they are performance-based. If you are still a fan of performance-based expectations at this time please seek out therapy. The rest of you make silly videos of yourselves that showcase the creativity that got you into education in the first place. Dig deep I know it is there, I have worked with many of you and know that most of you don’t hold to the old adage “never let them see you smile before Christmas Break.”

2) Take care of yourselves. Meet colleagues online for coffee via Zoom and complain about the children or your families or whatever just like you used to during your 5 minutes of unscheduled time. Revel in the new freedom that comes from being able to use the bathroom whenever you want without worrying about 25 people waiting for you in your classroom. Do not assign any homework that you are not looking forward to reviewing 30 times while your spouse is playing the television too loudly. Remember those headaches, they haven’t been there for several weeks have they? Take the hint, don’t assign any homework at all.

3) Focus on your student’s parents more than the students. They don’t know how to be you, most of them weren’t trained to be you. Try not to point out that this demonstrates how you do more than childcare and deserve the summers off. Don’t go there. Please just reassure them that they are doing enough to keep their children safe and psychologically sound, and that their children will not be unemployed and living in a cardboard box at the airport, or worse still at home, when they are 30 because school stopped early this year.

4) Create a filter for email from your school admins. Do not look at it more than once a day. They are so overwhelmed they will not notice. They may have children at home they are feeding pop tarts to. They are probably dealing with budgets now. They are definitely giggling inappropriately sometimes.

School Administrators:

1) Please don’t be defensive. I know, nobody understands what you do, and they never call you unless there is a problem. It is lonely at the top, and now the top has multiple abandoned buildings that still are falling apart. It is also true that the Bureau of Special Education Appeals is forging ahead with zoom like the rest of us, so no respite there. And even though you all look (and are) tough I know you feel responsible for every single adult, adolescent and child in your district for everything. You aren’t but I know you feel that way. Try to remember that every one of the 200 emails/calls you got today doesn’t know about the other 199. Only you do, and it is exhausting. So breathe—getting defensive will only make it worse.

2) Model Self-Care. Mention loudly to your teachers and principals and assistant principals that you are in therapy, have a zoom peer group, whatever you are doing to keep yourself from going off the deep end. Limit your exciting emails about resources to one digest a day at the end of the day. (They won’t be reading them until the next morning anyway, see Teachers, 4, above.)

3) Encourage silliness wherever possible. Anticipate filling out state waivers for EVERYTHING this summer. Kick every can that has “MCAS,” “Curriculum Frameworks” or other bureaucratic jargon down the road you can. Be aware that you are demonstrating unprecedented leadership in our recent history. Did Churchill talk about “standards-based assessment” during the Blitz? I think not.

4) Plan to pivot. There are many reasons to believe that there will be another round of this in the Fall/Winter. Use the current closure to plan intentionally with your colleagues. Develop a district-wide pandemic plan if you don’t have one. But only do work “work” a few hours a day. The rest of the time have fun or be outrageous. Stream you and a few students playing Call of Duty on Twitch for the District. Pioneer using Tik Tok for Social Emotional Learning (SEL in 20 second increments? How can that NOT fit somewhere in the middle school schedule?)

There, I know that none of you may have wanted to hear that, and you may not agree, but I thought I’d give it a shot. I’ve been hearing too many of you being way too hard on yourselves during this pandemic, confusing “need for structure” with “maintaining standards.” This is not Lord of the Flies: Society will not fall into chaos if we relax our educational and parenting goals for a few months, but we might be able to lower the incidences of domestic violence and substance abuse if we can reorder our priorities a wee bit. Thanks for reading.

Filed Under: Gamer Therapy Tagged With: adolescents, behavior change, children, covid19, education, gamers, games, psychology, technology

Streaming, Path of Exile & The Repetition Compulsion

June 11, 2019 by langloimsw Leave a Comment

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!

Find this post interesting? I can speak in person too: Click here for Public Speaking info & Press Kit. And, for only $4.99 you can buy my book. 🙂

Filed Under: Gamer Therapy Tagged With: addiction, adolescents, behavior change, education, Freud, game theory, gamers, games, gaming, path of exile, psychoanalysis, psychodynamic, psychology, psychotherapy, repetition compulsion, stress, technology, therapy, twitch, video games, Web 2.0

Tetris Beats Nazis: Video Games & Worry

November 5, 2018 by langloimsw Leave a Comment

This week I have two stories about video games, one that causes worry and one that effects it.

The first, worrisome, one concerns white nationalism, video games and propaganda. For as long as we have had Nazis, Aryanism, or White Nationalism, we have had its propaganda. Art is one of the most powerful medium that propaganda gets disseminated: Paintings by Erler and Feuerbach; film by Leni Riefenstahl; and music curated by Axis Sally were all examples of how the art form was used to convey Nazism. It should surprise no one that 21st century art mediums such as video games have their own share of deplorables.

One example, which I won’t link to, from the early 21st century was “Ethnic Cleansing” which came out in 2002. Since then there have been games like “Muslim Massacre” and “Zog’s Nightmare.” The games primarily target, Jews, Blacks, and Latinos, and are often on or linked to Nazi sites. Meanwhile, young people may find themselves being solicited online, where low-to-no moderation servers and bulletin boards like Discord and 4Chan provide a safe place to foster white supremacy.

Today, NPR came out with a story worth your attention, on the rise of recruitment efforts by white hate groups in online gaming environments. Now please don’t blame Fortnite. Most video games, even the violent ones, do not blatantly pedal nazi propaganda. The few that do are pretty explicit about it. What we need to worry about is how disillusioned and disenfranchised young men are vulnerable to being recruited by domestic terror groups, and of course they will be doing recruitment where youth are, including video games. My recommendation? When hate crimes or white supremacy comes up in your family discussions please ask your kids if they ever here things online that sound like hate speech or stereotypes. Assure them that you are more interested in hearing about what they may be experiencing than pulling the plug on Call of Duty, and that this is just one thing that people need to keep an eye on in online communities.

If anything shows up in their chat, consider taking screenshots and sending it to Discord or the chat platform you are using to let them know about the hate speech or recruitment. Both things are violation of TOS, and if your child doesn’t send it and someone else does they be banned themselves. Above all, keep an eye on gameplay, the content and the chat happening while it is happening. You don’t have to be Big Brother all the time, but let family members know that occasionally the games and chat need to be without headphones so you get a sense of who their “friends” are, just like you would if the friends were visiting your home in body.

Now that I have you worried about something new, go play some Tetris. That’s right, a recent study published in Emotion, a psychology journal, found that Tetris helped distract people from worrying by helping them achieve flow experiences. I have discussed before how distraction gets a bad rap and is actually evolutionarily adaptive. Here is some more research to support that theory!

So, now that I’ve made you worry, go play a little Tetris. You can do that here. Then, tomorrow, go vote.

Find this post interesting? I can speak in person too: Click here for Public Speaking info & Press Kit. And, for only $4.99 you can buy my book. 🙂

Filed Under: Gamer Therapy Tagged With: activism, adolescents, behavior change, children, gamers, games, gaming, psychoanalysis, psychodynamic, social media, tetris, video games, worry

Can’t We All Just Game Along?

July 16, 2018 by langloimsw Leave a Comment

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..

Find this post interesting? I can speak in person too: Click here for Public Speaking info & Press Kit. And, for only $4.99 you can buy my book. 🙂

Filed Under: Gamer Therapy Tagged With: adolescents, behavior change, buddhism, candy crush, children, education, gamers, games, gaming, minecraft, play, pokemon, psychodynamic, psychotherapy, stress, technology, therapy, video games

Taking Leaps: Fortnite, HIPAA & Psychotherapy

May 31, 2018 by langloimsw Leave a Comment

“You keep dying,” Sam* said. The annoyance in the 9 year old’s voice was palpable. I looked at my avatar lying face down on the screen. Another of the 100 players in the game, appearing as a brunette woman in sweats sporting a ponytail, was doing a victory dance with her rifle over me. Sam was nowhere to be seen on the screen, but I knew he was hiding somewhere in the game, and seething.

“You’re disappointed in me,” I said calmly. A moment of quiet.

“Yeah.”

“You were hoping I’d be better at this, as good as you or maybe better, and it’s frustrating.”

“Yeah… Can we try again?”

And so we tried again and again, and while we did I talked with Sam about the other adults who were disappointments to him, who kept leaving or letting him down. And I guessed that we were also talking about his frustration and disappointment in himself. And at the end of our appointment I promised I would practice Fortnite, the game we had been playing. We had turned on our webcams again so we could see each other to finish the session, so I could see that he brightened at this idea.

“Nice to see you again,” I said. He smiled faintly.

“You too.” His screen went dark.

As I reflect on the work I do with patients, meeting them where they are at, I am struck by the same issues, opportunities, and conversations that can happen in an online play therapy session. I only wish more of my colleagues would try it. What gets in the way? For some it is a dismissal of emerging technologies which masquerades a fear of trying something new. For others it is a worry about running afoul of HIPAA and being sued. If you are one of those people who wonders about how to integrate video games online into your therapy practice, read on.

* * * * *

Quick, without Googling it; what does the “P” in HIPAA stand for?

If you are a psychotherapist or other health provider, you probably guessed “privacy.” At least that’s often the consensus when I ask this question at my talks. It would be understandable if this was your guess. You’d be wrong.

The correct answer is “portability,” the basic premise that individuals have the right to healthcare treatment that moves with them as they go through the vicissitudes of life and work. That is also where technology comes in– electronic health records, telemedicine, etc., are ways that technology increases portability by collapsing time and space so that the patient and the healthcare professional can get to work.

In therapy, that work traditional has happened in an office setting. And in the case of children and youth especially, that meant play therapy which was bounded by the space and time of a physical office. From Uno to Sandtrays to the infamous “Talking Feeling Doing Game,” we have often assumed that play therapy needs to be the games of our own childhoods. But 21st century play can, and I maintain should, include 21st century play. That’s where video games come in.

In the days of the Atari 2600, there was no worry about patient privacy, because the system was hooked up directly to a television that didn’t even need to be connected to cable. But nowadays with SmartTVs, PCs and PS4s, video games are often played online with many other people and seamlessly connected to voice chat. This can be a concern for the psychotherapist who is unfamiliar with newer technology, especially with games like Fortnite, which boast Battle Royales having as many as 100 players at a time in the same game instance.

Videoconferencing programs and online therapy using video/audio chat have been around long enough to have specifications that adapt to HIPAA’s privacy requirements, largely because there is market force behind developing products that can be sold to the healthcare industry. Video games and their platforms, on the other hand, do not have a similar demand to give them an incentive to supply. Games like World of Warcraft, Platforms like STEAM, and streaming services like Twitch were designed for gamers, not therapists, and it is unlikely they will go through the technical and legal procedures to become HIPAA compliant anytime soon.

Some therapists have begun developing their own video games, which, like most therapy games are dismally boring. They are thinly veiled therapy interventions that are disguised as play, but lack any of the true qualities of play. True, they are more likely private; but they are also boring, and easily recognizable as “not playful” by patients. Mainstream games have broader appeal, critical user mass, and better graphics and gameplay in many cases, and are more immediately relevant to the patient’s life. But they are definitely not HIPAA-compliant. So what to do?

* * * * *

My solution, which I’m sharing as an example that has not been reviewed by policy experts, lawyers or the like, has two parts:

Due Diligence– Research the existing privacy settings and technologies to maximize benefit and minimize risk to patient privacy. So for example, I structure the “talk” part of therapy to happen over HIPAA-compliant software like Zoom or GoToMeeting. We start on that platform with video camera on, until we begin playing. Then we, turn off the camera to save on bandwidth and talk over this software, not the game. Previously, I will have sent the patient or their parent a snapshot of the settings of the game we are using with the voicechat disabled if possible. We also want to lower or turn off the game sound so we can hear each other. So in the case of Fortnite, the settings would look like this:

2. Limited HIPAA Waiver- This is the part most therapists overlook as even being a possibility. You can ask patients to sign a release waiving in a limited capacity their HIPAA rights in order to use noncompliant technology. It is entirely voluntary and I’ve yet to have a patient decline. I use a informed consent form that I developed that looks like this:

These are examples of how to engage with online technologies in a clinical way that is thoughtful yet forward-moving.

* * * * *

Whether you love Freud or hate him, most experts agree that he was one of the fathers of modern psychiatry. He was also an early adopter. He based his hydraulic model of the drives on steam technology of his era. His concept of the “mental apparatus” was likewise integrated from the advances in mechanics and his formulation of ego defenses such as projection occurred simultaneously with the Lumiere brothers’ creation and screenings of motion pictures. Regulatory concerns aside, therapists can be early adopters. Doing so would probably help our patients no end, and definitely cut down on my waitlist.

* “Sam” is based on several patients whose identifying information has been disguised to protect patient privacy.

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Filed Under: Gamer Therapy Tagged With: adolescents, avatar, children, digital literacy, Fortnite, Freud, gamers, games, gaming, HIPAA, play, private practice, psychoanalysis, psychodynamic, psychology, psychotherapy, technology, therapy, video games

Mindfulness, Minecraft & The I Ching

March 5, 2016 by langloimsw Leave a Comment

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!

Find this post interesting? 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!

Filed Under: Gamer Therapy Tagged With: adolescents, behavior change, children, Confucianism, digital literacy, education, gamers, games, gaming, I Ching, meditation, mindfulness, minecraft, play, private practice, psychodynamic, psychology, psychotherapy, technology, therapy, video games

A New Startup Focusing on Minecraft & Social Emotional Learning

January 4, 2016 by langloimsw 4 Comments

Happy New Year, Gentle Reader!

I wanted to let you know about a new startup project that launches this month that you may find of interest called Grokcraft.

Grokcraft is a Minecraft server, learning lab, & community where parents, kids & professionals engage in playful collaborative social-emotional learning (SEL.) All our members are vetted & for youth require parent permission to participate. Our counselors are available to mentor youth in SEL. Our youth group, Grok Corps, will be open to those who want to be trained in conflict resolution & online moderation. Our vision is that kids will not avoid conflicts as much as learn to resolve them when they arise. We believe that in free play, children & adults can learn mindfulness, empathy & other social skills in a playful environment. You can read more about this in our Manifesto. With both adult and youth groups approaching with complementary educational needs & abilities in SEL & tech skills, there are constant opportunities for collaboration embedded in (most importantly!) fun.

Grokcraft is an educational rather than therapeutic milieu. Based on the educateur model, professionals are encouraged to refer clients who would benefit from play-based social emotional learning. Some examples of people who might refer:

A psychotherapist who has a patient needing to improve mindfulness, relational skills or empathy training beyond the clinical hour
A speech & language therapist who wants to provide a student with more opportunities for social pragmatic skills acquisition
A special educator who with students who need more opportunities to learn & practice SEL
A parent or professional who wants a child in their care to have a Minecraft community that is safe & supportive & vets each member personally

At the same time, Grokcraft provides a high-touch learning environment for adult educators & clinicians to learn how to use Minecraft in their work. Monthly seminars for educators, in-game coaching & instruction are available to give professionals a fun way to learn & practice 21st-century game play & add it to their professional repertoire. Some examples of professionals who may benefit:

A psychotherapist who wants clinical training in online play therapy techniques from experts
A speech & language therapist who wants a place to provide social pragmatics groups
A special educator who wants a secure place to have virtual field trips/project-based learning
A parent who wants parent guidance around digital literacy & SEL
All of the above who want a peer community where they can exchange ideas & develop community that is not technophobic

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!

Filed Under: Gamer Therapy Tagged With: adolescents, behavior change, building your business, children, digital literacy, education, game theory, gamers, games, gaming, grokcraft, mindfulness, minecraft, psychodynamic, psychology, social justice, social media, technology, video games, Web 2.0

Better Living Through Minecraft

April 22, 2015 by langloimsw 2 Comments

Last month I had the opportunity to talk at SXSW 2015 about how the video game Minecraft has a lot to teach us about mindfulness. Video games often get a bad rap with mental health folks, but I try to change that thinking by pointing out that playing video games can actually be a form of concentration meditation, albeit one that does not jibe with many people’s traditional concepts of such (focus on your breathing, focus on the candle, focus on..erm, Mario?) If you want to hear more, the Audio is here:

https://soundcloud.com/michael-langlois-6/better-living-through-minecraft-audio-version

If you want to see the visuals from the Prezi, feel free to do so here:

If you enjoy it, please feel free to share, and if you want me to come talk to you and your colleagues drop me a note.

Filed Under: Gamer Therapy Tagged With: activism, adolescents, behavior change, buddhism, children, digital literacy, education, game theory, gamers, games, gaming, mindfulness, minecraft, psychoanalysis, psychodynamic, psychology, psychotherapy, social media, sxsw, technology, therapy, video games, Web 2.0

The Lava Expert

January 2, 2015 by langloimsw 2 Comments

“Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.” –The Imitation Game

Shortly before I fell into the lava I began a conversation with an eleven year old girl, we’ll call her Sal. This was a while back, on a Minecraft server I play on from time to time. My name when I play Minecraft has the word “therapist” in it, and Sal had noticed this.

“Hey, are you really a therapist?” Sal asked via our server text chat.

“Yes I am.” I typed back. I had been mining obsidian and using a river to cool the lava so I could chip away at it with my diamond pickaxe. In the time it took to type my reply, I managed to fall into the river and get washed into the lava. I watched myself go up in flames, and with me most of my loot. There is always a chance though, when one falls into lava this way, that some of one’s loot can be thrown clear. So upon respawning I quickly made my way back to the scene of my demise as we continued our conversation.

“Oops, burned up,” Sal said, as the server had announced just that when I fell in the lava. “Are you the kind of therapist that talks to kids about their problems?”

“Kids and adults both, yes.”

“My mother wants me to see a therapist,” Sal said.

“Why?” asked another one of the kids on the server.

“She says I have problems with friends,” Sal said. By this point I had returned to the lava pool. There was no loot that had survived.

“Sal,” I said. “Everyone needs help with their problems from time to time. That’s why there are 7 billion people on the planet, to help each other out.”

For some reason that made quite an impact with the other players. “Wow, you must be an expert!!” one typed. I’m not sure how he’d come to that conclusion.

“I’m certainly not an expert on lava,” I replied, and fortunately the conversation went back to the business of mining after some sympathetic emoticons.

I have no problem talking with kids about therapy, or being a psychotherapist. If I did, I certainly wouldn’t have the word in my userid. And it wasn’t even that I was “off duty.” I’ve had many conversations in chats over the years and heard a range of problems. In part I was a little protective of Sal’s right to privacy, although experience has again shown me that kids are often less hung up on therapy than adults, and in many ways are often more trusting of psychotherapy than adults are. Mostly the reason I wanted us all to get back to playing was that I had caught myself sounding “educational.”

* * * * *

In play if there is any such thing as an expert it is certainly not the therapist, or adults in general. Virginia Axline, knew this. In her book Play Therapy she writes, “Non-directive therapy is based upon the assumption that the individual has within himself… the ability to solve his own problems satisfactorily.” (Axline, 1947) My trainees are often as surprised to find that I am friend to both psychodynamic and solution-focused theories as I am to find that they have been taught the two have irreconcilable differences.

As I see it, my job is often to be a unique experience in the lives of patients. “It is a unique experience,” Axline writes, “for a child to find adult suggestions, mandates, rebukes, restraints, criticisms, disapprovals, support, intrusions gone.” (Axline, 1947) And by the time people come to us as adolescents or adults, those suggestions, mandates, rebukes, restraints, criticisms, disapprovals, etc. have become internalized. By adulthood, many of us feel as if we lack expertise in anything, except perhaps screwing our lives up.

Education has increasingly played a hand in this. We do not teach so that our students learn to think independently and feel resourcefully. Instead we teach them to think like someone else. Critical thinking and exploration become supplanted by the sense that education has to give us something tangible in a materialistic sense: A good grade; a profitable job; published ideas or maybe if we really drink the Koolaid admiration from other academics.

One thing that is so enjoyable about Minecraft for many is its’ open sandbox environment. There is an endgame you can play if you want, but there are also myriad variations of play you can do instead. Sal and millions of other children and adults can range freely through such open and creative spaces without “experts.” Education certainly can happen there, but often in a lightly curated if not autodidactive way. People have created versions of Westeros, Middle-Earth, Panem or their own creations. There are PvP versions where conflict and combat, stealth and griefing hold sway; fantasy realms where people can role-play. It is a topsy-turvy world where children can have the most wisdom, and we adult experts can trip and fall into lava.

