Hello readers!
I hope that you are spending as much time as outdoors as possible whenever you are able to take time away from work or in my case from video games. Am I getting addicted…..hope not but playing Dungeons and Dragons has definitely picked my curiosity and all this because I wanted to research it for a case. A client of mine has been grappling with cyber addiction and in my quest to find out what it is….I have succumbed to it too..
Interestingly…..it’s not as bad as it seems. Did you know that Video games have found their way into the clinical care of youth in most medical fields, and academic interest in their use is increasing steadily? The popularity of video games among youth may qualify them as a useful tool in psychotherapy for children and adolescents (Ceranoglu., 2010). In fact, psychotherapists and counselors have started using this medium as an assessment, intervention as well as rehabilitative tool while working with adolescent clients. Now I found that there were not much research available in this area and there were few article on this subject so there is not evidence based practice to support the efficacy.
Studies have been conducted using it to teach focusing skills to children with ADD to using it as a rehabilitative tool while working with patients with Parkinson’s disease, In fact it called Wii Habilitation.
But what interested me the most was a portion of an article which states that certain games, which are still in clinical trial have physiological sensors that are built into the game hardware which allows players to learn how to monitor the physiological manifestations of anxiety and stress, or what is commonly called their “fight or flight” response. The players use those same sensors as controllers to move themselves through the game by monitoring and controlling their characters and the stress responses they represent ( Sugarman, 2011).
So with the new found knowledge I am trying to discover for myself the ‘benefits’ of being a gamer , get better understanding of my client as well as use it as a part of my counselling tools and techniques
Further Readings
http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/gpr-14-2-141.pdf
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/products/games/2005-09-26-video-game-therapy_x.htm
http://psychcentral.com/news/2011/08/29/computer-game-therapy-combats-stress-anxiety/29004.html
*The views expressed by our authors are personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CCPA