NASW Social Work Talks - EP22: Teens and Video Games

Episode Date: January 22, 2019

Mike Langlois, MSW, LICSW, is author of "Reset: Video Games & Psychotherapy." He is a gamer-affirmative therapist whose work focuses on gaming, social media, and the impact of social networks on relationships. Langlois encourages us to change our perspective of gaming and to understand that they can be very social in nature. See show notes for resources

This is NASW Social Work Talks. Thanks for joining us. This is the first of a two-part series on how teens are using technology, specifically gaming and social media. In this episode, our host Greg Wright speaks with Mike Longlois, author of Reset, Video Games, and Psychotherapy. Mike is a gamer affirmative therapist whose work focuses on gaming, social media and the impact of social networks on relationships. Now here's Greg Wright with Mike Longlois. Michael, welcome to Social Work Talks podcast. We're very happy to have you. Thank you so much for having me today. You have done a lot of work around how video games influence young people. As a social worker, how did you get involved in this area?

so I got involved in it first off through my personal life when I was younger I definitely enjoyed playing video games and I was always an early adopter and one of the things I found when I've talked to peers and in our field is that a lot of the folks that as adults are working with adults or kids and technology often were early adopters so I had you know some video game stations like the Atari 2600 and and play a lot of Nintendo. Professionally how I got interested in using video games and how video games influence young people really came from my early work as a special education social

worker. My second job out of graduate school in the late 90s was working in an inner-city public school district for the special education department which was what it was called at the time and i was really engaged with kids that were having a hard time regulating their behavior and or learning because the two often go hand in hand and one of the things that often happened in the special education department was we had some younger folks doing the teaching and the educating and we're really open to innovation and part of that was because you know some of these folks had adaptive technology and so technology was being used anyway but really the spirit of working in that sort of paradigm was whatever worked to get a kid

interested in learning whatever worked to get a kid focused and learning ready whatever worked to reinforce them to continue to do certain educational tax tasks we did it as people have probably noticed if they have their own kids with smartphones today that technology has a child's undivided attention whether you like it or not that that technology really engages them we learned really early on that if playing video games was going to help the kid feel motivated if talking or thinking about things from a gamified point of view was going to motivate them we went with it and we had some really supportive administrators that you know a lot of these kids this was the last place for them before they went to an out of

district placement or a substantially separate placement and so we got to we got to do a lot of things we wanted to in a very creative way so um are more social workers now becoming more aware of this and also and incorporating it into their practices or um you know is it um a thing now that a lot of folks are a little bit skeptical of michael so there there's a great piece that adam gopnik in the new yorker wrote about technology he classified people into into three groups and and the two groups that i'll point out are there are the better nevers and the never betters and the The better-nevers are folks that take any new technology and say, oh, my God, better we never had this technology. Everything's making it harder now that we've got this.

It's making people more distracted. It's making them dumber. It's better that we never had technology. And I'd say some of the colleagues that I work with fall into that better-never camp. But as younger folks are coming up more and more in the profession, we're seeing a lot more of the never-betters. and the never betters are folks that say you know it's not it was never better that since we've had this technology it helps kids get organized it helps people stay in touch over distance it's engaging and people are able to use

video games to improve learning and improve all sorts of things it's never better so I've actually seen that there's an awareness in both camps on the influence of gaming and some folks are inclined to incorporate into the practice more folks unfortunately tend to be inclined to pathologize it that's sort of what I do when I you know part of what my role is is a workshop leader and an educator around the country I try to help people see that there's probably more power for good in gaming than there is for bad how does a video game help a young person become better organized and also more and engage with

other people how does that happen okay so let's take the first part better organized so there are forms of games video games such as plants versus zombies that's one of the most popular ones that are called tower defense games and the point of these games is you have to plan where to put things and what the timing is to place them in places to defend your tower so one of the things that this game is really good for is for executive function in that it helps kids learn how to figure out what are the relative times it would take to build one thing versus another and what order they should put them in in order to succeed in the game and so that's just one example of how a game of the kind that are called tower defense games can really help people in terms of strategizing

were planning another one is you know any of the sims uh civilization series those are games where in order to build a civilization well you have to you know have a steady balance of people doing certain tasks and you have to keep your your attention on several different things and figure out what's most important so those are examples of how video games can really help with executive functioning tasks in terms of keeping them engaged I think a lot of us that are okay grew up in the you know 60s 70s 80s are used to it thinking of video games from the point of view of palm where it was you know it was a game that had you know fairly poor graphics and you and maybe one other person sitting

next to you were facing a television set or a monitor playing a game and that's actually not at all what video games are like now now games are highly networked kids are playing online they're using headsets and chat they're talking with classmates after school they're engaging in a very social way a lot of times with video games there are members of leagues of guilds they engage in team-based and problem-based problem-solving based games so the the idea that games are very isolationist and cut people off is actually not not true in my experience yeah now there are parents out there that think that their children are on these games much much too long are you

seeing that worry and is that a reality going on out there michael i think i'm seeing the worry i tend to think that anytime parents feel like something is taking their child's time and attention more than they wish it will there will be a conflict I think that for better or for worse most of us adults have this irrational wish on some level that everything we said and did was the most important thing in a kid's life that if we didn't want to compete with a smartphone or a computer but the reality is that we're not necessarily the most interesting or engaging part of of a kid's life I do think parents worry about this and part of it I think is