* * * * *

In a world obsessed with measuring outcomes, psychotherapy can have a rough time of it. If Sal ever goes to therapy, she will have to be labeled as ill somehow if her mother wants insurance to help pay for it. Notes will have to be written, treatment plans planned, goals and objectives filed away so bean-counters can determine that Sal should get 14 beans-worth of help. It’s hard for me to get too angry at the bean-counters though, over the past 25 years I’ve met a few of them and they don’t seem too happy either.

Education fares little better, with things like the Common Core which tells us what should be taught; standardized testing which masquerades as achievement; and trigger warnings which are supposed to warn students of upsetting content as if they somehow were entitled to get through the mind-altering experience of learning without ever being upset.

It takes bravery to stand up to this. To let the individual chart their own course, make their own mistakes, draw on their own core. For the therapist and educator it takes bravery to get out of the way, to radically reflect the developing self. I do believe that each one of us needs help throughout our lives; but that help needs to be asked for lest we run the risk of telling others what to do and implying they aren’t up to the task of living their own lives.

* * * * *

Many therapists, social workers, and teachers I have met chose to become members of those professions at least in part as an expression of admiration for their own therapists, social workers and teachers. They had no interest in falling into the lava ever again, so they started focusing on helping other people out. It’s a thankless job if you are going to go through it secretly hoping to be thanked. I’m not sure I’ve ever had someone I work with refer to me as an “expert” unless they were being facetious about some blunder I’d just made. And I’ve made many. As an apotheosis, being a psychotherapist or academic is rather anticlimactic, not because the work is devoid of meaning or value, but rather because if we truly place such people on a divine pedestal it needs a steady stream of troubled people to hold it steady.

Perhaps an alternative for therapists, social workers, educators and our ilk is to think of ourselves as “lava experts.” We have some acquaintance with falling into pits, being consumed by intense feelings, losing all our, erm, loot. These are human experiences. This is not a secret to anyone, and I doubt most people would put their trust in someone who knows nothing of failure, obsession, overwhelm or grief.

What’s more is we’ve fallen into lava, often the same pit again and again! We know something of the repetition compulsion. We have let our yearning for whatever we think we need lead us to risky or self-defeating behaviors. We can talk to people about their problems, because we are people who have problems ourselves. We’ve been burned. Minecraft miners know mining deep is risky: We know what we’re doing even up to that moment our bones ignite.

Rather than being an expert on a pedestal, accept that you will tumble into fire, again and again, looking outside of yourself for what is precious. Straight A’s, that book you published, six or seven figures–There’s a little Gollum in all of us. It’s what makes us forget mindfulness, build empires, win arguments or wars. No one was ever oppressed by play, only the lack of imagination that comes from the absence of it.

Filed Under: Gamer Therapy Tagged With: activism, addiction, adolescents, behavior change, buddhism, children, digital literacy, education, game theory, gamers, games, gaming, HMOs, managed care, mindfulness, minecraft, play, private practice, psychoanalysis, psychodynamic, psychology, psychotherapy, social justice, social media, technology, therapy, video games, virginia axline, Web 2.0

Using Gaming & Gamification in Clinical Practice

June 25, 2014 by langloimsw 4 Comments

What does “gamification” mean, and what is its relevance to mental health practice? In this video of a conversation I had at University at Buffalo with Charles Syms, I take a stab at answering those questions. This is just a start, and hopefully by the end of the video you can begin to see how applying principles of game design could be therapeutic for people dealing with issues ranging from trauma to executive functioning challenges to substance abuse and beyond.

Find this video interesting? 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!

Filed Under: Gamer Therapy Tagged With: activism, addiction, adolescents, behavior change, call of duty, children, dark souls, education, game theory, gamers, games, gamification, gaming, mindfulness, minecraft, play, private practice, psychoanalysis, psychodynamic, psychology, psychotherapy, social justice, social media, technology, therapy, video games, Web 2.0, World of Warcraft, wow

Gamer-Affirmative Practice: Today’s Play Therapy

June 13, 2014 by langloimsw 1 Comment

The importance of play is universal, and in many ways the nature of play is timeless. That said, there is a lot to learn about video games as 21st-century play, especially if you are a play therapist. Adding 21st-century forms of play to your repertoire can be daunting. With so many naysayers in the mental health profession, avoidance of learning the new takes the form of contempt prior to investigation. With video games being low-hanging fruit for political arguments ranging from gun control to teen bullying, many social workers, psychologists and counselors give in to the media hype and spend far more time demonizing or ignoring this form of play than they do understanding it.

Recently my colleagues at the University at Buffalo made it a point to take a gamer-affirmative stance and offer a beginning piece of continuing education on integrating video games as play therapy in the form of a podcast. In it my friend, colleague, and yes, fellow video game player Anthony Guzman and I have a beginning conversation about just that. Have a listen:

inSocialWork® Episode 144 – Michael Langlois: Gamer-Affirmative Practice: Today’s Play Therapy

Find this podcast interesting? 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!

Filed Under: Gamer Therapy Tagged With: addiction, adolescents, behavior change, call of duty, children, dark souls, digital literacy, education, game theory, gamers, games, gaming, mindfulness, minecraft, play, play therapy, private practice, psychoanalysis, psychodynamic, psychology, psychotherapy, social media, technology, therapy, video games, Web 2.0, World of Warcraft, wow

Bringing Emerging Technology into the Clinical Process: Implications for Engagement and Treatment

June 2, 2014 by langloimsw 1 Comment

If you have ever wondered how to begin attending to, listening for, and asking questions about a patient’s use of technology, this video might give you some ideas. In it my colleague Lesa Fichte, LMSW, University at Buffalo School of Social Work, and I, discuss the role of technology, people’s relationship with technology, and how to integrate it into the treatment process by listening, inquiring, and learning.

Filed Under: Gamer Therapy Tagged With: adolescents, behavior change, children, digital literacy, education, facebook, gamers, games, gaming, LGBT, mental health parity, mindfulness, minecraft, private practice, psychoanalysis, psychodynamic, psychology, psychotherapy, social justice, social media, technology, therapy, twitter, video games, Web 2.0, World of Warcraft

The Relationship Between Emerging Technology & Psychodynamic Theory

May 23, 2014 by langloimsw Leave a Comment

Often when I present, people are surprised that I teach on both emerging technologies such as social media and video games, and classic psychodynamic theories. Although it may initially seem counterintuitive, especially to classically trained psychotherapists and social workers, I see a strong connection between the two. Here is the first in a series of posts featuring work I am doing with the University at Buffalo, in which Charles Syms and I discuss the relationship between the two.

Filed Under: Gamer Therapy Tagged With: activism, building your business, digital literacy, education, emerging technology, Freud, game theory, gamers, games, gaming, play, private practice, psychoanalysis, psychodynamic, psychology, psychotherapy, social media, technology, therapy, video gmaes, Web 2.0

Works, Life and Marshmallows: Iterative Design

February 13, 2014 by langloimsw 2 Comments

They say the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single marshmallow. Ok, I say that, and more specifically I am talking about your life, job or relationship rather than a journey. I am coming back to my practice from a brief sabbatical, and have been noticing that while many things are going to stay the same, a few are changing as well. I’ll get back to the marshmallow in a minute.

One thing I learned on my sabbatical is that I definitely want to continue my therapy practice. As I said to some friends on Facebook this week, “You know, I’m kind of grateful that I get to challenge the self-hatred of others for a living.” As a clinical social worker and psychotherapist I get paid to do that. One thing I also decided on my leave was to withdraw from the last managed care insurance panel I was on. It made no sense to continue to decrease the time I could be seeing people due to paperwork and bureaucratic hassles, and it made no financial sense to have a waiting list of people who are willing to pay my full fee and also deserve treatment just so I could work at half my rate. I have always built pro bono or sliding scale slots into my practice because I have a commitment to serving a diverse population, so why was I doing that and letting an insurance company slide the remaining hours of my week?

Part of the answer to this and most “why-have-I-been-doing-this-this-way-when-it-doesn’t-work-in-my-favor?” questions is fear. Most of us are afraid of change. Whether we are staying in an abusive relationship, having difficulty getting sober, flunking out of college or missing days at work, most of us have moments when we see what we are doing to ourselves and ask the above question. And then we often resume whatever the pattern is, leaving an interesting question unanswered and instead turning it into self-recrimination, which is really just evasion. Another part of the answer is that we often act is if we only get one shot at answering the question of life satisfaction. Here comes the marshmallow.

Invented by Peter Skillman of Palm, Inc. and popularized by Tom Wujec of Autodesk, the Marshmallow Challenge may be familiar to some of you: “It involves the task of constructing the highest possible free-standing structure with a marshmallow on top. The structure must be completed within 18-minutes using only 20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of tape, and one yard of string.” (per Wikipedia) You can call it an exercise, or play, but in either event the creators of the challenge have observed something very interesting about how different groups tend to approach it. Children tend to make a first structure, stick the marshmallow on top, and then repeat the process over and over, refining it as they go. Adults tend to engage in group discussions, arguments, power plays and plans to produce one structure built once to which the marshmallow is added. In other words they tend to approach it derivatively rather than iteratively.

Iterative design is a method of creating a thing or addressing a problem by making a prototype (first attempt,) testing it, analyzing the prototype, and then refining it. Rinse and repeat. Iterative design isn’t good for everything: As parents know, often there is not time in the world for everything to get done in 18 minutes or before the school bus gets here. But a life built on derivative design alone is destined for stagnation and rigidity.

Derivative design, as the name suggests, takes something from a pre-existing something-else, whether it be a rule, materials, social construction or interpretation of the something-else. When you psychoanalyze a patient’s dream and interpret it as a manifestation of their Oedipus Complex, you are deriving your interpretation and their dream from the something-else of Freud, who in turn derived his Oedipal Conflict theory from the something-else of Greek mythology. Derivative design can save time and effort in many important ways, by collapsing cultural memes and thinking and transmitting them forward through time from Sophocles to your office. But as feminist thinkers and cultural critics have shown us, we might have arrived at a different “complex” if Audre Lord et al had been in on the prototyping of it.

Derivative thinking left unchecked can get you in a rut. One of my most recent examples of this comes from The Little Prince, where he encounters the drunkard:
“- Why are you drinking? – the little prince asked.
– In order to forget – replied the drunkard.
– To forget what? – enquired the little prince, who was already feeling sorry for him.
– To forget that I am ashamed – the drunkard confessed, hanging his head.
– Ashamed of what? – asked the little prince who wanted to help him.
– Ashamed of drinking! – concluded the drunkard, withdrawing into total silence.
And the little prince went away, puzzled.
‘Grown-ups really are very, very odd’, he said to himself as he continued his journey.”

Everything derives from the previous thing, but in the end it sometimes gets us nowhere.

We all get in these difficult spirals. A good therapist or supervisor can point them out to us and then encourage us to become iterative in our design:

So what are you going to do this time?
How did that work out?
So what are you going to do differently?

Therapists starting their private practices also come to see me, often stuck in derivative thinking:

-I need my NPI number.
-Ok, why?
-To get on Medicare.
-Ok, because?
-So I can get on insurance panels.
-Ok, why?
-So I can get patients who will pay me so I can rent an office so I can have an address to register for my NPI.

If you are one of my consultees reading this rest assured I am NOT talking about you in particular: I have had this conversation a hundred times with people. We get indoctrinated into the world of managed care and get, well, managed. In this case, I usually recommend the consultee start by imagining what kind of office space they want. Answers have varied and included: Sunny, exposed beams, plants, yellow paint, toys, music system, waiting room with receptionist, friendly colleagues in suite, accessible to public transportation, elevator, warm colors, cool colors, and all sorts of other iterations.

Once you have a mental prototype you can either build or design your office, or find and rent it. Again I tell folks to walk around the areas they want to work in, find buildings that look interesting to them, then walk inside and ask to speak with someone about seeing a unit. Testing involves going to see several spaces. Then they can analyze the results: Does the space look like it would become what they imagine it to be furnished? Are there things about their ideal that need to be discarded? Do they now realize that they could be even more wild in their expectations?

This is just one example of the ways that iterative design can open up possibilities. But be warned, iterative design can be daunting for many of us raised in our current education system. We have been trained to create one product presented in final form with the expectation that we will be graded on that product alone. Everything becomes about that one paper or exam, which is often more about regurgitation rather than innovation.

I have colleagues who take my breath away with the number of projects and ideas they are consistently throwing out there to see what happens: It takes guts to do that. I myself often am afraid that the Project Police are going to pop out and say, “What happened to your idea of a Minecraft group? Shame on you for proposing it and not completing that project! You are not allowed any more ideas until you show us you can carry that one out.”

Sound ridiculous? Of course it is, but does it sound familiar to you as well? If it does, go out and buy yourself some spaghetti, tape and marshmallows: The quality of your job, relationship and life may depend on it.

Interested in setting up a consult for your practice? I have some openings come March. 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!

Filed Under: Gamer Therapy Tagged With: addiction, behavior change, buddhism, building your business, children, education, gamers, games, gaming, marshmallows, mindfulness, play, private practice, psychoanalysis, psychodynamic, psychology, psychotherapy, ROI, social justice, technology, therapy, video games, Web 2.0

No Matter How You Feel, You Still Failed

January 14, 2014 by langloimsw 4 Comments

Psychotherapists are often people who prefer to deal with feelings in their workings with people. Feelings are important, and being empathically attuned to how patients are feeling is equally important. We are taught to explore the patient’s feelings, imagine ourselves into their lived experience, and validate that experience.

This is often where we become disconnected from other professionals we collaborate with, such as educators. Be it Pre-K or graduate school, educators are charged with working with students to learn and grow as a whole person. It’s not that they aren’t concerned with feelings, they just can’t get hung up on them to the exclusion of everything else.

To be fair, psychotherapy has a long history of taking a broader view on the individual as well. A famous psychoanalyst, Winnicott, once responded to a patient of his who was expressing feelings of hopelessness by saying something to the effect of “sometimes when I am sitting with you I feel hopeless too, but I’m not going to let that get in the way of continuing to work with you.”

But often in the past decade or two, feelings have held sway over everything. Students don’t complete their assignments because they felt overwhelmed and still expect to pass the course. Adults feel emotionally exhausted and miss work or are late to it. Children feel angry at the injustice of chores and don’t do them but still want their allowance.

A criticism I often hear toward video games is that they encourage people to believe that they can always just reset, do over and have another shot. But implicit in this criticism is the fact of something I feel video games actually do better than many of us sometimes: They acknowledge the reality of failure.

When we play video games, we are failing 80% of the time. Failing in the sense of Merriam Webster’s definitions including:

to not succeed : to end without success
to not do (something that you should do or are expected to do)
to fall short <failed in his duty>
to be or become absent or inadequate
to be unsuccessful

In video games the reality of this is driven home to us by a screenshot:

You can feel any way you’d like about it, angry, sad, annoyed, blase, frustrated with a touch of determination. But no matter how you feel you still failed.

In life outside games, many of us have a hard time accepting the reality principle when it comes to failing at something. We think we can talk, think, or feel our way out of failing to meet expectations. My own predilection is that of a thinker, which is probably why I became a psychodynamic psychotherapist and educator. I often waste a lot of time trying to think (or argue) myself into a new reality, which just boils down to not accepting the reality principle. I notice the same with patients, colleagues and students, who miss deadlines, avoid work, come late to class and then try their best to think or feel their way out of it.

The first class each semester I tell my students, who are studying to be social workers and psychotherapists, that the most frequent complaint I get as an instructor is “I feel put on the spot by him.” I assure them that this is a valid feeling and actually reflects the reality that I will put each and every one of them on the spot. I will ask them tough questions, I will point out that they are coming late to class, I will disagree with ideas that seem erroneous to me. Because if they think it is ok to be late or avoid thinking through a problem or confrontation in class, how in the world will they ever be a decent psychotherapist or social worker? If the single mother you are working with wants to know how to apply for WIC, and you say you feel put on the spot by her question, that is a valid feeling AND you are useless to her. If your therapist was 15 minutes late every week I hope you’d fire him. And when you are conducting a family session and someone discloses abuse it is unprofessional to say “I’m feeling overwhelmed and sad right now, can you ask somebody else to go next?”

These sort of disconnects doesn’t happen overnight. It comes from years of being enabled by well-intentioned parents and yes, mental health providers who focus on feelings to the exclusion of cognition and behavior, and worse, try to ensure that their children grow to adulthood feeling a constant sense of success. When I hear self psychology-oriented folks talk it is almost always about mirroring and idealizing, and never about optimal frustration. And I suspect that this is because we have become so focused on feelings and success that we are preventing people from experiencing optimal frustration at all.

The novelist John Hersey has said “Learning starts with failure; the first failure is the beginning of education.” We commence to learn because reality has shown us that we lack knowledge or understanding. That’s the good news. We’ve woken up! In this light I regard video games as one of the most consistent learning tools available to us. When that fail happens and that screen goes up you can try to persuade it to cut you some slack, flatter or bully it, weep pleadingly for it to change to a win, but no matter how you feel, you still failed. And because that reality is so starkly there, and because the XBox or PS3/4 doesn’t get engaged in your drama, that feeling will eventually dissipate and you will either try again, or give up.

Because that is in a lot of ways the conflict we’re trying to avoid isn’t it? We want to avoid looking reality square in the face and taking responsibility for what comes next. We want to keep the feelings flowing, the drama going, and we are willing to take entire groups of people and systems with us. If we are lucky they put their feet down, but more often then not they want to avoid conflict too, and the problem just continues.

So here’s a confession: I have failed at things. I have ended a task without success. I have not done things I was expected to do. I have fallen short, been inadequate and been unsuccessful at stuff. And nobody took away my birthday. I’m still around doing other things, often iterations of the previous failures, quite successfully.

If you are a parent or educator please take a lesson from video games. Start saying “Game Over” to those in your care sometimes. If they can try again great. If they want to read up on some strategy guides or videos to learn how to do it better, awesome. But please stop capitulating to their desire to escape reality on the illusory lifeboats of emotional expression, rationalization or verbal arguments. As Mrs. Smeal says in “Benny and Joon,” “when a boat runs ashore, the sea has spoken.” Reality testing is probably the most important ego function you can help someone develop, please don’t avoid opportunities to do so.

Nobody likes to experience failure, I know it feels awful. But to move through it to new realizations can be very liberating, and in time become more easily bearable. And I truly believe that success without past failures feels pretty hollow. When I play through a video game from start to finish without a fail I don’t feel like a winner. I feel cheated.

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!

Filed Under: Gamer Therapy Tagged With: addiction, adolescents, behavior change, buddhism, building your business, children, digital literacy, education, ego psychology, failure, Freud, gamers, games, gaming, Kohut, mindfulness, minecraft, optimal frustration, play, private practice, psychoanalysis, psychodynamic, psychology, psychotherapy, reality testing, ROI, self psychology, social justice, social work, stress, technology, therapy, video games

Selfie Esteem

December 2, 2013 by langloimsw 6 Comments

Nancy J. Smyth, PhD, Dean & Professor, University at Buffalo

“Photographs do not explain, they acknowledge.” –Susan Sontag

Last month, the Oxford Dictionary made the word “selfie” not only an official word, but their word of the year for 2013. Defining selfie as “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website” the OD made explicit what has implicitly grown to be the norm of our world; a world of smartphones, self pics and social media.

Many psychotherapists and social workers have and will continue to decry this as another sign the the “narcissism” of our age. Selfies have become synonymous with the millenials, the dumbing down of the populace by the internet, and sometimes even stretching to how Google is making us stupid. My chosen profession has historically played fast and loose with calling people and cultures narcissistic. Karen Horney coined the term “the neurotic personality of our time” in the 1930s, initially in part as a critique to the Freudian critique of Victorian modesty. Kohut’s groundbreaking work on “tragic man,” and the healthy strands of narcissism in human life was co-opted within years by Lasch (1979) to describe the then-current “culture of narcissism.” In short, even though narcissism has been a part of human being at least since Narcissus gazed into the water in Greco-Roman times, we continue to see it as perennially on the uprise.

