“You keep the streak up because you’re anxious,” Rosen says. The daily login streak-a concept popularized by (but by no means originated by) Snapchat-is a perfect example. On the flip side, gaming can help us get rid of undesirable feelings, namely anxiety. The more we play, the more feel-good chemicals we experience-primarily dopamine, serotonin, and other chemicals, says Rosen. Larry Rosen, professor emeritus and former chair of the Psychology Department at California State University, Dominguez Hills and coauthor of The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World, says gaming can promote behavior modification that can develop into an addiction. A 2020 review of 53 studies determined the worldwide prevalence of the disorder to be approximately 3 percent of gamers. Though the World Health Organization recognizes gaming disorder as a condition, estimates of its prevalence vary. Recently, China tightened its already stringent regulations limiting online gaming time for kids under 18. Some experts have voiced concerns about screen time and online gaming addiction, especially in children. When clients can’t get in to see her right away or want to practice coping techniques between sessions, she often prescribes mental health-focused games like Sea of Solitude, Night in the Woods, and Gris. “Every therapist I know is wildly overbooked right now,” Daramus tells me.
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Online gaming has been a critical supplemental resource during the pandemic. And dealing with inevitable glitches, like when a game lags or kicks the player out, helps kids develop patience. “We are competitive, we go.” That can be an opportunity for children to practice “frustration tolerance,” she says, if, for example, they’re losing to her in a game of Mario Kart. Today she frequently plays video games with her clients during sessions, but she doesn’t just let them win. Poitevien grew up in a family of gamers and played Atari as a toddler. Gaming can help build emotional regulation skills, too. “They’d have these backstories about how they’re good people but the police think they’re bad.” Kids were “terrified of the police,” so the idea was, “I want to protect myself,” she says. Kim Wheeler Poitevien, a licensed clinical social worker in Pennsylvania who counsels children and teenagers, saw more young Black patients gravitate toward games like Fortnite in response to racial violence during the summer of 2020. Soon the kids were enthusiastically leading each other around the game space, their shyness forgotten.Īnd sometimes it’s within a game world’s digital boundaries that patients may feel more safety and freedom to work through intense emotions. Eventually, one boy mentioned Brookhaven, a roleplaying game set in a bustling city. Everybody has their cameras off,” says Goldman.
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In a Zoom session with two elementary school boys, Goldman kicked things off by asking the kids to name their favorite Roblox game. Goldman began training other clinicians to use online gaming in their work, starting with Roblox, a platform with millions of games that’s especially popular with kids ages 5 to 12 in the United States. As he and his colleagues struggled to connect with clients virtually, he wondered if gaming could help his patients too. In the bright, immersive world of online gaming, Goldman found solace-and he started to have fun again.
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But he didn’t start to feel better until he turned to a familiar pastime: video games. “I was exercising, I was meditating, I was doing yoga,” says Goldman, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Santa Clara, California. In the early weeks of the pandemic, Monet Goldman tried different strategies to cope with stress.