Thank you to James Woollard, one of the speakers at our Minecraft – understanding the application of videogames in healthcare event in April, for this guest post:
Hi I am James Woollard and I am a child and adolescent psychiatrist and I finish my training in July.
I was hoping to be with you today and join in what I am sure will be a great workshop and discuss what I think is a very exciting forward development.
Through my training as a child and adolescent psychiatrist, it has been clear that joining children in their worlds is far more powerful tool for engagement than prescription or conscription to therapy or treatment. It was such an approach that led me to my experience of using minecraft in a therapeutic setting.
I was seeing a 13 year old young man in an inpatient unit. I was trying to take the usual approach of sitting down, talking, with pens and paper at the ready to give the process some space for creativity as needed. The first few session were okay, but the closer we got to talking about difficult stuff the harder it became for him to talk and he would leave the room. I asked him when he felt most comfortable talking – he said when also engaged in playing games on the playstation. That’s when he was used to talking to friends over the internet whilst gaming.
So I suggested we tried playing minecraft together as this was a game he had mentioned and I had some ideas about how it might work in this context. The inpatient unit had a PS3 with Minecraft. We used his login so that the game was created under his account and we set it up as two player in creative mode. I had played minecraft no more than 2-3 times before this and had watched videos on youtube so there was a definite sense of a change in role or power.
There was no initial discussion about what would be created, I stared creating something…I wasn’t quite sure what it was going to be. The young man started building a house and through a developing conversation I joined him in it – clearly as the builder’s mate.
What came through of that joint endeavour was a different experience of young man who could be angry and whose life was relatively chaotic. He was imaginative and creative such as the interior of décor of the two floor cascading lava flow in the middle of house and the sun deck furniture. The attention to detail and fastidiousness about such things as pattern and symmetry was something not seen elsewhere in his academic work.
And whilst we created, we talked about what was going on in his life and whilst he directed the build, I scaffolded the conversation about his relationships and managed the time ensuring we finished at the hour. We would save the game and comeback to the following week. We completed five sessions like this by which time the house was deemed “finished”. Interestingly we played a platform game for one session after this and it was much harder to manage the session – definitely recognised not all games are the same!
Having spent some time reflecting on the experience of working with this young man through using minecraft, it has left me keen to explore the idea further. I can see that as a creative space it is very engaging, responsive, and flexible.
Having just spent a year doing a special policy job, I am now back in clinical practice. I am keen to think about how I can take the use of creative digital spaces forward in my practice, how can this be done safely and effective?
How can it can be framed such that it allows colleagues to understand why this might be great tool for engagement – “you’ve got lego in the consultation rooms – this is just “virtual lego””?
Certainly talking to parents of children who play Minecraft since then, there is a sense that it is something young people “do over there, in the corner, and not something I want to get involved in”…put a jigsaw puzzle in front of them and their child and there wouldn’t be such a thought. Will I have the same experience in ten years?
How do we frame and organise therapy that involves “games” to create a successful experience? Is this just old techniques using new tools? Therefore what research do we need to do? What are the thoughts about psychotherapeutic interpretations that could be made from the creations – as eye catching as the two floor lava flow was in the house, what could it represent in the unconscious mind of the young man?