Joanna Pappas, Epic MSW Student

This dovetails with each generation’s lament that the subsequent one has become more self-absorbed. And yet, as Sontag points out, by making photography everyday, “everybody is a celebrity.” Yep, that’s what we hate about the millennials, right? They think everything is an accomplishment, their every act destined for greatness. But as Sontag goes on to say, making everybody a celebrity is also making another interesting affirmation: “no person is more interesting than any other person.”

Jonathan Singer, Assistant Professor, Temple University

Why do many of us (therapists in particular) have a problem then with selfies? Why do we see them as a “symptom” of the narcissism of the age? Our job is to find the interesting in anyone, after all. We understand boredom as a countertransference response in many cases, our attempt to defend against some projection of the patient’s. So why the hating on selfies?

I think Lewis Aron hits on the answer, or at least part of it, in his paper “The Patient’s Experience of the Analyst’s Subjectivity.” In it he states the following:

I believe that people who are drawn to analysis as a profession have particularly strong conflicts regarding their desire to be known by another; that is, they have conflicts concerning intimacy. In more traditional terms, these are narcissistic conflicts over voyeurism and exhibitionism. Why else would anyone choose a profession in which one spends one’s life listening and looking into the lives of others while one remains relatively silent and hidden?

(Aron, A Meeting of Minds, 1996, p. 88)

In other words, I believe that many of my colleagues have such disdain for selfies because they secretly yearn to take and post them. If you shuddered with revulsion just now, check yourself. I certainly resemble that remark at times: I struggled long with whether to post my own selfie here. What might my analytically-minded colleagues think? My patients, students, supervisees? I concluded that the answers will vary, but in general the truth that I’m a human being is already out there.

Mike Langlois, PvZ Afficianado

Therapists like to give themselves airs, including an air of privacy in many instances. We get hung up on issues of self-disclosure, when what the patient is often really looking for is a revelation that we have a subjectivity rather than disclosure of personal facts. And as Aron points out, our patients often pick up on our feelings of resistance or discomfort, and tow the line. One big problem with this though is that we don’t know what they aren’t telling us about because they didn’t tell us. In the 60s and 70s there were very few LGBT issues voiced in therapy, and the naive conclusion was that this was because LGBT people and experiences were a minority, in society in general and one’s practice in specific. Of course, nobody was asking patient’s if they were LGBT, and by not asking communicating their discomfort.

What has this got to do with selfies? Well for one thing, I think that therapists are often similarly dismissive of technology, and convey this by not asking about it in general. Over and over I hear the same thing when I present on video games–“none of my patients talk about them.” When I suggest that they begin asking about them, many therapists have come back to me describing something akin to a dam bursting in the conversation of therapy. But since we can’t prove a null hypothesis, let me offer another approach to selfies.

All photographs, selfie or otherwise, do not explain anything. For example:

People who take a selfie are not explaining themselves, they are acknowledging that they are worth being visible. Unless you have never experienced any form of oppression this should be self-evident, but in case you grew up absolutely mirrored by a world who thought you were the right size, shape, color, gender, orientation and class I’ll explain: Many of our patients have at least a sneaking suspicion that they are not people. They look around the world and see others with the power and prestige and they compare that to the sense of emptiness and invisibility they feel. Other people can go to parties, get married, work in the sciences, have children, buy houses, etc. But they don’t see people like themselves prevailing in these areas. As far as they knew, they were the only biracial kid in elementary school, adoptee in middle school, bisexual in high school, trans person in college, rape survivor at their workplace.

So if they feel that they’re worth a selfie, I join with them in celebrating themselves.

As their therapist I’d even have some questions:

What were you thinking and feeling that day you took this?
What do you hope this says about you?
What do you hope this hides about you?
Who have you shared this with?
What was their response?
What might this selfie tell us about who you are?
What might this selfie tell us about who you wish to be?
Where does that spark of belief that you are worth seeing reside?

In addition to exploring, patients may find it a useful intervention to keep links to certain selfies which evoke certain self-concept and affect states. That way, if they need a shift in perspective or affect regulation they can access immediately a powerful visual reminder which says “This is possible for you.”

Human beings choose to represent themselves in a variety of ways, consciously and unconsciously. They can be whimsical, professional, casual, friendly, provocative, erotic, aggressive, acerbic, delightful. Are they projections of our idealized self? Absolutely. Are they revelatory of our actual self? Probably. They explain nothing, acknowledge the person who takes them, and celebrate a great deal. If there is a way you can communicate a willingness see your patient’s selfies you might be surprised at what opens up in the therapy for you both.

Melanie Sage, Assistant Professor, University of North Dakota

In other posts I have written about Huizinga’s concept of play. Rather than as seeing selfies as the latest sign that we are going to hell in a narcissistic handbasket, what if we looked at the selfie as a form of play? Selfies invite us in to the play element in the other’s life, they are not “real” life but free and unbounded. They allow each of us to transcend the ordinary for a moment in time, to celebrate the self, and share with a larger community as a form of infinite game.

It may beyond any of us to live up to the ideal that no one is less interesting than anyone else in our everyday, but seen in this light the selfie is a renunciation of the cynicism I sometimes see by the mental health professionals I meet. We sometimes seem to privilege despair as somehow more meaningful and true than joy and celebration, but aren’t both essential parts of the human condition? So if you are a psychotherapist or psychoeducator, heed my words: The Depth Police aren’t going to come and take your license away, so go out and snap a selfie while everyone is looking.

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!

Filed Under: Gamer Therapy Tagged With: adolescents, avatar, behavior change, children, digital literacy, education, game theory, gamers, games, gaming, LGBT, mindfulness, play, private practice, psychoanalysis, psychodynamic, psychology, psychotherapy, selfies, social justice, social media, video games, Web 2.0

Evocation and Mindfulness: Or, How to Think Better

October 16, 2013 by langloimsw 2 Comments

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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Filed Under: Gamer Therapy Tagged With: behavior change, building your business, digital literacy, education, game theory, gamers, games, gaming, mindfulness, private practice, psychoanalysis, psychodynamic, psychology, psychotherapy, ROI, stress, video games, World of Warcraft, wow

Dopey About Dopamine: Video Games, Drugs, & Addiction

August 25, 2013 by langloimsw 4 Comments

Last week I was speaking to a colleague whose partner is a gamer. She was telling me about their visit to his mother. During the visit my colleague was speaking to his mother about how much he still enjoys playing video games. His mother expressed how concerned she had been about his playing when he was young. “It could have been worse though,” she’d said, “at least he wasn’t into drugs.”

This comparison is reminiscent of the homophobic one where the tolerant person says, “I don’t mind if you’re gay, as long as you don’t come home with a goat.” The “distinction” made actually implies that the two things are comparable. But in fact they are not.

Our culture uses the word addiction pretty frequently and casually. And gamers and opponents of gaming alike use it in reference to playing video games. Frequently we hear the comments “gaming is like a drug,” or “video games are addictive,” or “I’m addicted to Halo 3.” What muddies the waters further are the dozens of articles that talk about “proof” that video games are addictive, that they cause real changes in the brain, changes just like drugs.

We live in a positivistic age, where something is “real” if it can be shown to be biological in nature. I could argue that biology is only one way of looking at the world, but for a change I thought I’d encourage us to take a look at the idea of gaming as addictive from the point of view of biology, specifically dopamine levels in the brain.

Dopamine levels are associated with the reward center of the brain, and the heightened sense of pleasure that characterizes rewarding experiences. When we experience something pleasurable, our dopamine levels increase. It’s nature’s way of reinforcing behaviors that are often necessary for survival.

One of the frequent pieces of evidence to support video game addiction is studies like this one by Koepp et al, which was done in 1998. It monitored changes in dopamine levels from subjects who were playing a video game. The study noted that dopamine levels increased during game play “at least twofold.” Since then literature reviews and articles with an anti-gaming bias frequently and rightly state that video games can cause dopamine levels to “double” or significantly increase.

They’re absolutely right, video games have been shown to increase dopamine levels by 100% (aka doubling.)

Just like studies have shown that food and sex increase dopamine levels:

This graph shows that eating food often doubles the level of dopamine in the brain, ranging from a spike of 50% to a spike of 100% an hour after eating. Sex is even more noticeable, in that it increases dopamine levels in the brain by 200%.

So, yes, playing video games increases dopamine levels in your brain, just like eating and having sex do, albeit less. But just because something changes your dopamine levels doesn’t mean it is addictive. In fact, we’d be in big trouble if we never had increases in our dopamine levels. Why eat or reproduce when it is just as pleasurable to lie on the rock and bask in the sun?

But here’s the other thing that gets lost in the spin. Not all dopamine level increases are created equal. Let’s take a look at another chart, from the Meth Inside-Out Public Media Service Kit:

This is a case where a picture is worth a thousand words. When we read that something “doubles” it certainly sounds intense, or severe. But an increase of 100% seems rather paltry compare to 350% (cocaine) or 1200% (Meth)!

One last chart for you, again from the NIDA. This one shows the dopamine increases (the pink line) in amphetamine, cocaine, nicotine and morphine:

Of all of these, the drug morphine comes closest to a relatively “low” increase of 100%.

So my point here is twofold:

1. Lots of things, not all or most of them drugs, increase the levels of dopamine.

2. Drugs have a much more marked, sudden, and intense increase in dopamine level increase compared to video games.

Does this mean that people can’t have problem usage of video games? No. But what it does mean, in my opinion, is that we have to stop treating behaviors as if they were controlled substances. Playing video games, watching television, eating, and having sex are behaviors that can all be problematic in certain times and certain contexts. But they are not the same as ingesting drugs, they don’t cause the same level of chemical change in the brain.

And we need to acknowledge that there is a confusion of tongues where the word addiction is involved. Using it in a clinical sense is different than in a lay sense– saying “I’m hooked on meth” is not the same as saying “I’m hooked on phonics.” Therapists and gamers alike need to be more mindful of what they are saying and meaning when they say they are addicted to video games. Do they mean it is a psychological illness, a medical phenomenon? Do they mean they can’t get enough of them, or that they like them a whole lot? Do they mean it is a problem in their life, or are they parroting what someone else has said to them?

I don’t want to oversimplify addiction by reducing it to dopamine level increase. Even in the above discussion I have oversimplified these pieces of “data.” There are several factors, such as time after drug, that we didn’t compare. And there are several other changes in brain chemistry that contribute to rewarding behavior and where it goes awry. I just want to show an example of how research can be cited and misused to distort things. The study we started out with simply found that we can measure changes in brain chemistry which occur when we do certain activities. It was not designed or intended to be proof that video games are dangerous or addictive.

Saying that something changes your brain chemistry shouldn’t become the new morality. Lots of things change your brain chemistry. But as Loretta Laroche says, “a wet towel on the bed is not the same as a mugging.” We need to keep it complicated and not throw words around like “addiction” and “drug” because we want people to take us seriously or agree with us. That isn’t scientific inquiry. That’s hysteria.

Filed Under: Gamer Therapy Tagged With: addiction, adolescents, behavior change, call of duty, children, dark souls, dopamine, education, Freud, game theory, games, gaming, mindfulness, minecraft, play, private practice, psychoanalysis, psychodynamic, psychology, psychotherapy, social justice, social media, technology, therapy, video games, Web 2.0, World of Warcraft

Breaking Eggs and Holding Your Fire: Some Thoughts on Skills Acquisition

August 14, 2013 by langloimsw Leave a Comment

Not too long ago, I was learning how to fire a sniper rifle in Call of Duty. It wasn’t going very well. I kept firing (which you do by holding down the right-hand trigger) and missing. Or I would use the scope, which you do by holding down the left-hand trigger; and then try to find my target so slowly that I’d get shot long before seeing it. To make thing more complicated, my patient Gordon** was trying to teach me the difference between “hardscoping” which meant to press and hold down the left trigger, and “quickscoping” which was more like a quick tap and release of the scope.

The key to success, I was told, was to locate the target, quickscope it for a second to take aim, and then fire. The source of my failure was that I’d see the target and not bother to scope at all, and just fire. At first I didn’t even know I was doing that. I thought the scope was going up, and it was, but it was going up a split second after I was firing and not before. After several fumbled attempts Gordon said, “you have to not fire and learn to push the scope first instead.” I suddenly realized that he was teaching me about impulse control.

Because many parents and therapists are reluctant to play video games, in particular first-person-shooters, they only tend to see them from outside the experience. What they learn from seeing that way is that FPS are full of violence, mayhem, blood and noise. Is it any wonder then that they grow concerned about aggression and the graphic nature of the game? It’s all that is really available to them unless there is a strong plot line and they stick around for that.

But as someone who has been playing video games for years I can tell you things are different from within the experience. And one of the most counterintuitive things I can tell you from my experience is this: First Person Shooters can help you learn impulse control. It takes a lot more impulse control to not fire at a target the second you see it. It takes a lot more impulse control to wait and scope. And because all of these microdecisions and actions take place within the player’s mind and the game experience, outside observers see violence and aggression alone and overlook the small acts of impulse control the player has to exert over and over again.

Any therapist who has worked with adolescents, people with ADHD, personality disorders and a host of other patient types understands the importance of learning impulse control. That act of mindfulness, that ability to create a moment’s space between the situation and the patient’s reaction to it is necessary to help people do everything from their homework to suicide prevention. In addition, there is always a body-based aspect to impulse control, however brief or small, and so to create that space is to forge a new and wider relationship between mind and body.

All of this was going on as we were playing Xbox. Over and over again, I was developing, practicing impulse control from behind that virtual sniper rifle. Again and again I was trying to recalibrate my bodily reflexes and sensations to a new mental model. Don’t fire. When my kill score began to rise, it wasn’t because my aim had gotten better, it was because my impulse control had.

Meanwhile, for the past two weeks I have been practicing making omeletes.

In particular, I have been learning how to make an omelette roulée of the kind Julia Childs makes below (you can skip to 3:30 if you want to go right to the pan.)

This type of omelette requires the ability to quickly (in 20-30 seconds) tilt and jerk the pan towards you multiple times, and then tilting the pan even more to flip it. Doing this over the highest heat the movement needs to be quick and reflexive or you end up tossing a scrambled eggy mess onto the burner. I can’t tell you how tense that moment is when the butter is ready and you know that once you pour in the egg mixture there is no going back. To jerk the pan sharply towards you at a tilt seems so counterintuitive, and this is an act of dexterity, meaning that your body is very involved.

In a way an omelette roulée requires impulse control just like Call of Duty in order to learn how to not push the pan but pull it toward you first. But just as importantly, making this omelette requires the ability to take risks. It can be scary to make a mess, what happens if the eggs fly into the gas flame?!

Let me tell you, because I now know what happens: You turn off the flame, wait a minute and wipe off the messy burner. And then you try again.

Adolescents, all people really, need to master both of these skills of impulse control and risk-taking. To do so means widening the space in your mind between situation and action, but not let that space become a gaping chasm impossible to cross. Learning impulse control also happens within experience, not in a special pocket universe somewhere apart from it. Learning risk-taking requires the same. And at their core they are bodily experiences, which may be what Freud meant when he said that the ego was first and foremost a body ego.

When I worked in special education settings, I was often called on to restrain children in crisis. Afterwards we would usually do a postvention: “What was happening?” “How could you do things differently next time?” We were looking at their experience from the outside, constructing a little pocket universe with words, as if we understood what had been going on in the experience, in the body and psyche of the child. I doubt these post-mortems taught impulse control.

I wonder what might have happened if we had risked throwing some eggs on the fire and encouraged the kids to play first person shooters or other video games. If my theory is right, then we would have been cooking.

**Not his real name. Name, age, gender and other identifying information have been altered to preserve confidentiality.

Mike is on vacation until September, which means that he has started talking in the third person at the end of blog posts. It also means that the next new post will be next month. He’ll repost an old fave or book excerpt to tide you over in the meantime.

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!

Filed Under: Gamer Therapy Tagged With: adolescents, avatar, behavior change, call of duty, children, digital literacy, education, Freud, game theory, gamers, games, gaming, mindfulness, omelette, play, private practice, psychoanalysis, psychodynamic, psychology, psychotherapy, social media, technology, therapy, video games

“Can I Kill You Again Today?”: The Psychoanalysis of Player Modes

July 28, 2013 by langloimsw 2 Comments

In 1947, Virginia Axline published the first edition of what was to become a seminal work in the field it was named for, Play Therapy. In her book she championed the concept of non-directive play, the form of play therapy where the therapist takes in some ways a very Rogerian approach of reflecting rather than directing the play either overtly or subtly.

This is easier said than done, as I learned when I started using it as an intern. I recall watching a youngster play and describe a family in a horrible car accident. My first comment was, “are they all right?” covertly signalling to the child that I was anxious in the presence of such violence and the possibility of death. The child reassured me that the family was okay, and I am convinced that I had essentially ruined that session’s treatment. Fortunately I was lucky to have an amazing supervisor, Linda Storey (great name for a therapist too!) who helped me to learn how to truly be non-directive. Over the next year and since I have greeted tornadoes, murder, floods, monster attacks, plane crashes, burning buildings and other disasters with “what happens next?”

Non-directive play therapy is still at it’s heart a two-part invention between the therapist and the patient. However, unlike some other forms of treatment, it requires the therapist to be able to tolerate a lot of violence and anxiety. Trying to direct children away from their aggressive fantasies and desires is often rooted in the therapist’s own anxiety about them. Let’s face it, for many of us death and destruction are scary things. It isn’t just a rookie mistake to ask the child to make the story turn out “okay,” and yet I think it has never been more urgent for therapists to be able to tolerate violent fantasy and encourage it to unfold in the play.

21st Century Play

Virginia Axline never had to contend with Call of Duty Special Ops, Modern Warfare or Battlefield 3. What was different about 20th Century play therapy was that the games in the consulting room usually resembled the ones from the child’s everyday life at home or school. The therapists therefore knew how to play them, and didn’t necessarily need to learn them as they went. But now we are in the 21st century, where the therapy office often has games from our childhoods rather than those of our patients, and they are very different.

If you are a therapist and never intend to learn to play video games and play them with your patients, you should probably stop reading here; the post won’t be useful to you and I’ll probably annoy you. But if you don’t plan on using video games with your young patients I hope you’ll consider stopping doing play therapy with children as well. Certainly stop calling yourself a non-directive play therapist, because you’ve already directed the child’s play away from their familiar games and away from this century. I actually hope, though, that you will lean into the places that scare you and try to meet your patients where they are at in their play, and for 97% of boys and 94% of girls that means video games.

Video games like Call of Duty and Minecraft are both very useful in both diagnosis and treatment of patients, as I hope to demonstrate by focusing just on one aspect here, that of player modes. Most video games have a range of player modes, and what the patient chooses can say a lot about their attachment styles, selfobject needs, and object relations.

Solo Play is OK

Like other forms of play, sometimes patients want to play alone, and have me bear witness to their exploits. They may do so out of initial mistrust, or a yearning for mirroring. Solo play is looked down on by some therapists, who often think kids using “the computer” are austitic and/or “stuck” in parallel play. I’d refer you to Winnicott, who taught us that it is a developmental achievement to be alone in the presence of another. (I’d also refer you to my colleague and therapist Brian R. King who has a lot to say about a strengths-based approach to people on the autistic spectrum, on which he includes himself.)

The Many Reasons to Collaborate.

Some patients want to play with me on the same team in first person shooter games. The reasons for this can vary. Some patients want to protect me from their aggression because they are afraid I’ll be scared of it like parents, teachers and other adults may have been. Other patients want to be on the same team because they want to have a merger with an idealized parent imago to feel more powerful and able to take on the game. Still other patients, seen in their daily lives as oppositional or violent, want to play on the same team so they can revive me and have me experience them as nurturing and a force for good in the world.

Some patients want to have their competition framed by overall collaboration, meaning that they want to get the most or final “kills” but remain on the same team. Some patients secretly yearn to play on a different team, and may need to “accidentally” change the settings to put us on opposing teams and passively want the game to continue.

Let’s Bring On A World of Hurt.

On the other hand, there are a lot of reasons patients want to compete. They may want to see if I can stand their aggression and/or desire to win without being annihilated. They may want to express their sadism by tormenting me for my lack of skill, or alternately project their yearnings for recognition by praising me when I kill them. They may want to see how I manage my frustration when playing, and interpret that frustration as investment in the game and therefore my relationship with them. They may be watching very carefully to see how I act when I win or lose. Do I gloat when I win? Do I make excuses when I lose? How might these behaviors be understood by children and adolescents who often feel like they are chronically losing and behind their peers in the game of education?

