Incorporating Games into Counseling
As a behavior tech, I enjoy playing games with my kids. These games can encompass anything, from card games such as UNO, You-gi-oh, and Pokemon, to online games like Fortnite, League of Legends (doubtful), and Halo. And with the success of the recent Dungeons and Dragons movie (and the advent of nerd culture as a whole), more adults are flocking to gaming than ever before. So, of course, as a counselor, I can’t help but scream delightfully.
Gaming can have a whole slew of benefits for individuals, regardless of their age. For instance, it can help them practice distress tolerance skills, especially if they lost a match. Like books, games can provide an escape from reality for a little while, just until they’re able to regain emotional control. It can provide social interaction to adults who may otherwise be trapped in an unfortunate situation (work, home, a pandemic, ect.) and can offer unique opportunities to practice critical thinking skills. Moreover, workplaces are starting to gamify their spaces, such as making contests out of who can be the most productive, hosting fun trivia questions, and even encouraging workers to share their personal lives with one another (cutest pets, best taste in music, best lovable intern, ect.)
That being said, games have also been blamed for a variety of social ills. Mass shootings have been attributed to first person shooter games. For individuals experiencing severe mental illness, it can be difficult to distinguish fact from fiction. To give you context, the DSM 5 outlines gaming addiction, video games or otherwise. If an individual is playing online games, there’s the added bonus of exposing a person to potentially toxic environments. Take into account the plethora of scandals that have rocked the gaming world, such as Gamer Gate and the Teabagging scandal.
For me, I would love to incorporate games into counseling. It could give me a way to help my clients practice coping skills for when negative emotions arise (I’m very competitive). It gives me a chance to offer a nonthreatening way of building rapport, and can give me insight as to why a client acts the way they do. In this way, I think of games as an extremely informal psychological assessment, or a sandbox you can use to practice certain behaviors with a client, just before you shove them off into the real world. Heck, when I’m working as a behavior tech, I play games with kids to develop socially adaptive behaviors. I’ll bring a bag of games with me that they can choose from just so they could generalize these behaviors.
For me to include video games though, I’m more than a little wary. I’ve seen video games harm and hurt people. On one hand, video games carry the same social significance that regular games do, perhaps even more so because of the growing presence video games has on our society (e-sports and the like). Winning matches and completing storylines can offer satisfying emotional awards that will simultaneously build resilience. On the other hand, there’s still a lot of toxicity that needs to be dealt with in these spaces. Sexist or racist remarks can easily trigger individuals who are just recovering from trauma. And more often than not I’ve seen children (and adults) stealing money from their loved ones just to pay for items that, in the long run, won’t mean anything.
For counselors who are interested in incorporating games into their counseling, it really does depend on the individual client. Do you think playing games with them will help develop the skills they need to be confident in the real world? Is there a significance to them playing a specific game? Are they mature enough to play with others? Are they willing to learn? Who knows?