More questions arise: Does the patient ask me what mode I want to play or simply decide on one? Do they modulate their anxiety by playing a combat mode but expressing the desire to stay away from the zombie mode? By allowing them to do that am I helping them to learn that sometimes life is about choosing the lesser of two anxieties rather than avoiding anxiety altogether?

Multiplayer and Uninvited Guests

In terms of settings, there is some direction on my part, which is part of maintaining the therapeutic frame. I make it a requirement that we play either locally or in a private game. And of course this sometimes go wrong, with a random player joining us.

What to do then? What if we are on an extremely high level and just terminating the game will do more harm than good? In that case I make sure we are on mute and the our conversation can’t be heard by the added player, and then things get even more interesting in the therapeutic conversation: Does the patient have any feelings about the new player’s arrival? What do they imagine the usertag “NavySeal69” means anyway? Do we help them when they are down or try to ignore them? How do we feel if they are ignoring us? Do we team up against them?

Minecraft and the Repetition Compulsion.

I could probably write a whole post or paper on this, but for know let’s talk about creative mode and griefing. In Minecraft you and other players can build things alone or together. Other players can also “grief” you, meaning cause you grief by destroying your structures and setting you back after a lot of hard work. What does it mean when a patient griefs my building, apologizing and promising not to grief it if I rebuild, then griefs it over and over again? What may be being reenacted here? Are there adults in the patient’s life who tear her/him down again and again? When does one give up on any hope for honesty or compassion from the other? What sort of object are they inviting me to become to them; angry, patient, gullible, limit-setting, mistrustful?

I have used the term child or adolescent here, but exploring the gameplay of adults when they describe it to me is often useful as well. I often encourage my adult students or gamer readers to do a little self-analysis on their play-style? What does your preferred mode of moving through video games say about you? What questions does it invite you to explore?

The goal here is not to give you an explicit case presentation or analysis of one hypothetical patient or game. Rather, it is to provide you with a Whitman’s Sampler of practice and theory nuggets to give you a taste of the richness you are missing if you don’t play video games with your patients, especially if you are a psychodynamic therapist. There is a lot that “happens next” if you engage with your patients in 21st century play that has themes you may find familiar: How do I live in a world that can be hostile to me? Why should I trust you to be any different? Will my badness destroy or repulse you? Will you hurt me if I am vulnerable? These and dozens of other fascinating and relevant themes emerge in a way that never did for me when I forced kids to endure 45 minutes of the Talking, Feeling, Doing Game. And what’s more you don’t have to remember to take the “What Do You Think About a Girl Who Sometimes Plays with or Rubs Her Vagina When She’s Alone?” card out of the deck.

I’m not THAT non-directive. 🙂

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!

Filed Under: Gamer Therapy Tagged With: adolescents, axline, battlefield, behavior change, call of duty, children, digital literacy, FPS, Freud, gamers, games, gaming, mindfulness, minecraft, object relations, play, private practice, psychoanalysis, psychology, psychotherapy, rogers, self psychology, shooters, social media, special ops, technology, therapy, video games

Bad Object Rising: How We Learn to Hate Our Educated Selves

June 30, 2013 by langloimsw 1 Comment

Recently I had the opportunity to work with a great set of educators in a daylong seminar. One of the things I do with teachers when I present is have them play Minecraft. In this case I started off by giving a general presentation that ended with a story of auto-didactism in an Ethiopian village, where 20 children who had never seen the printed word were given tablets and taught themselves to read. I did this in part to frame the pedagogy for what came next: I had them turn on Minecraft and spend 30 minutes exploring the game without any instruction other than getting them networked.

The responses were as varied as the instructors, but one response fascinated me in particular. Midway into the 30 minutes, one teacher stopped playing the game and started checking her email. Later, when we returned to our group to have a discussion about the thoughts and feelings that came up around game play, this same teacher spoke up. We were discussing the idea of playfulness in learning when she said , “you know, I hear a lot about games and learning, and making learning fun; but sometimes learning isn’t fun and you have to do it anyway. Sometimes you just have to suck it up and do the work.”

“I’m not saying that I disagree with you entirely,” I said. “But then how do we account for your giving up on Minecraft and starting to check your email?”

She looked a little surprised, and after a moment’s reflection said, “fair enough.”

I use this example because these are educators who are extremely dedicated to teaching their students, and very academically educated themselves. Academia has this way, though, of seeping into your mind and convincing you that academics and education are one and the same. They’re not.

I worked in the field of Special Education for more than a decade from the inside of it, and one of the things I came to believe is that there are no unteachable students. That is the good news and the bad news. Bad news because if a student was truly unteachable, they wouldn’t learn from us that they are dumb or bad if they don’t demonstrate the academic achievement we expect. I remember the youth I worked with calling each other “SPED monkeys” as an insult; clearly they learned that from somewhere and someone. They had learned to hate themselves as a bad object, in object relations terms, or to project that badness onto other students. They learned this from the adults around them, from the microaggressions of hatred they experienced every day: By hate I’ll go with Merriam as close enough, “intense hostility and aversion usually deriving from fear, anger, or sense of injury.”

We tend to mistakenly equate hatred with rage and physical violence, but I suggest that this is because we want to set hatred itself up as hated by and other from ourselves; surely we never behave that way. But hatred is not always garbed in extremis. Hatred appears every day to students who don’t fit the academic mold. Hatred yells “speak English!” to the 6 year olds getting off the bus chatting in Spanish. Hatred shakes its head barely (but nevertheless) perceptibly before moving on to the next student when the first has fallen silent in their struggle. Hatred identifies the problem student in the class and bears down on her, saying proudly, “I don’t coddle my students.” And Hatred shrugs his shoulders when the student has been absent for 3 weeks, and waits for them to be dropped from the rolls.

I’m not sure how I came to see this, because I was one of the privileged academically. I got straight A’s, achieved academic awards and scholarships that lifted me into an upperclass world and peer group. I wrote papers seemingly without effort, read for pleasure, and was excited to get 3 more years of graduate school. And I have had the opportunity to become an educator and an academic myself, having taught college and graduate students. I could have stayed quiet and siloed in my area of expertise, but work with differently-abled learners taught me something different. It taught me that people learn to dislike education, shortly after academia learns to dislike them.

Perhaps one of the best literary portrayals of adult hatred of divergent thinkers comes from the movie Matilda:

“Listen, you little wise acre. I’m smart, you’re dumb; I’m big, you’re little; I’m right, you’re wrong. And there’s nothing you can do about it.”

Nowadays I teach in a much different way than I did early on, before I flipped my classrooms and facilitated guided learning experiences rather than encourage people to memorize me and ideas that I had memorized from others. And I struggle with this new approach, because I enjoy it so much I feel guilty. You see, I have internalized the bad object too. Even with my good grades I internalized it. And any time I start to depart from the traditional mold of the educated self, I experience a moment of blindness, then a stony silence that seems to say, “you’re being lazy, you should make them a powerpoint and prepare a lecture.” Yet, if my evaluations on the whole and student and colleague testimonies have truth to them, I am a “good” educator. So let’s say I am a “good” educator, and if I as a good educator struggle with this, we shouldn’t assume that people that struggle with these issues are “bad” educators.

In fact, when it comes to emerging technologies like social media and video games, educators often try to avoid them, if not because they are fun and suspect, then because educators risk experiencing themselves as the bad object: Who wants to experience themselves as hopelessly dumb, clumsy or lazy when they can experience themselves as the bountiful and perfectly cited fount of all wisdom? Truth is, both are distorted images of the educated self.

Don’t forget that educators themselves experience tons of societal hatred. For them it often comes in the guise of curriculum requirements or linking their performance to outcomes on standardized testing. Hatred comes in the low salaries and the perception that people doing intellectual or emotional labor aren’t really working. All of this helps educators to internalize a bad object which feels shaming and awful; is it any wonder that we sometimes unconsciously try to get that bad object away from ourselves and locate it in the student?

The good news as I said before is that we are all teachable. We can learn to make conscious and make sense of the internalized bad object representations. We can see that thinking of people in terms of smart or dumb is a form of splitting.

And yes, there’s a lot we can do about it.

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!

Filed Under: Gamer Therapy Tagged With: ADHD, adolescents, Asperger's, behavior change, children, digital literacy, education, gamers, games, gaming, minecraft, play, private practice, psychoanalysis, psychodynamic, psychology, psychotherapy, social justice, social media, special education, stress, technology, therapy, video games, Web 2.0, World of Warcraft

10 Nonviolent Video Games

June 17, 2013 by langloimsw 4 Comments

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!

Filed Under: Gamer Therapy Tagged With: activism, adolescents, android, behavior change, buddhism, children, digital literacy, gamers, games, gaming, ipad, iphone, nonviolent games, pacifism, play, private practice, psychoanalysis, psychodynamic, psychotherapy, smartphone, social justice, social media, technology, therapy, video games

Empathy (Re)Training

June 8, 2013 by langloimsw 2 Comments

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!

Filed Under: Gamer Therapy Tagged With: adolescents, avatar, behavior change, children, digital literacy, education, EVE, game theory, gamers, games, gaming, mindfulness, play, private practice, psychoanalysis, psychodynamic, psychology, psychotherapy, social justice, social media, technology, therapy, video games, Web 2.0, World of Warcraft, wow

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

May 23, 2013 by langloimsw 7 Comments

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!

Filed Under: Gamer Therapy Tagged With: adolescents, behavior change, buddhism, children, cyberbullying, digital literacy, education, facebook, game theory, gamers, games, gaming, LGBT, mindfulness, play, private practice, psychoanalysis, psychodynamic, psychology, psychotherapy, social justice, social media, technology, therapy, twitter, video games, Web 2.0, World of Warcraft

Skyrim Family Values

April 13, 2013 by langloimsw Leave a Comment

In psychotherapy we have grown to have a narrow definition of what it means to prescribe something. Most of us think of prescription in terms of medication, however if we take this definition, you’ll see why I often prescribe video games:

pre·scribe

/priˈskrīb/

Verb

(of a medical practitioner) Advise and authorize the use of (a medicine or treatment) for someone, esp. in writing.
Recommend (a substance or action) as something beneficial.

(Google, Transmitted from http://bit.ly/XyztcE, 2013)

I have mentioned before my assertion that video games are among other things models of the world, that must both resemble and be distinct from the world to be effective. Sometimes they are models that present dystopian worlds, and other times they model how things could be if we set aside some of our differences.

The game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is such a game, and one I recommend that therapists who work with a diverse range of families familiarize themselves with. Like other prescriptions it does have some effects that need to be considered carefully before recommending it to patients. It is rated M by the ERSB, which is characterized as “MATURE: Content is generally suitable for ages 17 and up. May contain intense violence, blood and gore, sexual content and/or strong language.” For parents who are very concerned with violence in video games, this one has a range of it: Set in a quasi-Nordic society, it contains the brutality one would expect there, including a decapitation in the first 10 minutes of the game’s opening.

So what on earth am I thinking in recommending it?

Last week the U.S. and the Supreme Court engaged in public deliberation on Proposition 8 in CA, the repeal of DOMA, and the question of what makes a marriage, and by extension, a family. As the debate unfolded, the statistics reported indicated that the court of public opinion had already reached a majority about the subject. The Washington Post reported that 58% of Americans favored gay marriage, the highest percentage of our citizens yet. And in the Supreme Court, Justice Kennedy raised this:

He was alluding to children of parents in same-sex relationships, some of whom are biological offspring, but a substantial number of others who are adopted. Adopted children often experience marginalization by virtue of their adoptive status, which can in itself be stigmatizing in a world which often give genetics primacy over nurturance. But the child who is adopted by same-sex parents often faces a double whammy in a world where their family system goes unrecognized if not persecuted.

I’d like to think that at least part of the change in public opinion on gay marriage and families is due to Skyrim. The video game from its inception has allowed for quest lines that culminate in your proposal, wedding, and marriage to a partner who can either be the same or different sex. If your character is female and you ask another female character to get married, your experience is one of acceptance. Later you get married in a ceremony celebrated and witnessed by several people in your community. Still later you set up house together, and have the experience so many of us have craved, coming home to someone who loves you after a hard days work (or dragon-slaying as the case may be.) As of last July, 10 million copies of the game had been sold worldwide, so it is not unreasonable to imagine that a large number of these found their way into the homes and minds of U.S. gamers. So let’s not give Will and Grace all the credit.

When working with patients from adoptive and/or same-sex families, Skyrim can be a valuable resource in providing a model of a world where adoption and gay marriage are accepted and treated with little fanfare as part of life. Families can use the game as a launch pad for discussion about what makes a family. Perhaps more importantly, kids, adolescents and adults can enjoy hours of gameplay in a world that celebrates marriage diversity and the family of adoption. It’s by no means a perfect world, but the benefits of such a video game may outweigh the concerns about gore. I can tell you that what I hear discussed eagerly by players is not how cool the gore is, but rather how neat it is to be able to be adopted or marry who you want.

Think about how often parents wish their children could understand them better. Now your child has the opportunity to imagine themselves choosing a child as they were chosen. Imagine a LGBTQ adolescent being able to experience choosing to marry who they want regardless of sex. And imagine a straight person seeing that they aren’t always what “normal” has to look like. Not medication, but a powerful prescription for what often ails our patients, and our nation.

And then, as I was preparing to write this post, I was bitten by a vampire.

Another common occurrence in the world of Skyrim is encountering a vampire. In my case, without choosing to, I had been bitten, and within a few days of game play, people in Skyrim began to notice. At first the shopkeepers would tell me I looked pale. A day or so later I was told by the guards that I had a hungry look in my eye. Finally, when my vampirism was no longer concealable everyone turned hostile. I couldn’t enter any city, including my hometown without being attacked, both verbally and physically. No matter that I hadn’t hurt anyone yet, I was forced to sneak around everywhere. I felt frustrated and victimized. It was a powerful lesson in ostracism.

I wish I could assign Skyrim to every one of my social work students studying diversity and racism. The game provides a model of a world which provides you with the experience of tremendous acceptance and empowerment, as well as hatred and stigma. It also shows us models of love and families which we have yet to embrace sufficiently in the United States of America.

There are 38 children in Skyrim who could be parented by a same-sex couple, in CA there are some 40,000 who have been. In our nation as a whole an estimated 65,000 adopted children are being raised by same-sex parents. We risk raising a portion of these, our future population, to feel ashamed, marginalized and flawed.

We can do better.

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!

Filed Under: Gamer Therapy Tagged With: activism, adolescents, adoption, behavior change, children, doma, education, gamers, games, gaming, LGBT, LGBTQ, psychoanalysis, psychodynamic, psychology, psychotherapy, Skyrim, social justice, social media, therapy, video games, Web 2.0

Continuing Education From Pax East

March 24, 2013 by langloimsw Leave a Comment

For those of you who may not know, Pax East is a yearly convention here in Boston celebrating all things video game. This year I was so fortunate to have the opportunity to present there on “Rethinking Gaming Addiction.” If you are interested in seeing what the presentation was about, you can view the Prezi here:

For those with the stamina, you can find a video of the presentation here:

And if you want to just listen to it in MP3 form, you can do so here:

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!

Filed Under: Gamer Therapy Tagged With: addiction, adolescents, behavior change, children, digital literacy, education, game theory, gamers, games, gaming, LGBT, mindfulness, minecraft, Pax east, private practice, psychoanalysis, psychodynamic, psychology, psychotherapy, public speaking, social media, therapy, twitter, video games, Web 2.0, World of Warcraft, youtube

Nice Everything You Have There: Mindful Minecraft

March 13, 2013 by langloimsw 4 Comments

Did you know that Minecraft has a lot to teach us about how we pay attention to, get distracted from, and cope with things? Embedded in the design and the lore of the game are nuggets of philosophy, neuroscience, and psychology. From work/life balance to physical and mental health to the meaning of life Minecraft has something to teach us.

That’s why I decided to present on mindfulness and Minecraft this year at SXSW. If you were there, thanks for coming, but if you weren’t fret not, for David Smith of Austin, TX was kind enough to videotape the event on his iPhone. David, thanks for your stamina! The video is broken into 5 parts, and I’ll include the prezi for you to play with as well:

Like this post? I can rant in person too, check out the Press Kit for Public Speaking info? And, for only $2.99 you can buy my book. You can also Subscribe to the Epic Newsletter!

Filed Under: Gamer Therapy Tagged With: adolescents, avatar, behavior change, buddhism, children, creeper, digital literacy, education, game theory, gamers, games, gaming, mindfulness, minecraft, Minecraft Pocket Edition, play, private practice, psychoanalysis, psychodynamic, psychology, psychotherapy, social justice, social media, stress, sxsw, technology, therapy, video games, Web 2.0, Xbox

Twenty-Three Apps for the 21st Century Therapist

March 3, 2013 by langloimsw 29 Comments

Mobile applications have a lot to offer therapists. Whether you are looking for games to play with patients, productivity or billing tools, or something to help you research, there’s an app for that. Many supervisees, students and consultees have asked me lately what apps I recommend, so I thought it was about time I gave you a list sampling those I find most helpful and fun. Many are cheap or free, and available for the iPad, iPhone and Android:

1. GoToMeeting

Planning on doing online therapy? Gotomeeting has desktop and app versions of videoconferencing software, which is HIPAA-compliant. The app version allows you to attend meetings, but the meeting needs to be initiated from the desktop version. I use this program for the majority of my online sessions with patients and supervisees.

2. IbisMail

If you are juggling multiple roles or a portfolio career, or simply want better therapeutic boundaries, this is the email program for you. Installed on your iPad or iPhone, this program allows you to set up automatic filters, so you can sort through junk mail. But it also allows you to set up folders for patient emails, so that you can have them all in one place. Then it is up to you to decide when you review your patient communications, rather than have everything coming through one inbox. Supports multiple email accounts.

3. Flipboard

If you are wanting to add value to your twitter followers or consultees, this is a great app. It provides a slick intuitive interface on your mobile device that pulls in stories from feeds you set, from you Facebook account to the Harvard Business Review blog. When you find something you want to share, the app allows seamless sharing on a variety of social media platforms. In a few minutes you can browse and share selected readings and keep up to date on current interests.

4. Bamboo Paper

This app allows you to write notes on your iPad. It is great for note-taking during evaluations, and allows you to send these notes to Evernote as a .pdf or email yourself a copy. NOTE: Doing this is not HIPAA-compliant if you have distinguishing identifying information in the note, so I recommend you refrain from using the cloud-based features if you have any concerns about patient privacy. If you are using it for workshops or other personal uses, however, no worries. And if you keep the notes local to your password-protected device, it can be a great tool.

5. Evernote

I was hesitant to add Evernote due to the recent hack they experienced, but their quick and effective response to this have actually made me more confident that this cloud-based note-taking device is still useful. It is NOT HIPAA-compliant, so I don’t use it for patient notes ever. That said, it is great for dictating notes about workshops, blog ideas, snapping pictures of things for study aids, and a myriad of other useful tasks. The notes synch up between every device you have them on, so you’re always up to date.

6. iAnnotate

One of my favorites. iAnnotate allows you to mark up .pdf files on your mobile device. If you need to sign off on a document someone emails or faxes you, no more scanning, printing, scanning again stuff. And if you are a student or researcher this is a must-have, as it supports highlighting and annotating research articles. Synchs with Mendeley and Dropbox so you can store your research library with notes online.

7. 1Password

How can you make your mobile device more secure and use your web-browser more safely? This may be the answer for you. 1Password installs on your mobile or desktop, and allows you to save and generate extremely long and secure passwords. The level of encryption can be adjusted for the most cautious of password protectors. This program also synchs over the cloud so that you always have the up-to-date passwords on all of your devices. Even more convenient, it can bookmark your sign-in pages. All of this is secured by double-password protection on your iPhone. Stop using the same lame password for everything and start generating unique hard-to-crack ones for true HIPAA-compliance.

8. Mendeley

One part social network, one part research library, Mendeley allows you to store research articles and annotations online and on your device. It allows you to network with other colleagues to see what they are researching, share articles, and store all of your articles in one place. Often it can even pull up the bibliographic entry from the web just by reading the .pdf metatag. Geeky research goodness!

9. PayPal

This is one option for billing patients and paying vendors that is good to have. You can invoice by email, transfer money to your bank account, and keep track of online payments on the website. The app works well in a pinch if you aren’t ready to swipe cradit cards in your office. NOTE, each transaction has a small fee.

10. Prezi

I’d love to see more therapists using this one. This presentation software allows you to create dynamic visual presentations on your computer or mobile device. You could use it to convert boring DBT worksheets to a dynamic online presentation. Prezi supports importation from powerpoint, and provides free online hosting of your prezis as well as tons of templates and tutorials. If you do public speaking, upload some of your prezis on your LinkedIn profile to give potential clients a vivid sense of your work. You can see a sample here, but bear in mind that it would make more sense if I was there giving the talk. 🙂

11. DCU

I haven’t been to a bank in over 2 years, and this app is the reason why. Digital Credit Union’s Mobile Branch PC, allows me to deposit checks from patients via my iphone. Just login, scan the checks, and in 10 minutes you’ve done your deposits for the week. Meanwhile, the online interface allows you to keep track of your spending easily and export to Excel or accounting software if you need to. Great for tax season!

12. Dropbox

Dropbox is a great and free way to store non-private information on the cloud. The app allows you to email items easily, so I use it to email intake instructions to patients, press kits to people inquiring about keynotes, and a number of other items. I also keep all my DBT worksheets on it so that they can be sent quickly and easily to patients should they be feeling in need of extra support between sessions but not acute enough to warrant hospitalization.

13. TED

This app allows you to stay inspired and experience innovation daily, by beaming TED talks to your mobile device from the offical TED site. You can favorite, search, and share your favorite ones, or hit “Inspire me” for random ideas. As I wrote this, I was listening to Amanda Palmer speak on “The art of asking.” This app can allow you access to ideas outside of the filtered professional bubble with therapists often get ourselves stuck in.

14. Line2

Want a second phone line on your iPhone? This app allows you to have one. You can port your practice number to it, and stop carrying two cell phones. At $9.95 a month you can have unlimited US/Canada calling, at $14.95 a month you get a toll-free number and virtual fax.

15. CardMunch

Tired of keeping all those business cards from a shoebox? CardMunch allows you to snap photos of a colleague’s business card and convert it to a digital one which it stores in your contacts. Synchs with LinkedIn.

16. Micromedex

Keeping up-to-date on medications is pretty daunting, but this app, with frequent updates, helps you keep track od a medication, its Black Box warnings, contraindications, drug interactions, adverse effects, alternate names, standard dosages and more.

And now for some games!

17. Plants Vs. Zombies

This game is great for helping patients who want to learn about strategy and pacing. Choose a certain number of plant types to plant in order to stop the zombies from overrunning your backyard.

18. Zombies, Run!

Continuing my zombie kick, this game is better than any pedometer I’ve ever used. The more you walk or run, the further you progress in this game of fleeing zombies. Go on multiple missions, play with friends, and even train for a 5K.

19. Kingdom Rush

This game is a classic tower defense game, which helps patients learn to make choices, control impulse spending as part of a winning strategy, and work on pacing, problem-solving and a host of other cognitive abilities.

20. Minecraft Pocket Edition

This mobile app version of Minecraft is a great way to connect with a patient’s gaming, and the app allows you to play together on a wireless LAN, so you can fight for survival or create an amazing construction right from your office together.

21. Flower Chain

This is a completely nonviolent game that focuses on setting up a chain reaction of flower blooms in order to complete each level. Great eye candy, and a fun game for clearing the mind after a difficult session.

22. Trainyard

This puzzle game requires you to plan out and design multiple railroad tracks. The trick is to set them up and pace them so that they all meet their goals without running into each other. Great prompt for talking with adolescents about how they can learn to negotiate peer relationships in the same way, or learn to compromise with adults in order to get along with them.

23. Lavalanche

This puzzle game is reminiscent of Jenga, in that you have to dismantle a tower without letting the Tiki Idol fall into lava. Another great one for executive function capacity-building around sequencing, planning and problem-solving.

So there you go, give some of these a try and let me know what you think. Have a favorite app that you want to share? Please feel free to comment and include the link.

Like this post? I can rant in person too, check out the Press Kit for Public Speaking info? And, for only $2.99 you can buy my book. You can also Subscribe to the Epic Newsletter!

Filed Under: Gamer Therapy Tagged With: #sworcery, 1Password, adolescents, Apps, Bamboo Paper, behavior change, building your business, CardMunch, children, DCU, Dropbox, education, evernote, Flipboard, Flower Chain, gamers, games, gaming, GoToMeeting, iAnnotate, IbisMail, kingdom rush, Lavalanche, Line2, marketing, Mendeley, Micromedex, Minecraft Pocket Edition, PayPal, plants vs. zombies, prezi, private practice, psychoanalysis, psychodynamic, psychology, psychotherapy, self-promotion, social media, technology, TED, therapy, Trainyard, twitter, video games, Web 2.0

Live At The Cooney Center: “Improving Our Aim: A Psychotherapist’s Take On Video Games & Violence”

February 20, 2013 by langloimsw Leave a Comment

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Filed Under: Gamer Therapy Tagged With: addiction, adolescents, behavior change, children, cooney center, digital literacy, education, game theory, gamers, games, gaming, mindfulness, private practice, psychoanalysis, psychodynamic, psychology, psychotherapy, sesame, social media, technology, video games, violence, Web 2.0, World of Warcraft

Learn More About Rethinking Video Games & Addiction Here!

February 17, 2013 by langloimsw 1 Comment

In the midst of several projects, including the upcoming 2013 SXSW presentation, but wanted to give you a post in the meantime. Here is the presentation on rethinking gaming addiction I did there last year.

[gigya ]

This can give you an idea of:

The power of Prezi, even in its’ most stripped down version
The visuals that accompanied the presentation you can listen to if you go here
What my approach to technology and psychology is
What my style is as a public speaker

Enjoy, and I will be posting again with bigger news soon!

Like this post? I can rant in person too, check out the Press Kit for Public Speaking info? And, for only $2.99 you can buy my book. You can also Subscribe to the Epic Newsletter!

Filed Under: Gamer Therapy Tagged With: adolescents, behavior change, children, digital literacy, education, game theory, gamers, games, gaming, mindfulness, play, prezi, private practice, psychoanalysis, psychodynamic, psychology, psychotherapy, social media, sxsw, technology, therapy, video games, Web 2.0, World of Warcraft, wow

4 Tips For Dealing With Video Game Violence For Parents

February 2, 2013 by langloimsw 2 Comments

Whenever there is an upsurge in moral panic around violence in the media, the focus becomes more polarizing than pragmatic. Despite the overwhelming research (such as these articles) that shows weak if any links between video games and violence, media pundits whip up mental health providers and the parents they work with into a frenzy. Feelings such as a passionate urge to protect children and adolescents are often to intense to be suspended to look at data. In the midst of all this, moderate and practical ways to address the graphic content of some video games are overlooked in favor of heated philosophical debates. So for those of you who are parents and/or work with them, here are a few tips and links on how to handle violence in video games:

1. Set console parental controls. You can set your game consoles to only play games of a certain rating. If you haven’t done so and are complaining about violence in video games, take some action here. Here are the how-tos:

XBox Parental Controls

Playstation Parental Controls (Video from CNET

Wii Parental Controls

These are password-protected, and will allow you to set the ratings limits, which brings us to:

2. Know your ratings. Although I have mixed feelings about the Entertainment Software Rating Board, it’s what we’ve got. But the ESRB is only as useful if you familiarize yourself with it. This means not only looking at what each rating means, but using the other resources they have, including mobile tools, setting controls, family discussion guides and other tips for safety. The message here is that there is more to understanding and moderating access to your child’s gameplay than a rating system, including discussion of in-game content.

3. Make use of graphical content filters. Many parents, educators and therapists don’t know that a growing number of games have options that can be set to filter out violent graphics, profanity, and alter the experience of game content to a more family-friendly level. If your child wants a video game, have searching online to see if the game has a GCF be part of the process. Not only will you be teaching them about consumer choice, but digital literacy as well. Here are some popular games that have GCFs:

Call of Duty Black Ops 2

Gears of War 3

World of Warcraft

4. MOST IMPORTANT TIP: Parenting has no “settings.” Parents and educators often want some expert to rely on–don’t try to “park it” that way. Most games can be rented before you buy them from services like GameFly so you can test drive them. That’s right, I’m suggesting you play the games yourself so you can make a personally informed decision. At the very least you should be watching your child play them some of the time, not to be nosy, but because part of your role as a parent is to take an interest in their world. If you can spend 2 hours going to their Little League game, you can spend an hour watching (if not playing) Borderlands 2.

If you’re an educator or therapist, you’re not off the hook either. 🙂 If you are going to offer opinions on video games and their content, make sure you are playing them. Chances are you don’t say things like “reading Dickens is dangerous for young minds” if you have never read any of his work. If you did, you’d probably be out at a book burning rather than reading this blog. By the same token, don’t presume to opine about video games if you have done nothing to educate yourselves about them. And please note that asking children about them is a place to start, but by no means sufficient for educating yourself. If you are a play therapist, please start including 21st century play materials like video games in your repertoire. And be sure to provide parents with the resources they need to help them make sense of this stuff, such as the resources this post gives you.

Look anyone can have an opinion on video games and violence, but we need practical processes to help people be informed consumers. This is one parenting issue that has practical, doable options, and is rated “O” for “Ongoing…”

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Filed Under: Gamer Therapy Tagged With: adolescents, call of duty, children, digital literacy, education, ESRB, gamers, games, gaming, Gears of War, parenting, play, Playstation, private practice, psychoanalysis, psychodynamic, psychology, psychotherapy, social justice, social media, technology, therapy, video games, violence, wii, World of Warcraft, wow, Xbox

Epic Every Day: What Video Games and the Millenials Can Teach Us If We Let Them

January 23, 2013 by langloimsw 4 Comments

The term millennial refers to the generation following mine, Generation X, who were born between the early 80s and 2001. There certainly may be some differences in the millennial cohort in terms of race and social class, but in my experience working in both urban and suburban settings, technology use is not one of them. In fact, technology has probably exacerbated some of the traits millennials are known and often criticized for. Social media has made expression more democratic and amplified, and millennials cite self-expression as extremely important. Growing up with the internet has also placed them in the same social and informational spheres as their parents more than previous generations, making them more civic-minded than rebellious, and having different, some would say overly dependent, attachments to their parents.

Common complaints about millennials include that they are entitled, tethered to their parents, unable to tolerate longterm goals, averse to sustained effort and require a constant stream of praise for the most minimal pieces of work. The other side of this coin is worth noting, too: Higher sense of self-expression has led to millennials’ higher acceptance of diversity in others; they are more comfortable with switching jobs or organizations they work with and working outside the box in general. Yes, they may also have a higher tendency to blame external rather than internal things for their problems, but having come to self-awareness post-9/11, can we really blame them?

In my work, I often encounter children, adolescents and young adults who are failing in school for a variety of reasons. These “millennials” avoid attending, and often the blame is placed on excessive video game use. They are seen to be escaping from reality, and although I can understand this perspective, it also puzzles me in some ways. Video games would in many ways seem to me to be going from the frying pan into the fire: They are rife with failure; in fact the statistic Jane McGonigal gives us is that people are failing 85% of the time in playing video games. MMOs often require even more collaboration, sharing and critical thinking between individuals than classrooms in any given 30 minute period.

Millennials are often criticized as post-academic workers as well, for having less job loyalty, a need for constant feedback, and expecting that feedback to be praise. In more affluent school districts I often heard their parents described as helicopter parents, who would email school minutes after receiving the report card to begin to debate the grades and exert pressure on educators to change them. This has led to such grade inflation in my experience that my graduate school students are hurt and insulted when they get a B+ on a paper, sometimes to the point of tears. I can’t remember a class I had in college where I wasn’t listening to a lecture, millennials are constantly asking for more small group work. I’ve even had a call on occasion from a parent about their child’s performance. Did I mention that I taught in graduate school?

From the above criticisms you’d think I was down on millennials, and you’d be dead wrong. Because I think for the most part the millennials are happy, tolerant, and more likely to help others voluntarily than other generations, and the Pew Research on them bears this out. And I think that a major reason for this is that they play video games.

The video games of today and the past decade have morphed from Pong and Space Invaders to Halo and World of Warcraft. They have set up myriad game worlds where survival and thriving requires critical thinking, social collaboration, and lots of trial and error for mastery. These games have also been played by over 90% of the millennial population, and I would suggest that the result is that millennials have been conditioned to be more collaborative, expect feedback to be quick and positive, and be more connected to others through technology.

Then we send them to school, and it is frustrating for a majority of them, a majority of teachers, and a majority of parents. Rather than encourage them to be “lifelong learners,” education as it is currently structured aims to produce a very narrow form of educated person, one that Sir Ken Robinson describes in his TED talk as an “academic professor.” In addition, we all start to become impatient with millennials to adopt our own often individualistic notions of what adulthood is. They need to stand on their own two feet, work without constant reassurance, and memorize things that they could just as easily Google. All to get into the right college, and all to get a good job.

We criticize the millennials’ work ethic for many of the same reasons: They won’t take individual responsibility for projects, they have trouble working independently, and they expect an award merely for being present. They need to take things more seriously and get their nose to the grindstone, no one has time to hold their hand anymore. These are all complaints I have heard levied against adolescents and young adults in my work, and the implicit message is that it is time to grow up.

One of the greatest things we can learn from millennials is something that I think they learned from video games, and that is how to destigmatize, and even enjoy, failure. The epitome of this for me is the ‘Heron’ The Greatest Spelling Bee Fail/Epic Win of All Time’—which was posted on YouTube originally by the millennial who flubbed it. This ability to have a sense of observing ego and humor about oneself is something many of us in psychotherapy work with our patients for years to achieve, and yet as a generation millennials seem to have grasped it more easily.

Part of my work with gamers is often to explore this paradox: Why is it fun or okay to fail in video games so much, and so intolerable in work or school? Sure, part of it is that play is a magic circle according to Huizinga, which is marked apart from real life. But games impact the same brain, the same emotions that exists inside and out of that circle. And if that is the case, there must be some transferable skills. We work on how to destigmatize failure

Innovation requires lots of trial and error, and lots of failures. As educator Lucas Gillispie said at a recent education conference in Second Life, it makes little sense to penalize so harshly when students get 69%. Rather than see it as having acquired more than half the knowledge assessed, we make it a source of embarrassment and usually require they repeat the entire exercise, class, or grade. Millennials have grown up with a split view of failure. On the one hand, video games have helped them understand that failure can be fun, even if you’re failing 85% of the time. On the other, they are put in educational environments where the A is everything, and the goal of learning is to get high marks rather than enjoy the creativity and critical thinking. In fact, A’s are so limiting! Why not focus on a high score which can always be improved upon in school? If the best you can do is an A, then you have to resort to accumulating the most A’s possible, which is less intrinsically rewarding and dynamic.

Many detractors will say that millennials need to get with the existing program, that what I am suggesting is dumbing down a curriculum, or that I am being too Pollyanna and that some jobs just aren’t capable of being fun. But for over a decade companies like IBM have found success modeling work environments on MMOs, and schools which institute dance classes notice higher math scores. And the solution to our economic and occupational troubles may not be the return of a “work ethic” or more job, but the creation of new types of schools and jobs, work we can’t even imagine yet because it hasn’t been innovated or invented. Can you imagine some 14^th century youth telling his farmer dad, “I don’t want to work on the farm. I’d like to create and use something that applies pressure and ink to paper to make reading and writing something we can all do.”

It probably isn’t a coincidence that the word “epic” has become ubiquitous over the past several years, with so many millennials and others playing video games like World of Warcraft. And it has come under fire by many of my colleagues, who maintain that in a culture where everything is Epic, nothing truly is. I’m not saying that everything is Epic, but I am saying that there can be some Epic every day. It’s what they call teachable moments, flow, success, even the Epic fail that we can laugh off with colleagues before redoubling our efforts to nail it next time. What we’re really learning here is how to tolerate frustration.

Millennials know that “epic” is a superlative, they’re not devaluing the currency of that word. If anything, I think that this is a sign that Buddhist thinking is becoming more integrated into the 21^st century: It is Epic that we are here alive in this moment, that we want and fear so much, and the struggles that ensure from those things. There are a lot of levels left to unlock and problems to be vanquished in the world, and we need to cultivate optimism and positive psychology at school and in the workplace, not stomp on it.

Millennials often have that sense that there can be some Epic every day. Video games offer worlds where there can be some Epic every day, too. Let’s start noticing it.

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Filed Under: Gamer Therapy Tagged With: adolescents, behavior change, digital literacy, education, facebook, gamers, games, gaming, generation y, millennials, play, private practice, psychoanalysis, psychodynamic, psychology, psychotherapy, social media, technology, therapy, twitter, video games, Web 2.0

Happy New Year!

January 1, 2013 by langloimsw 1 Comment

As we start the New Year I wanted to share a quote I think applies to you:

“Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

Going into the New Year, entertain the possibility that you are a genius. Whether you are a gamer playing first-person shooters, a therapist trying to build your private practice, an educator trying to reach students, or someone trying to live a good life, ask yourself: What are the targets you can see that other people can’t?

Don’t expect praise, people will think you are crazy for shooting into thin air. You may be bullied, insulted or ignored, but remember you are not alone. Find that person or group who believes in you even though they can’t see your target. Those are true people of faith in your life.

Does this mean you’ll be coasting? Nope. It takes practice allowing yourself to look for things invisible to most. It takes constant effort to hone your talent.

If you play Minecraft, think of 2013 as your new sandbox. 2013 is loaded with things you’ve not discovered yet. Any rock could conceal diamonds or ore. You will encounter creepers when you least expect them, lose things and have setbacks. But you can opt for multiplayer, and build in community. All of the materials are there for you. You may think you are starting with nothing, but you always have the tools to build tools.

If you keep at it you can change the world.

Whether you are a regular visitor or a loyal follower of this blog, thank you. In case you missed them, below are the 5 most popular posts from this year:

Dopey About Dopamine: Video Games, Drugs, & Addiction

Epic Mickey and Frittering

Gamer Therapy

How to Get Taken Seriously as a Mental Health Professional

Skyrim, Stealing & Sadism

Like this post? I can rant in person too, check out the Press Kit for Public Speaking info? And, for only $2.99 you can buy my book. You can also Subscribe to the Epic Newsletter!

Filed Under: Gamer Therapy Tagged With: behavior change, building your business, education, gamers, games, gaming, marketing, mindfulness, minecraft, private practice, psychoanalysis, psychodynamic, psychology, psychotherapy, self-promotion, social media, technology, video games, Web 2.0

Angry Birds, Advent, & the 12 Links of Christmas

December 13, 2012 by langloimsw 5 Comments

You may be familiar with Angry Birds, one of the most popular smartphone games in the world. But did you know that they have a holiday season edition? They cover several world holidays, but by far my favorite is the Christmas version, which comes out early each December.

The reason I like it so much is that it is basically an Advent calendar. For those of you who aren’t familiar with them, advent calendars are holiday calendars used to help celebrate the anticipation of Christmas. There are usually 24 little doors or windows in the calendar, and each night you open one of the doors as you get closer to the 25th. Behind the door may be a picture, small piece of chocolate, part of a story, or something else.

Angry Birds Seasons allows you to play one game level per day leading up until Christmas. Whether you whiz through it or play for 2 hours, the next day’s level is locked until midnight. You’ll see a countdown page if you try to move forward, but that’s it.

Many spiritual traditions emphasize the celebration of small patient acts. Hanukkah uses the nightly lighting of the menorah and exchange of small gifts for 8 nights. Diwali has 6 nights of celebration in its festival of lights, and there are many more. And now we have the more secular tradition of Angry Birds.

I want to celebrate with you the idea of waiting and enjoying small things. I think we can enjoy anticipation, see the value in the smallest of gifts. And that those gifts can be as powerful as they are small.

So whatever your particular holiday tradition is, or isn’t, I hope you’ll accept this gift from me to you. I call them the Twelve Links of Christmas, but you can call them whatever you want. They’re hyperlinks (sorry Zelda fans) to 12 different activities and ideas. Some of them are video games you can try, others are gift ideas, some are videos of change. All of them engage you in some activity involving social justice.

Don’t open them all at once! Each day from now until the 25th, click on one link and try it out.

The Twelve Links

1. Darfur is Dying: Refugee Game for Change Play this game to learn more about the genocide in the Darfur region. One of my students played the game for 45 minutes before realizing that she had now spent more time learning about Darfur in one sitting than the totality of her life before.
2. Eli Pariser TED Talk: Beware online “filter bubbles” In this TED Talk, Eli Pariser helps us see how we are in danger of having our experiences and information filtered by emerging technologies, and warns us of the potential consequence of such searches mediating and filtering our understanding of the world.
3. True Colors It’s been two years since this performance was belted out by the LA Gay Men’s Chorus, but it is as moving as ever. Sung to the world, but also to every LGBT youth feeling isolated and hopeless, this resounding cry of comfort and encouragement is perhaps best summed up in the powerful vocals at 3:50: “So don’t be afraid..”
4. Foldit: Science Game for Health Learn about and play the game that contributed to HIV research in 10 days of gaming in ways that computer models had been trying to do for years. Foldit uses a video game to fold proteins, which aids in the search for cures of health issues such as Cancer and AIDS. Within minutes, anyone can begin playing the game and help!
5. Tropes Vs. Women #3: The Smurfette Principal This is one video from Anita Sarkeesian’s series, which offers a feminist perspective on the limited and limiting ways women are portrayed in popular culture. Anita’s more recent exploration of sexism and these tropes in video games sparked a hateful backlash from some, and may just have ushered in a new era of discussion and self-critique as gamers and game developers supported Sarkeesian and have begun working to make the days of such hate numbered.
6. Papo and Yo If you still have any doubt that video games can be both art and social commentary, this powerful trailer may convince you otherwise. This PS3 game offers a powerful exploration of childhood abuse, ethnicity, poverty and the power of the imagination to solve the puzzle trauma inflicts on the oppressed.
7. Ken Robinson Says Schools Kill Creativity Check out this TED talk, not just for its commentary on education in general, but as a meditation on how we could rethink learning disabilities, autism, and other differences in the human learning process.
8. Ethos and Seniors Flash Mob for Elder Abuse Awareness Day This year, senior citizens in my very own Massachusetts dropped into the local supermarket for a flash mob to raise awareness on elder abuse. Their choice of song was apt, and even a bit chilling. Check out the video and see if you can notice how many stereotypes of elders it helps debunk.
9. Heifer.org : Rethinking Gift-giving A perennial favorite of mine, the mission of Heifer is simple: “To work with communities to end hunger and poverty and care for the Earth.” This website will show you the way you can change the world this holiday season by giving a gift of sustainable food and agriculture to indigenous peoples all over the world. Much nicer than another soap on a rope.
10. I Am: Trans People Speak A brave and bold use of social media, this project is affiliated with the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition in partnership with the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. It seeks to raise awareness about diversity within transgender communities, as well as empower individuals to create positive change in the media representations of trans people.
11. Food Force 2 Look, you’re on Facebook anyway, why not spend some time learning a bit about sustainability, community organizing and world hunger? This game, sponsored by the United Nations World Food Program, seeks to raise both awareness and money to solve real world food shortages. Since it is a video game on a social media platform, perhaps you can invite your friends to play too!
12. Give An Hour: Psychotherapists Supporting Veterans Got a spare 50 hours? Of course not. Okay, how about 10 minutes to check this video out. In it my colleague Barbara Van Dahlen discusses how she founded Give An Hour, an organization that connects returning veterans with psychotherapists who have volunteered to donate an hour a week of free therapy. After you listen to some of the soldier’s stories, you may find yourself inspired to make room for that hour a week in your practice. I have since 2006, and I recommend it highly.

If you’ve checked out the link before, maybe there is someone important to you you could send it to? Maybe you haven’t shared it with your child? Maybe someone else who you know will be alone for the holidays, or someone you’ve been meaning to reconnect with and can’t quite figure out how to do it?

I hope you find these links as rewarding and enriching as I have. Please accept them as my thank you for reading the blog this year. Please take them as an invitation to change the world. Because that is what social justice is, isn’t it?

;

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Filed Under: Gamer Therapy Tagged With: activism, angry birds, behavior change, children, education, gamers, games, gaming, LGBT, mindfulness, play, private practice, psychoanalysis, psychodynamic, psychology, psychotherapy, social justice, social media, technology, therapy, video games, Web 2.0

‘Tis The Season For Power Ups

December 3, 2012 by langloimsw 2 Comments

This time of year is for many of us a time of stress and reflection. The days get shorter and much of the time it seems as if we are wandering around in darkness waiting for things to change. We may be pursued by haunting images of past relationships and mistakes we have made. We may feel like we are doing things over and over the same way expecting different results. We may become painfully aware of our repetition compulsion even as we charge around trying to get something to fill us up. We may dread the end and fear death.

You all know I’m talking about Pac-Man, right?

No, seriously, by now everyone on the planet, gamer or not, must know that Pac-Man is not just a fun video game but a compelling spiritual meditation. First off, Pac-Man is walking a labyrinth over and over, focusing on his path, how mindful is that? And then there are the ghosts, don’t even get me started on them. They pursue him constantly, like the specter of death or the ruminating thought that can’t be shaken. They are constantly somewhere on the board with him, yet Pac-Man is essentially alone in the world.

This would all be pretty depressing if it weren’t for the power-ups. Traditionally there are four of them, in the form of larger blinking white dots in the corners of the maze. You probably recall the drill: Pac-Man runs away from the ghosts until he finally eats one of those power-ups. And then everything changes. The ghosts turn blue and run away from him, and he can eat them for more points. Yep, turns out Pac-Man applies good old Buddhist principles to the whole situation: He faces his fears, and moves toward them. As Pema Chodron would say, Pac-Man goes to the places that scare him and leans into the sharp points.

Ok, so back to you and your life, or your business or your family or your health, whatever situation or ghostly thoughts are running around the maze in your head. Let’s do some Pac-meditation on them:

1. Who’s chasing you? Take a moment to stop rushing around and ask yourself what are you worrying about? Are you legitimately busy or being hectic? Remind yourself that in this present moment, the people, places or things you may be avoiding are probably not really there in front of you. If you aren’t physically moving, then remind yourself of that with a breath or two. If you feel like you are moving and you really aren’t, gently remind your mind of that. And if you are moving, try moving like you are walking a labyrinth not running around a maze: purposefully, single mindedly. Mindfulness is the difference between a maze and a labyrinth.

2. Don’t let the bouncing fruit distract you. This time of year especially it is easy to get thrown off course because you can become fixated on one goal: The perfect gift, the perfect holiday dinner, the New Year’s resolution to change X,Y, or Z. Much of it is hype or a collective hysteria. Look again, there isn’t one special dazzling fruit (or pretzel) that you have to have to win. Nope, it’s just ordinary time, the present moment stretching out before you like a string of yummy pellets. Enjoy those quiet unassuming moments where everything is calm and sufficient.

3. Know your ghosts. Take a few minutes now to get to know your four ghosts. This doesn’t need to be all psychoanalytic. Just try to list off 1-4 things that are most pressing to worry about. The ghosts often have less scary identities than you may suspect:

Those are the traditional names, but now let’s have you take your ghosts and put your names on them. For example they could be:

Try to limit the ghosts to four–Remember, this isn’t Space Invaders. What are the most pressing urgent concerns? The goal is to get them down and begin to do what Michael White referred to as “externalizing the problem.”

Now you’re ready for…

4. Identify your power-ups. What are those things that help you feel more powerful, more effective? Some people identify a song that powers them up to go to the gym. A favorite quote can be your power-up. In my office I have one of those Staples Easy Buttons which some people find useful. My own personal power-up is an Iced Venti Americano at Starbucks. Sometimes power-ups are specific to the particular ghost you are dealing with, sometimes one power-up works for many different ones. This is not a new concept, people have been using talismans for years. Object relations folks would probably call power-ups “transitional objects.”

Last, but not least:

5. Use your power-ups. This is not as easy as it sounds. People often forget they have power-ups even after they have identified them. You need to make sure your power-up is ready at hand. If yours is an Easy button, you need to keep it at your workspace in plain view. If it is fresh orange juice you need to make sure there is some in the fridge. If it is a song it needs to be downloaded on all your gadgets. If prayer or meditation is your power-up put the cushion on the floor in front of your bedroom doorway. Enlist your partner or family members to remind you that you have these power-ups. Then use them no matter how silly it feels, no matter how hopeless you feel. Just. Use. Them.

This isn’t the only time of year you can use power-ups, but it is definitely a good time to start. Not because it is the holiday season, but because it is the present. Right now you are awake, so you can reflect and take action. The only person stopping you from logging off and figuring out your ghosts and power-ups is you: Game on!

Filed Under: Gamer Therapy Tagged With: adolescents, behavior change, building your business, cbt, game theory, gamers, games, gaming, mindfulness, pac-man, private practice, psychoanalysis, psychodynamic, psychology, psychotherapy, social media, stress, video games, Web 2.0, winter

On The Importance Of Feeling Useless

November 7, 2012 by langloimsw 1 Comment

Recently I was being trounced in a game of Call Of Duty 3: Modern Warfare 3. Not only was I having a difficult time understanding the lingo and mechanics of the game, the controls for this first person shooter were bewildering to me. I found myself staring down at the controller more than at the screen. Why couldn’t I remember what the A button did? Over the course of the week, I was also informed that Halo 4, Assassin’s Creed, and Paper Mario: Sticker Star are also here or on the horizon.

I wasn’t sure when I was going to find the time to try all of these. I was already behind. Skyrim had new DLC, Minecraft had different updates for both PC and the XBox 360 versions, and the Secret World and Guild Wars 2 had both been preempted by the latest World of Warcraft : Mists of Pandaria expansion. And what about Salem? I had gotten a beta key for that, didn’t that make me obligated to try a little more? And I won’t even go into the iPad and iPhone games, but Baldur’s Gate was just 3 weeks away…

I write all this because I have found that readers and colleagues often assume that because gaming is an area of clinical practice and focus of mine, that I am up on all of the latest games. If you have been imagining that I always know what every MMO gamer is talking about, or can jive with adolescents about the finer points of COD: MW3 (Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3) and how it differs from Max Payne, you are in for a rude awakening.

I can relate to every therapist who has sat with a patient and said no repeatedly to “Do you know about” questions involving video games. I can relate to every colleague with thumbs of lead who plays with (against) their patients on XBox. I too struggle against the countertransference urge to display my “hipness.” And boy am I tempted sometimes to throw up my hands and say I am so over the latest thing.

But I don’t throw up my hands because I recognize that it is a defense against feeling useless. Who wants to feel slow, clumsy, behind the times? Feeling useless coincides with feeling powerless, devoid of meaning or hope, and isolation. For me, that feeling of uselessness is touching the water’s bottom: It’s where I kick off. Uselessness is almost always the feeling that precedes determination for me and the moment when I am closest to getting going again. Here are just a few reasons why feeling useless can be important:

1. Feeling useless reminds me of how my patients often feel. Regardless of age, gender or walk of life, I have sat with people who experience feelings of utter uselessness. Most kids feel useless in school at one point or another. Adults tend to embrace amnesia when it comes to remembering how dumb education can make you feel before you feel smart. They have forgotten what it was like to be called last for the kickball team, or draw and erase and draw until your paper ripped. And the population of Baby Boomers can feel useless as they sense the impatiences of their younger colleagues in the workplace: You talk too slow, drive too slow, and why don’t you just retire? Meanwhile, younger adults send out resume after resume and spend more hours in sweatpants as they feel that they and their education are both useless. Parents send their children off to college and experience the empty nest, or send them off to war and experience a more terrifying version of uselessness. We need to remember how it feels to be useless if we are going to stay empathically attuned to our patients.

2. To recognize that you are feeling useless is to begin to wake up. At least it can be, because the sense of being useless is completely irrational. There is nobody, not one person on the planet who has nothing to give of themselves. There is no such thing as a useless person, it is a cognitive distortion. And the minute we recognize that distortion we can begin to use our observing ego to ask ourselves “who is this who is telling me I am useless?” Whoever it is, the media, a parent, an old tape running in our head, or all of the above, it is just wrong. And that’s ok, because we’ve been wrong before, and now that we know it we can begin to gently guide our thinking back to a more rational place. If this sounds like meditation, that’s probably because it is.

3. To feel useless is only a feeling. Sure feelings are important, and a powerful part of human experience. But they are only one part of human experience. Thinking and behavior are two other parts. We can use feeling useless to motivate ourselves. We can use it as a barometer for our overall mental health. We can also use it as a defense to stay stuck, or to attempt to elicit pity from others. There are all sorts of ways we can use a feeling, and they aren’t all necessarily, well, useful. Or we can just sit still for a bit, because being just a feeling, feeling useless will float by and be replaced by another feeling, and another and another…

So if you are a therapist, and you notice yourself feeling useless, you are one step closer to coming to your senses. You can become more mindful of how unpleasant the feeling is, and mindful of how your patient may feel when they experience it. You can remember it is only a feeling, and become curious about it and why it is coming up. And you can consciously decide how to use it or cope with it, rather than unconsciously act out in response to it.

To return to my video game example, here’s how I used it. I noticed the feeling and said to myself, “That’s how my patients experience themselves sometimes.” From there I went on to think, “That’s how the therapists I consult with about technology experience themselves sometimes.” Interesting information, and it helped me pause a moment more. And when I sat with it more it occurred to me that there was some symbolic content that had come up in a session recently that I’d overlooked. And then it occurred to me to write this blog, and as I wrote the first paragraph I remembered how video games are a form of social media, and how my friend Susan Giurleo often reminds me that we don’t need to be on every single platform of it to be technically savvy. From that stream of consciousness, and more importantly, from my feeling of uselessness, came this post. And I have no doubt that at least a few of my colleagues will find it useful, which totally debunks the useless Mike theory.

What about you? What has elicited a feeling of uselessness for you lately? What is that feeling about, and what are you going to do with it?

Filed Under: Gamer Therapy Tagged With: adolescents, Assassin's Creed, behavior change, buddhism, call of duty, children, education, gamers, games, gaming, Halo, mindfulness, minecraft, Pandaria, private practice, psychoanalysis, psychodynamic, psychology, psychotherapy, social media, technology, video games, World of Warcraft

Taking An Interest

October 14, 2012 by langloimsw 2 Comments

This week I was at the dentist, and the appointment probably took twice as long as it was supposed to. This was because as I was waiting in the dentist chair, I was playing Denki Blocks on my iPhone when the assstant came in. She found the game interesting, and confessed to me that she didn’t know how to download games on her new iPhone. And as I was explaining how to do that, the dentist came in and he talked about how his children weren’t allowed to play games on the iPhone because they discouraged socializing. So then of course I explained that there was research that suggested very differently. He listened quietly and I said, “maybe I shouldn’t be arguing with someone who is about to put a drill in my mouth.”

“No, no,” he said. “It’s just that I’m thinking about what you said, and I haven’t thought about it that way before.” All three of us had an ongoing conversation between all the stages of filling a cavitiy, about smartphones, digital literacy, gaming. And at the end of it I noted how clearly this is a topic for our times if all of us can be talking and listening intently about it for such a long period of time.

In college, one of my creative writing teachers once said, “What interests you is interesting.” I think there is a lot of truth in this in general, and specifically when it comes to psychotherapy and running a business. I feel extremely fortunate to be in a portfolio career that allows me to pursue my interests and take an interest in the psyche and society. Not everybody has an easy or clear path to this in our society. Some self-help gurus make it sound like all you need is a burning interest to become the happy and successful, which is absolutely not true. There are millions of talented people out there that start off with less privilege and opportunity, and more stressors due to race, gender, poverty, or living in an ableist culture. But what I do think my professor was on to was the idea that often what interests you can be a strong motivator to yourself and exciting to others.

A supervisee and I recently were discussing the possible meanings and messages that could be conveyed in leaving a voicemail for a patient. After discussing this for 30 minutes, I interjected by saying, “Can I just take a step back and point out what a weird profession we’re in that we can spend so much time talking about this?” We both laughed at this, and it was true, but the time had gone by so fast because we were mutually interested in the subject.

Enthusiasm, in its original meaning, was taken from the Greek enthousiasmos, which came from enthousiazein, to be possessed from within by a spirit or god. That sense of a powerful force from within that can fill one with energy and ideas and lose track of time is at work in all of the stories above. It is not the only ingredient to having a successful business, but I believe it is an essential one. We need to be able to geek out about what we do, to go on at length about it. Hopefully we can do so in an engaging way, but we need to be able to lose a bit of self-consciousness to be able to focus properly on our patients, our work, and our business.

Frequently I consult with therapists who come to me because they want to grow their practice. A few of them say that, but what they really mean is that they want to make more money and work less. That is not in itself a bad thing, but for some it is an attempt at compromise. For they have grown tired or disinterested in what they are doing. They feel trapped in their work, not interested in it. They are afraid that they are too old to change, or don’t have anything else they can do. Some dream about a time they’ll retire and write a novel. But for now they are consigned to sit silently and voicelessly in their office. They grow bored and resentful of their patients, who if they are lucky, escape. This vicious cycle can go on for years.

The same holds for supervision. I have heard from a lot of supervisees about supervisions where it’s all about the paperwork, or the liability, or the billable hours. I’ve heard supervisors lament how they don’t have time to focus on talking about the dynamics of therapies, as if that was “extra” stuff! My experience is that these comments are voiced midway or at the end of a progression towards burnout. First the supervisor feels overwhelmed by the “musts” of paperwork and filing 51As, and then the supervision shifts to only being about those. Next, the supervision gets defined as merely being about that, so that the supervisee sees the supervisor rushing down the hall or on the phone, pausing to ask, “Anything we need to talk about?” If there is no crisis the student feels pressured and becomes trained to say no, there isn’t. And now that supervision is only about crises and paperwork, it becomes something everyone wants to avoid because it is boring, lifeless. There is no enthusiasm.

I would suggest this is ultimately a setup for malpractice. Supervisees trust supervisors who seem interested in them. Over and over I have heard that supervisees have a hard time connecting or trusting supervisors who are “just business,” or cheerleaders. Yes, supervisees don’t want a supervisor who lets them talk for an hour and then says, “sounds like you handled that well.” This bears saying, because sometimes we unconsciously or consciously try to substitute affirmation for engagement and interest. If you’re a supervisor, don’t do it, because your supervisees can smell it a mile away. If you’re vacant, they know it. If you are filled with the spirit of interest, they know that as well.

I’ve had colleagues tell me how clever I am to have found the niche I have, which drives me crazy frankly. I didn’t choose to focus on technology, gaming and social media in therapy because I saw a vacuum. I was just lucky that there was one. I chose these areas of specialty because I am a total geek about them. I could play or talk about video games for hours. I can’t talk about Twitter or Google+ without getting animated. I see their influence everywhere, read vociferously about them on my “free” time. I wrote a book about it which I charge $2.99 for. When asked to teach a class on clinical practice I declined, and said, “No, but I’ll write a syllabus and teach a class for social work and technology.” Any of you who have taught at the graduate level know that teaching from a pre-existing syllabus is easier and less time-consuming than writing and proposing a pilot course. But I was enthusiastic about the topic, which fueled my work ethic. And this has set up a virtuous cycle, where I get more recommendations for reading or TED Talks than I can handle, and referrals to work with those patients.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t hope someday to become famous or rich, but it is more likely that I will make a decent living and have a modest reputation. Because as I said there are thousands, no millions of people out there who have talents and interests to share with the world. I’m just grateful I got lucky enough to be one of the ones who got the chance to do it.

Filed Under: Gamer Therapy Tagged With: building your business, education, gamers, games, gaming, interest, play, private practice, psychoanalysis, psychodynamic, psychology, psychotherapy, social media, supervision, technology, therapy, twitter, video games, Web 2.0, World of Warcraft

Bio Breaks

September 17, 2012 by langloimsw 1 Comment

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!

Filed Under: Gamer Therapy Tagged With: adolescents, behavior change, bio break, children, education, gamers, games, gaming, mental health parity, private practice, psychodynamic, psychology, psychotherapy, stress, technology, therapy, video games, World of Warcraft, wow

What Back to School Could Mean

September 8, 2012 by langloimsw 2 Comments

This past week, over 70 million students from Pre-K to PhD went back to school in the United States. Of those, an estimated 1 million students are homeless, an all-time high. And this past week, many of us went back to school ourselves to teach these folks. Maybe you have a adjunct position, or maybe you are supervising an intern, or maybe you are a school counselor or work at a university health service.

It has never seemed more urgent to me then now that we help people get the educations they desire and work toward. Our country has been struggling immensely over the past several years with fiscal crashes, growing gaps between the upper, middle and working classes, and the sense of hopelessness and pessimism that accompany them. When 1 million children are homeless in one of the 10 richest countries in the world, there is a lot of change needed.

Education should be fueled by optimism even though it always begins in failure. By that I mean that we start off by not knowing stuff, and hoping to change that. If we all knew how to read, write and think critically innately, we’d never need to go to school. We begin not-knowing, but, and this is what is amazing, hard-wired to learn things. We are wired to attach to caregivers, acquire language, and make meaning of the world. And we all have the ability to have ideas.

Recently there has been a lot of useful commentary on how we need to get better at failing, in order to be able to innovate. That is true, and it is only half the story. To be able to innovate, we need to be willing to risk and tolerate failure, true. But just as importantly, we need to allow for the possibility that we could contribute something important and transformative to the world as well.

Recently I was talking with a group of my graduate students, and I asked them to be honest with me and raise their hand if they thought they could get an A in my class. I was heartened to see that 3/4 of class raised their hands. Then I said, “Now raise your hand if you believe that you could have an idea in this class that could change the world.”

One student raised their hand. It was a poignant moment for me, and I suspect many of them.

What has happened to our educational system and values that we teach people to expect they can get an A, but not come up with an idea that can change the world?

I do not fault the students at ALL for this, because I think they have been taught this pessimism by our system. SATs and standardized tests are the ways we grant access to more educational privilege in the U.S., but numbers don’t allow for the reality that everyone has the ability to ideate, to come up with a new thought that could change the world in small and large ways. And students are given or not given financial support based on numbers, which at best only indicate potential, the potential in many ways to know what has already been known, rather than the ability to discover the unknown. These numbers become a driving concern to parents and children, to teachers and students 0f all ages.

Many of the students you are working with are starting the year feeling defeated already. I remember a talk I gave a while back to students on academic probation at a community college, in the last chance class they had to pass in order to continue. Every one of them played and enjoyed some sort of video game, and I asked them why they were willing to try and fail repeatedly with video games when they were having such reluctance to try and fail at school?

One student raised his hand and answered, “because with a video game, I might win.”

What a damning indictment of the educational environment we are shaping people’s hearts and minds in. And yet, by the end of that class every one of the students had spoken, had put forth an idea of their own which brought us as a group further.

Recently, I have been playing a new MMO called Guild Wars 2 and I am finding it very timely for the back to school season. Although I have played WoW for years and have leveled characters up to 85 there, suddenly I find myself thrown into a new world. There is a completely unexplored map, a new economy to master, the game mechanics and character classes just different enough to make my keyboard skills rusty. I didn’t have a clue what was going on until I hit level 5 or 6, when suddenly I began to “get it.” The big question I have for you is, what kept me going to level 5?

I suspect the answer is that video games like GW2 create an optimistic world, where the possibility of success and creating something new is a distinct one. I kept trying in places where I got stuck because I knew both that failure was a possibility but so was success. I also had the opportunity to play the beta version, where we were always being asked by the game designers for our impressions and ideas. Many of these ideas have been incorporated into the later iterations of games like GW2, WoW, and Minecraft. These ideas have literally changed the worlds of these games.

What if we looked at our classrooms and studies more like a beta test? What if we allowed for the possibility that each of us, any of us, could have an idea that changes the world? What kind of learning and character building would that environment produce?

I highly doubt that if aliens were to visit our planet thousands of years from now that they would be impressed with anyone’s GPA. I doubt that they’d sift through the ashes of a civilization to see its test results. They might note the high levels of anxiety and rhetoric in the 21st century speeches on education reform though.

If you are a student reading this I hope you will take this to heart: I believe that you are capable of coming up with an idea that could change the world. If you are a teacher I hope you’ll fight to keep your classroom a laboratory of innovation or a beta test rather than crank out widgets of standardized educational achievement. If you are a therapist I hope you will help support your patients and their families to maintain a sense of their capability and optimism. If you are a parent I hope you will remember that your children’s willingness to take risks and find interests in the world may not always match your own or the status quo and that that is a good thing.

Someone, many someones, somewhere, many somewheres out there, a world-changing idea is about to happen. Let’s not miss it.

Filed Under: Gamer Therapy Tagged With: adolescents, behavior change, children, education, gamers, games, gaming, guild wars 2, gw2, mindfulness, play, private practice, psychoanalysis, psychodynamic, psychology, psychotherapy, social justice, social media, technology, therapy, video games, Web 2.0, World of Warcraft, wow

Minecraft & The Uncanny, Part 1

August 15, 2012 by langloimsw Leave a Comment

This is the first 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 1919 Freud wrote and published an article on “The Uncanny.” In it he described the concept of the uncanny as a specific type of fear something both strange and familiar. It is worth noting that the article begins with an investigation into aesthetics, something that was not usually done in the medical literature of Freud’s time. But Freud realized that there was something particularly aesthetic about the uncanny. It is an anxiety that both draws on the aesthetic, and from a distance also acquires an aesthetic quality itself. In fact, it could be argued that a whole genre of fiction, such as Lovecraft, embodies the aesthetic of the uncanny.

In German, the uncanny is unheimlich, which translates literally to the “unhomely” or “unhomelike.” Here homely has a double meaning. First homely is the quality of domesticity, the warm hearth of the house, down comforters, a cheery cottage coziness, etc. Second, heimlich refers to concealment, contained within the house’s domestic sphere, hidden from the public eyes of outside society.

Seen in this light, the uncanny or unheimlich is both alien and a revelation or an exposure. Freud quotes Schelling as saying that ‘“Unheimlich” is the name for everything that ought to have remained … secret and hidden but has come to light..’” Is it any wonder that Freud took up exploration of this concept, with all of its allusions to the unconscious, anxiety, and societal repression?

Freud also talks about the element of repetition in the uncanny, such as arriving at certain places we’ve been to before, or noticing the number 62 appearing throughout the day in a variety of places. This element of repetition gives rise to the sense that there is a pattern that we may not be aware of, which in turn makes the world suddenly seem both stranger and more imbued with meaning.

Freud goes on to discuss something gamers will be very familiar with, mana, although he discusses it from outside the framework of fantasy as a form of magical thinking that attributes powers to the neurotic overvaluation of their thought processes and their impact on reality. But the game world is within the realm of fantasy. Within that world, what Freud refers to as “the Apparent death and the re-animation of the dead” are fairly commonplace. The game world returns us in many ways to the animistic state of being, characterized by “the prompt fulfilment of wishes, with secret injurious powers and with the return of the dead.”

The uncanny also figures largely in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, and is connected to the idea of man’s “throwness” into the world. Human beings want to feel at home in the world, but when they encounter the uncanny they experience themselves as thrown into it and apart from it. For Heidegger the unheimlich eradicates our sense of Being-at-home-in-the-World, but as it does so it reveals something about the World to us.

For Heidegger the World is also revealed to us (and we are revealed as well) by that which is ready-to-hand, something that has a meaning that connects us to the world. An example is a hammer, which we experience as imbued with meaning and value and inextricably linked to human being. We don’t think about the hammer, in fact the only time we are really conscious of it is when it isn’t working. A similar example is your car, if you reflect on it you will probably notice that you only really pay attention to your car as a concept when it isn’t working.

As opposed to ready-to-hand, present-at-hand refers to an uninvested, detached way of looking at something, one that takes us out of any sort of meaningful relationship. Its meaning may be unclear and unconnected with human being at all. If I ask you what you’d like to do with that round green and red thing, you’ll be confused. But if you see it as an apple, things will become much clearer. It probably isn’t a coincidence, by the way, that most depictions of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden show the fruit as an apple. Before the Fall, everything is ready-to-hand and imbued with meaning. Afterwards, in our thrown state, things become less clear, and more uncanny. Paradise has been lost.

Ninety years after Freud wrote “The Uncanny,” Markus “Notch” Persson created the game Minecraft. Minecraft is a sandbox type of video game, meaning that the world generated can be permanently changed by the player. Creativity and survival is the goal, and there is no way to “win” the game. The premise of the game is that your character is thrown into a vast world designed with 8-bit graphics (think early Nintendo) with only your bare hands. The game has a day and night cycle, and at night zombies, skeletons, and other monsters come out and will attack you if you are exposed.

Everything in the game world can be destroyed and broken down into elements that can be crafted if you have the right ingredients. At first you have fewer options, because destroying a tree with your hands takes more time than if you had an axe. But slowly you gather materials so that you can build things that in turn allow you to build more things, so that you can hopefully build a shelter before night falls.

The landscape of the world is randomly generated by the game, and remains saved if you are killed. Dig a hole in the ground and it will be there when you return from the dead and to the game. The graphics are not realistic, with the blocky edges of 8-bit design, which underscores the uncanny element of the world. The world is vast, and looks like the real world, and also doesn’t. Minecraft is not trying to trick you into thinking it looks like real life, in fact that is one of the things that makes it so immersive.

Part 2, next week.

Filed Under: Gamer Therapy Tagged With: Freud, game theory, gamers, games, heidegger, mindfulness, minecraft, play, psychoanalysis, psychodynamic, psychology, psychotherapy, sxsw, technology, therapy, video games, Web 2.0

Post to a Young Therapist

August 1, 2012 by langloimsw 3 Comments

I’m a big believer in twofers. When you run your own business, twofers are essential. So when I get several emails about a topic I try to craft a post in response. Recently I have been getting emails from many therapists or therapists in training who want advice on how to pursue a career as a gamer therapist. Many of them grew up playing video games and have a lot more comfort and familiarity with them than their therapists who have been around for a bit.

Take Claire for example, who has graciously allowed me to share an excerpt from her email to me:

For most of my life, both video games and service to others have been passions of mine. I’ve recently been working at a game company in XYZ, and have been immersed in the gaming culture more than ever. The more I see it (and experience it first-hand) the more I see a need for therapists who can address the issues so many gamers face as a result of their passion.

Before today, I had no idea if anyone had pioneered this field of study, of if there was even a place for it. And then I found you. A quick perusal of your website tells me that you and I are very much aligned in our beliefs about how games affect us, and why they matter. Seeing that you have crafted this job for yourself inspires me to look further into the possibility of knitting together these passions of mine.

Note the use of the word “passion” here. I hear from these younger folks how their interest and curiosity around video games and technology in general is met with skepticism and often hostility. Supervisors turn into lawyers before their very eyes and begin every conversation about technology with the words “HIPAA” and “liability.” The only question asked in the exploration of patient’s video game is “how many hours are they on the computer?”

Part of the problem with this disconnect is that many up and coming therapists become inadvertently ashamed of the fact that they are gamers themselves. The implicit or explicit pathologizing of video games and tech use shapes the behavior and expectations about whether discussing gaming, or even using it as an intervention, stops before it begins.

Those of us who have been in the field for a while can often become set in our ways. We can act as if education and the workplace haven’t changed much since we started our practice. Insulated in our office and routine, we stick with the phone, maybe email, and play therapy games that have changed little since the 70s. With this stance we are not prepared to work with patients in the 21st century, let alone supervise 21st century trainees.

If you are training to be a therapist, here’s what I recommend if you want to be a gamer therapist:

1. Start from Within

Repeat after me, “It is okay to experience excitement and enjoyment when I am working with patients.” Somewhere along the line our graduate programs have begun to give you the message that you are supposed to be an evidence-based automaton with little emotional investment in treatment. I have had students who have heard dozens of times in their training ideas like “emotional detachment,” and “inappropriate boundaries;” yet not once has anyone talked to them about feeling excited and enjoyment in their sessions. Even trainees doing play therapy express guilt or fear about getting “caught up” in the play. You’d think we were supposed to spend our entire careers with dull, depressing people! Allowing for a range of emotional experience with patients means the whole range, including excitement and fun. So if you are going to be a gamer therapist, start building your capacity to enjoy yourself in sessions.

2. Create A Gamer-Affirmative Environment

Did you know that research has suggested that 1 out of 4 comic book readers are age 65 or older? Yet how many offices have comic books for their adult patients alongside People and Time? The same is true for video games. Geeking up your office and waiting room sends the message that you don’t equate video games or technology with “toys.” In my waiting room I don’t have comic books currently, but I do have Wired magazine and titles devoted to video games. Many conversations have begun as a result. I also have a Deathwing statue and other game-related memorabilia. Recently someone saw a Post-It I had with the word Katamari on it. I had made a note of the game to remind myself to check it out. That Post-It was all it took to begin a very excited and meaningful conversation about the game (which has a free App, by the way.) The smallest changes to your office can convey that you are interested.

3. Try (and I mean play) lots of different video games

This is the fun part, usually. I have the major game platforms and am always trying one or two new games a week. If a patient mentions a game in a session, I make a note to try it ASAP if I haven’t already. Sometimes this requires discipline, because like most people I don’t like every sort of game. But each game I test out helps me understand the patient better.

4. Have video games in your office

I have always had handheld video game consoles in my office, but in addition I have an XBox 360 as well. I don’t think you can be doing contemporary play therapy well without it.

5. Disclose that you play video games

The fact that you have game consoles probably implies this a bit, but let’s be explicit. Regardless of age, 64% of Americans play video games, and the percentage is much higher under 40. So if you have played video games, disclose that you have. If you have a supervisor who sees that disclosure as more akin to “I smoked pot as a teen” than “Yes, I saw Star Wars” run away. Video games are an art form not a controlled substance, and there is a big difference between those two conversations.

6. That said, be on the lookout for countertransference.

Whether you like or hate, play or avoid, video games, you need to be mindful of the reasons why and when you talk about aspects of it. If your patient is telling you that they managed to fish up the giant sea turtle in WoW, it is an empathic failure to say, “Yeah I got that last week, isn’t it cool,” rather than to reflect to them what that says about their persistence and discipline. Note any feelings of competition you have (or don’t have) and wonder about it.

7. Get good supervision, even if you have to pay for it privately.

One of the downsides of licensure having a (in MA) 2 year post-graduate supervision requirement before you get your independent license is that it inadvertently sends the message to fledgling clinicians that after two years you don’t need it any more. That is not true. I encourage new therapists to consider ongoing supervision of some sort to be a business expense to build right into your practice. I had the opportunity to have weekly supervision for free at my workplace for 12 years. That sort of job benefit has gone the way of the milkman in many places today. This means you’ll need to buy some.

If you buy private supervision, remember that it is a different experience from your earlier or agency experiences with it. This is not your boss, you are hiring them. Hiring people means interviewing them, and screening them for fit. If they are technophobic they are not going to be a good fit for a gamer therapist, so it is important to let them know your pro-technology and gaming stance from the beginning.

If you are interested in participating in a small group supervision experience, you may want to check out the Supervision Package I’ll be offering this fall. You can find out more about it here.

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.
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Filed Under: Gamer Therapy Tagged With: adolescents, building your business, children, education, gamers, games, gaming, katamari, marketing, mindfulness, private practice, psychoanalysis, psychodynamic, psychology, psychotherapy, social media, technology, video games, Web 2.0

Tower Defense & Executive Functioning

July 24, 2012 by langloimsw 2 Comments

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.

Filed Under: Gamer Therapy Tagged With: ADHD, children, education, executive functions, gamers, games, gaming, kingdom rush, learning disabilities, plants vs. zombies, psychoanalysis, psychodynamic, psychology, psychotherapy, technology, therapy, tower defense, video games

Homework on Mars

May 12, 2012 by langloimsw 7 Comments

In the 20 years that I have been working with children, adolescents and their families, I have seen no end of grief caused by homework. In fact, I sometimes wonder what families would do with all the time they saved if they weren’t doing homework, fighting about doing homework, looking for lost homework, trying to understand homework, or reading notes from teachers about incomplete homework.

And having worked in several school systems across communities of varying socioeconomic status, I can tell you that bad and boring homework knows no barrier of class or poverty. I’ve seen my fair share of photocopied worksheets and looked at “problems 1,2, 4-8 on pages 125-129″ enough to empathize with my patients over the years. Sometimes I manage to answer the question, how is this going to help me in life?” But more often I’m of the opinion that I’d glaze over looking at some of the homework assignments too if I were them.

If you are someone who believes in the idea that we’ve always had homework, and that kids and young adults have just got to shut up and do it, don’t waste anymore time reading this post. Because I think in general that homework is more over-prescribed than any psychiatric medication, and that it reinforces some pretty distorted views about education and work. Unfortunately, they are also pretty prevalent views of education and work, but they definitely aren’t the only ones.

I’m not alone in my critique of homework. Educator John T. Spencer wrote a great blog post about it a year ago, which points out that among other things, homework has been shown to not improve academic achievement and may even decrease it. This research came from Cooper’s metaanalysis of over 180 studies of homework conducted between 1987 and 2006, and you can find it here. Nor is this a recent critique: As Gill and Schlossman point out in their work many learned and progressive people spent the earlier part of the 20th century trying to abolish homework. Most of us parenting today however, were taught in such a way that we think of homework as a fundamental and inevitable “given” when it comes to school.

From the point of view of social emotional development and creativity at least, kids have a lot more important things to do when they aren’t in school. Homework takes time away from developing peer relationships, engaging in extracurricular activities, and, well, being a kid. And most assignments come in the form of worksheets and packets, which encourage dry research rather than lived experience or creativity.

I have a colleague whose son was given a list of “historic places” to research, which did not include one location in our Metro Boston area. No Old North Church, no African Meetinghouse, no Lexington Battle Green, nothing. No one place that encouraged parent/child time to take a trip or have a fun experience. This is one way that schools inadvertently teach kids to “phone it in.” And that’s not the only problematic habit homework instills: If a child comes home from a day of work and does more work, that is being a good student; if an adult comes home from a day of work and works more we call them a workaholic.

The other thing about homework is that it inherently demeans teachers. Although we are seeing some exciting developments with MITx, Udacity, the Khan Academy and other attempts to make education more scalable, we are being reminded that direct instruction by teachers is in many ways irreplaceable. Even if homework reinforces what is done during the day, which it may or may not, it doesn’t replace it.

Worksheets in particular become just another metric for grading, and a metric that doesn’t say much about how varied in support and context each of the homes it is occurring in can be. It can be argued that truly egalitarian public education happens in the school setting, as that is the one place that is a level playing field in terms of race and class.

But I don’t doubt that homework is not going away, if for nothing else than because it is “the way we do things.” But given the wonderful new technologies out there, I don’t see any reason why it has to be so rote and dismal as it often is. Originally I was going to write about using Netvibes as a virtual “Trapper Keeper” for homework, but then I began exploring and gardening on Mars.

Waking Mars is a game from Tiger Style, which I recently sampled for the iPad (it also is available for iPhone.) You play the game as Liang, an astronaut who finds himself exploring subterranean caverns on Mars. There he discovers various species of creatures called Zoa, who may be plants, animals, or something else entirely. In order to solve the mysteries of the cavern, Liang must experiment and learn how to interact with the different Zoa. This includes planting seeds, changing the pH of ground, helping mobile Zoa reproduce or herding them into predatory Zoa to create compost. As one progresses, the player must gather data on each Zoa in terms of their reproduction, vulnerabilities, ideal environment and interactions in order to help replenish the biomass of each cavern.

I could envision a range of educational uses for this game. It could be used to illustrate the concept of phyla and Linnaean taxonomy in general. It demonstrates both symbiotic and autonomous relationships in biology. It requires one to observe behavior and learn to predict it. It shows how and why understanding the environment and life cycles of a biosystem may have applied value. It requires problem-solving and critical thinking to advance, and the ability to compare and contrast types as well.

Waking Mars is an example of what could be begun in a connected classroom, and then continued at home. Achievements are recorded and available for later assessment. There is also social media capabilities to help kids collaborate on learning by tweeting things they’ve learned, and help teachers assess where the class as a whole is in terms of content. Best of all it is fun, and more intrinsically rewarding than a worksheet. I suspect parents would find it enjoyable too, and engage with their kids in a much more fun and playful way than the traditional role of parent as homework monitor.

These games are out there, and gamification is already being used in many educational settings. And if you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. What would you rather do, fill out a form or complete a quest? Both require literacy and other skills, but the added benefit of playing video games and using social media is that it begins to let kids integrate learning about digital literacy as well. One example of digital literacy that Howard Rheingold discusses is “crap detection,” where the individual doesn’t just Google something, but also questions whether the source is reputable, and fact checks it. So to return to Waking Mars, an instructor could pose the question, “should we consider the game and its’ website factual evidence to support the hypothesis that Mars has caves?” Why or why not? And if not, what or where might we search online to get more valid information?

Sometimes we need to allow for the possibility that youth might know better than us about something. If they are demonstrating that they want to spend time on iPads or computers, let’s ditch the pencils. If they enjoy video games and technology, let’s throw away the weekly worksheets. Do we want them to have the same disempowering and puritanical experience of education that many of us had? Or do we want them to enjoy learning and become lifelong learners? It would be great if we could get rid of homework entirely, but if we insist on having it let’s make it fun and engaging. Enough with the worksheets and problems 1,2, 4-8 on pages 125-129. Let’s jet-pack through caverns and garden on Mars.

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.

Filed Under: Gamer Therapy Tagged With: adolescents, children, education, gamers, games, gaming, homework, play, psychodynamic, psychology, social media, technology, video games, Waking Mars, Web 2.0

Digital Citizenship and the Forward Edge Transference

April 28, 2012 by langloimsw 11 Comments

Recently I had an opportunity to visit a school for a daylong workshop, where I got to meet with the kids during the day, and their parents at night. I love it when this happens because I can then ask the children what they struggle most about with their parents regarding technology. So during the course of the morning I asked over 425 5th, 6th, and 7th graders what I should help their parent understand about technology. I got lots of great answers from them all, and my favorite one came when one 7th grader raised his hand and said, “can you please explain to my parents that multiplayer video games have no save?”

There are several reasons why that request is actually brilliant, but the one I want to focus on is how this statement, and a person’s frustration at being asked to log off in the midst of a multiplayer video game may be a forward edge transference.

The term “forward edge transference” comes from Marian Elson’s work in self-psychology. She has described the forward edge transference as being akin to what Kohut was talking with his interns about when he described leading edge transference. Forward edge transferences, according to Tolpin, are tendrils of psychological growth in the patient, often hard to see, if not completely overlooked, by the therapist because they don’t look like growth. Often we consider “psychological growth” as in the eye of the beholder, whether it be therapist, parent, teacher or someone else other than the patient. One of the example’s Tolpin uses is that of a patient who cuts to be able to “feel,” and to bleed. The forward edge transference there in Tolpin’s estimation, is the self’s still healthy yearning for kinship, to “bleed like everyone else.”

I use this example because it very powerfully demonstrates how even an easily pathologized concern such as cutting, could indicate a tendril of healthy growth, easily overlooked. The behavior forward edge transference travels concealed within is glaringly “obvious” to us, and because of that forward edge transferences may be misunderstood, and the striving for psychological health get stymied.

So what does this have to do with Massively Multiplayer Online Games?

As I mention in my book MMOs are a form of social media, and collaborative play, where the player is often cooperating with a group of others in a raid or guild to achieve something that could not be accomplished individually. Whether it be downing a dragon in World of Warcraft, unlocking guild achievements, or building a city overnight in Minecraft, the player is part of a larger group. They matter to the larger group.

Embedded in the comment “multiplayer has no save” is the forward transference for a sense of kinship, and more specifically the dawning of a concept of being a digital citizen. Here is an adolescent saying that they understand their behavior has an impact on others, that they want to collaborate online, and that they feel responsible to the larger group. Saying in fact what all the adults around them have been trumpeting for over a decade of their lives in most cases.

A digital citizen is defined in Wikipedia as “a person utilizing information technology (IT) in order to engage in society, politics, and government participation.” To be a digital citizen requires “extensive skills, knowledge, and access of using the internet through computers, mobile phones, and web-ready devices to interact…” And the elements of digital citizenship per digitalcitizenship.net include:

Digital Access:full electronic participation in society.
Digital Commerce:electronic buying and selling of goods.
Digital Communication: electronic exchange of information.
Digital Literacy:process of teaching and learning about technology and the use of technology.
Digital Etiquette: electronic standards of conduct or procedure.
Digital Law:electronic responsibility for actions and deeds
Digital Rights & Responsibilities: those freedoms extended to everyone in a digital world.
Digital Health & Wellness:physical and psychological well-being in a digital technology world.
Digital Security (self-protection):electronic precautions to guarantee safety.

Here’s the rub: If you look at those elements, many of the adults charged with caring for and educating the young aren’t necessarily competent digital citizens themselves. I can tell you for a fact that I have participated over the past decade with professionals and peers on listservs and bulletin boards, and have seen appalling standards for conduct and procedure. It rivals anything I’ve seen adolescents do to each other.

We live in interesting times, when we are entrusted to educate youth about a technology when we often don’t know how to use socially and effectively ourselves. We tell them not to interrupt, then answer our cell-phones in the middle of them telling us about their day. We tell them to pay attention to us even as we’re checking our emails on the Blackberry. We stalk them on Facebook to censor them in one browser window, and post embarrasing pictures and comments of them in another. And we pull the plug on them while they’re playing an MMO even as we tell them that they’ve been inconsiderate of their younger sibling who wants a “turn.”

Part of the problem here is our neophyte digital citizenship. People from older generations tend to think of video games as this:

when they’re actually more like this:

When was the last time you showed up at your daughter’s basketball game in the 3rd quarter and told her, “you’ve been on the court long enough, you’re coming home?” And yet, we do this to kids online all the time, and foil their attempts to be team players and group contributors.

There’s a lot at stake here: Multiplayer has no save. 10-30 people, often from all over the world have come together to try to overcome an obstacle. When you pull the plug, you’re pulling it on all of them. It is great that our kids know this and care about it!

Most of us have wanted to be a part of something bigger than ourselves, to create something together, even if it is just one moment or memory with others. We need to look at video games without the Pong Goggles, and see it as a form of society and an opportunity for digital citizenship.

To recognize the forward edge of a transference is never an easy thing. It is small, fragile, the newest shoot of growth. In a sense, all of us on this planet are in the midst of such a tendril of growth when it comes to technology. But the time when digital literacy was optional has passed, and we need to do a better job with the next generation of digital citizens than we are doing.

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.

Filed Under: Gamer Therapy Tagged With: adolescents, adultism, children, digital citizenship, digital literacy, education, forward edge transference, gamers, games, gaming, Kohut, mmos, play, psychoanalysis, psychodynamic, psychology, psychotherapy, self psychology, social justice, tolpin, video games, Web 2.0, World of Warcraft

The Kids Are All Right

February 4, 2012 by langloimsw 4 Comments

image courtesy of gamerfit.com

Last week some family friends came over to our house for dinner. The children, we’ll call them Larry, Curly and Moesha, were ages 12, 4, and 8 respectively. As you may imagine, children enjoy coming over to the Gamer Therapist house, which has 3 gaming consoles and a dedicated big-screen TV. After a quick tour of the gaming room, Larry and Moesha sorted through my games and located Portal 2, and within minutes had set themselves up to play cooperative mode. Curly was content to sit between them, and the adults retired to the first floor to hang out and prepare dinner.

Throughout the evening we could hear the sounds of the happy gamers and the game, while my friend Rebecca talked frankly about her ambivalence about their gameplay. The ambivalence sprang primarily from a well-meaning friend who had criticized her parenting style. Another set of parents had told them that their children wouldn’t be able to play with them anymore because they thought that the children were picking up bad messages from video games.

This conversation was interrupted by the children twice, both by Moesha. The first time she came down to inform us that Larry had succeeded in unlocking a very difficult achievement. The second time she came down to ask me if I could join them and help them solve a puzzle in the game they had been struggling with. I went up, and within a few minutes a fresh perspective and Larry having some patience as I familiarized myself with the controls had advanced them to the next level. A polite thank you let me know that I was no longer required, and I returned to our conversation.

A discussion about education and video games was in full swing, and a debate about how much screen time is too much. At this juncture I pointed out how hard it is for us to catch children when they are doing things right. I observed that for the past 2 hours children, siblings, spanning an age difference of 8 years had been engaged in cooperative learning. What’s more they had voluntarily engaged with the adults on two occasions. The first was for one child to express pride in the achievement of her sibling. The second was to request adult assistance with some problem solving. And all along our parental ears had heard not one whit of conflict or argument. Yet all of this would have been easy to miss, or worse, dismiss as “parking the children in front of a screen.”

Every day, parents like Rebecca are bombarded with much-hyped exposes on how dangerous video games are to children. Horror stories like the one my colleague at BC psychologist Peter Gray blogs about are touted, in which a South Korean young man plays for 50 hours straight and dies after going into cardiac arrest. Gray goes on to put this tragedy in perspective: There are 7 billion people on the planet, and this incident represents 0.000000014% of the population. It is by contrast far more difficult to catch the number of children and adult gamers doing things like learning physics, researching a vaccine for HIV, or gaming to raise money for hospitals.

And although studies linking the dangerous connection video games have to childhood obesity, the media somehow never manages to pickup ones like this that showed that children who had electronic devices in their room were more likely to engage in outdoor play. Perhaps the Obama administration did read this study though, as they are moving to a more gamer-friendly position with the appointment of Constance Steinkhueler to study the civic potential of playing games (Thanks to my colleague Uriah Gilford for calling my attention to this.) The video game danger is overhyped.

Parents are playing a game far more dangerous than any video game, and that is the “Who Is Parenting Best” game. Over and over I hear conversations about what the best school district is, how to set privacy settings and enrichment activities. This despite, as Rob Evans EdD. points out in his book Family Matters that by age 18 children and adolescents will have only spent about 10% of their total lives in school. Setting privacy settings is the first and most minimal step to helping children navigate the 21st century community that relies on the internet. And enrichment activities are unfortunately often activities that appeal to what a parent wants quality time to look like, rather than what a child enjoys.

In discussing school districts, privacy settings and quality time, parents are often missing the point. Worse, they are confusing worry with effort.

We need to stop “phoning it in” with our kids, finding the “right” school, program or setting to park them on so we don’t need to worry. It is human nature to want to get to a safe spot to relax and stop changing: We need to fight it.

Often when I speak with parents who complain about the amount of time their offspring are spending playing I ask them if they have ever played the game with their child. The answer is invariably that they haven’t, even though a recent study showed that girls who gamed with their fathers reported lower levels of depression. Quality time always has to be some Puritanical ideal: a bracing hike, the symphony, or a museum. I love doing all of those things, which is why I do them. That doesn’t mean that a child or adolescent will have them as a preferred activity.

I know, I’m criticizing your parenting, please bear with me. Because you can take it, and your children need you to stop playing the Who Is Parenting Best Game. They need you to try playing Portal 2 with them if that is what they’re into. If you fumble with the controller, all the better, because we adults have forgotten how clumsy and awkward learning makes children feel. Education has gone taught us to find a safe spot and stop learning about anything that is outside that comfort zone.

We have long known that one of the strongest protective factors for children is an involved parent, but somewhere along the line we have gotten the mistaken idea that that means control. To be clear, parental control does not equal parental involvement. At best it is one element of involvement, at worst it is phoning it in.

Does this mean schools have no responsibility? Absolutely not. But I would like to suggest we return to Larry, Curly, and Moesha for a different example, namely a curatorial model. That means setting up a place for them to explore and negotiate things on their own for the most part, while we are constantly available for engagement. Yes that is a tall order, and one that requires that we think beyond the nuclear family and school as factory models.

I am fortunate to belong to massivelyminecraft.org a server where children and adults from the UK, US, Australia and other places play the sandbox game Minecraft together. It is not segregated by age, but vetted by the server moderators, who require parental permission for children to join. Within the game world, you can see adults and children learning and playing together at any hour of the day or night. They are voluntarily learning about geometry, math, physics, animal husbandry, chemistry, geology, economy, social skills, communication and a host of other things, in a way that is curatorial rather than proscriptive. Adults are there and occasionally on chat or via Skype will step in to mediate a conflict between two children, or if help with a task is requested.

Why can’t 21st century education be like this? Imagine a virtual classroom where parents and teachers can privately chat while both observing unobtrusively a child’s progress. Imagine homework at the table replaced by building a virtual pyramid together. Imagine virtual trips to Paris in Second Life, where no one is too poor to come along. Imagine time on learning that is maximizing the child’s engagement and minimizing unnecessary supervision. Imagine adolescents finally having educational settings that run synchronously with their biological clocks. Imagine a collaborative effort that doesn’t segregate human beings by rigid grades, parent/teacher roles or socioeconomic status. Imagine recess that can happen year-round, sometimes in a field, sometimes on the Wii Fit or Kinnect.

I believe the research is showing more and more that these things are possible. And I believe that our children are counting on us taking a leadership role in technology and education rather than a fear-based ones.

I leave you with this image. As he was leaving my house, Larry looked at me and declared that I “wasn’t entirely horrible” for an adult. What parent wouldn’t love to hear such high praise from their tween?

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.

Filed Under: Gamer Therapy Tagged With: addiction, adolescents, behavior change, children, education, gamers, games, minecraft, parenting, play, psychology, psychotherapy, social media, video games, Web 2.0, World of Warcraft

The Lurker Below

April 20, 2011 by langloimsw 2 Comments

Both video and tabletop gamers know about Lurkers. There are two particularly famous ones. In Dungeons and Dragons, one of the earliest and most beloved monsters was the Lurker Above. Imagine a giant cave-dwelling manta-ray-like thing that clung to the ceiling until some unsuspecting party of adventurers wandered into its lair (lurkers and lairs go hand-in-hand in many cases.) Then it dropped on the adventurers and ate them if it was hungry. It was nearly always hungry.

A more recent favorite lurker is the Lurker Below in Serpentshire Cavern in WoW. This Lurker is the second boss in the instance, and perhaps even more importantly, the catalyst for the achievement “The Lurker Above,” where you fish up the Lurker from the bottom of Serpentshire Cavern.

A third and less famous lurker is my cat, Winnicott, pictured above. Winnie can lurk for hours. She is exceptionally good at it. Like the Lurker Above, she prefers high altitudes for the most part, but will opt for deep and semi-concealed places as well.

One of the important and distinguishing characteristics of lurkers is patience. They are always waiting for something, patiently, and still. Another characteristic is that they are observant, sensitive to the environment around them and the non-lurking entities going about their adventuring, fishing or laundry. The final characteristic I would mention is that lurkers don’t pounce until they are good and ready. That’s why we call them Lurkers and not Pouncers. Pouncing is only 2% of the entire lurking activity.

I wanted to talk about lurkers because I have been reading and thinking a lot about social media, Twitter in particular, and therapist’s aversion to it. And I agree with colleagues like Susan Giurleo that one should not use social media before one is ready. But I think a point that often gets overlooked is that you don’t have to actively participate in Twitter to engage with it. If you don’t have anything to say or aren’t ready to put yourself out there, by all means don’t. But don’t avoid social media. Lurk.

Lurking is a time-honored tradition on the internet, and there has been estimates that up to 90% of people on bulletin boards, online sites, Twitter and blogs could be lurking at any given time. That’s a lot of lurking going on, and it is not a bad thing.

One of the powerful ways social media can expand the way we interact is by allowing silent participation without social anxiety. Imagine you are an introvert at a party, only you could people-watch and stay on the perimeter for hours without some well-meaning host noticing you and urging you to mingle. You can relax and take it at your own pace, and in fact over time you might even engage more directly. Nick Yee and the Palo Alto Research Center refer to this as ambient sociability, which Jane McGonigal explores in her new book Reality is Broken. Ambient sociability in MMO games refers to the number of people who enjoy lower intensity and indirect social connection. These are the gamers who run around World of Warcraft by themselves pausing occasionally to help out another player, whisper that they like their character name, wave, or various other social activities that can occur when you are in a virtual world and enjoy being “around” people. Ambient sociability may also be the precursor for introverts to have positive interactions that promote deeper engagement.

Therapists are often introverts, in fact I’d suggest that often our choice to spend our days relating to others is often a counterphobic response! So it makes sense that social media can be intimidating for many of us, the conceptual framework of Twitter or Facebook can be hard to figure out, and we’d prefer to structure of the therapeutic framework. What we may need is to engage in a way that allows for social ambience without plunging us into public engagement at first.

Epic Therapists Lurk.

Epic therapists are not always in the know about all things internet, but they are willing to learn. And they are also willing to learn by lurking, rather than by jumping in with both feet, trying Twitter for a week by tweeting 20 things a day and then just giving up. Epic therapists are not petrified of HIPAA and confidentiality, but they are also willing to spend time learning about social media before subjecting themselves, their patients and their communities to its half-baked use. So let’s review the guiding principles of lurking, and how you can use them to become Epic in social media.

1. Lurking requires patience. Try following a few people or groups on Twitter that interest you. Use the search feature and look around. Pick Tweeters with large followings so you can feel even more anonymous. If it doesn’t make sense at first, just be patient and keep lurking. You can do that, you do it every day with patients. You don’t get up and leave the room 15 minutes into the session if you don’t understand what they are talking about. You pay attention patiently. Try the same with Twitter for 10 minutes here and there between your sessions, and allow yourself some time to feel the unfamiliarity of entering a new framework.

2. Lurking requires good observation. I know you all are experts in that, but we can forget to apply that principle to Web 2.0 You don’t have to respond to anything you’re reading or seeing, just notice things. Just be sensitive to the environment and what the denizens of the Twitterverse are doing. How are people interacting? What do their profiles say about themselves? What sorts of topics trend at certain times of day? Who is following who, and who else is connected to them? What kind of Tweets get the most responses? Who spams, and who sends out thoughtful links? And include yourself in the equation: What Tweets do you notice enjoying? What ones do you dislike? I personally don’t enjoy lots of famous quotations, but that’s just me? Other folks enjoy clicking links to photos, or clicking on the latest news from APA. So since you are giving yourself time to lurk, give yourself the opportunity to notice things and ask yourself questions.

3. Don’t pounce until you are good and ready! It is ok to lurk silently for as long as you want, and if you don’t feel sure about Tweeting, don’t tweet. My experience with social media both personally and as a consultant has been that when you’re ready, it will come organically. Maybe someone will post a link on Japan Earthquake Animal Rescue and you’ll want to retweet it (Note the clever insertion of a link that can take you to an amazing cause to donate to 🙂 ) Or maybe someone will ask a question that you can answer, and you’ll want to. Maybe there will be a conversation going on about healthcare social media and you’ll want to add your two cents worth. Don’t be afraid to open an account and begin lurking because you imagine you’ll be obligated to chime in at some point. Remember pouncing is only 2% of the game.

I forgot to mention one other thing about lurking: It can be fun! One of the keys to engaging with social media is enjoyment, and lurking can provide you with hours of quiet enjoyment with no responsibility to say anything. And if you like that, I know a good laundry basket you can hide in.

Filed Under: Gamer Therapy Tagged With: building your business, d & d, games, private practice, psychology, psychotherapy, social media, twitter, Web 2.0

Some Beginning Games for Therapists to Try

February 8, 2011 by langloimsw 3 Comments

This Video Blog was inspired by friend Carolyn Stack, who asked that I recommend a iPhone game to ease her into the world of iPhone gaming. Here are a few of my favorites and why you might want to try them:

Filed Under: Gamer Therapy Tagged With: adolescents, angry birds, children, crosspatch, gamers, games, gaming, peggle, plants vs. zombies, play, private practice, psychology, psychotherapy, samurai, video games, Web 2.0

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

Streaming, Path of Exile & The Repetition Compulsion

Can’t We All Just Game Along?

Taking Leaps: Fortnite, HIPAA & Psychotherapy

Mindfulness, Minecraft & The I Ching

Evocation and Mindfulness: Or, How to Think Better

Bio Breaks

Minecraft & The Uncanny, Part 1

Tower Defense & Executive Functioning

Some Beginning Games for Therapists to Try

Mouse Over My Pic For A Secret Message..

Epic Tweets

Ye Olde Vault

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Mouse Over My Pic For A Secret Message..

Epic Tweets

Ye Olde Vault