because they they don't necessarily see how the way they're transitioning kids from playing a game to another activity it can in fact be a real problem so one of the things I do almost on a daily basis is have conversations with parents who are worried because when it's time for dinner they call the kiddo did you come to dinner and the kiddo won't come right away or they have to call three times or maybe the kiddo won't come at all and they get very frustrated if they try to put limits like one hour or 30 minutes do an egg timer all these things that have a very strict kind of quantifiable sense of time now meanwhile

these parents are also parents that have probably really instilled in their kids it's the desire that it's good at character building to be loyal, to be dependable, to honor your commitments, to show up when you say you're going to show up. And so from a kid's point of view, if they start playing, say, for example, Fortnite, and they're a member of a team, and then the parent comes in and says, okay, it's dinner in five minutes, the parent thinks they're being reasonable, the kiddo is experiencing that suddenly they're not supposed to be loyal and dependable and a team player and cooperate, but they're supposed to leave everybody in the middle of a match. And so a lot of times when I help parents see kind of the kind of language gap here,

they're able to switch how they transition kids. So for a quick example is when you're having dinner at your home, a family dinner. Dinner may happen roughly around six o'clock, but if dinner is not quite ready yet at six o'clock, you don't have everyone start eating raw food because six is when we start dinner. And if the conversation is going really well and people are enjoying each other's company in the meal, you don't start taking their plates away and say, okay, you got to leave at 645. Dinner is over. Those sorts of time, those sorts of activities are based on a time that's more qualitative in nature. And so the trick is to have parents help their kids identify qualitative equivalents so that, you know, do they want to build one more structure?

Are they playing one more round? Figuring out what is an approximation of 20 minutes in terms of whatever game they're playing. And that really helps kids transition a lot better. And it reduces the risk of you inter interrupting them from a preferred task and maybe even you know pulling them away from a group of people that have been kind of engaged in a cooperative venture there is some like bullying and also trolling going on in the social media world i was wondering if you've also run across that in your practice you know i have and what's really interesting is if people want to take a look at the Pew Internet Research Foundation, they have done some amazing work on bullying and

citizenship online. There definitely is, because of the anonymity, some prevalence where people will be hearing things that they are not necessarily that aren't kind or aren't friendly, that are abusive. But what the Pew Research foundation found was that actually people are more likely to speak up that um people reported um you know i'm trying to remember the right figure but it was probably something like 70 to 80 percent of the time that they heard hate speech in a game or online or on social media somebody jumped in and said hey that's not okay and i have to tell you i wish that 70 or 80 percent of the time trans kids or gay kids or kids with some sort of bullying at school were the

recipients of hate speech that 70% or 80% of the time people jumped in and said that's not okay in non-digital life so I actually think that the amount of bullying and the amount of pro-social response to bullying is is a lot more what we'd want to see online than in sort of physical school based reality that doesn't mean that there's not a need for digital citizenship and education on on digital literacy and social literacy online but the challenge is is nobody's teaching this you know there are some schools that are beginning to engage in digital literacy as a curriculum but it's one of those

things that it needs to be taught just like social emotional learning needs to be taught and so the question is not not is there some concern here we know there is but the question is okay who's going to take on the job and and that's actually one of the places I think school social workers or even social workers in private practice can really do something because we ask parents already to do so much and schools are already doing so much that perhaps one of the things we can help with is taking on more of a responsibility for providing psychoeducation on how to be a citizen, a good citizen in a digital world.

If you are a social worker who is working with younger people, are you recommending that all of them be literate in the world of online gaming? Well, in the world of online gaming or online, you know, whether it be preparing kids from a young age to to live in a networked world which is where the future of work is going to be which is the future of where you know staying informed and learning about things in terms of if you even think about politics and you think about how countable and apps like that really kind of engaged people civically much more than ever before because on a digital level what we need to start a

planet helping kids plan on how to make choices and how to make good choices now everybody has their own value system around what a good choice is and and we have some general things we all agree on and I'm certainly not suggesting that parents can't have their own set of values around things but I do think that the idea of not having kids engaging in online or social media or video game communities um doesn't help it doesn't give them practice and it doesn't give you the opportunity to in some ways chaperone you know that at an early age in an early age i would say is the time be kind of hanging out with your kiddo while they're playing so that you can sort of get them

in the habit of knowing that you're kind of in the room you're interested in what they're doing and that maybe you are going to hear some of the conversation i don't know about you but when i was growing up if my parents were in the same room my language was a lot more pristine than when I was just with her so I think that sometimes what we want to be doing is having parents engaging with kids early and getting them in the habit of of course you can use technology and of course I'm going to be helping you learn how to do that and and that's really quite honestly where parents stumble it's changing a little now but but the parents are having to

help their kids manage technology that just didn't exist you know when I was growing up you didn't have a computer and a digital camera that was with you 24-7 you couldn't talk on the phone anytime you wanted anywhere so here's a here's a brave new world that parents weren't prepared for all right NASW has an updated code of ethics that has added in technology issues I was wondering if you read that and what do you think about this new updated code it's better than the last one but not good enough and honestly I was very interested in and advocated to be one of the folks that was at the table when we had this

discussion about these technologies partly because I'm not just a clinical social worker but I'm somebody that has helped co-found a startup for a social network platforming system I'm somebody that has had the opportunity to practice telehealth in many states and done video game based play therapy so I felt like I had a lot of a lot to offer in terms of both the skills as well as some of the technology interest but I wasn't invited to be part of that so I've been critical about it but I've tried to have a light touch with that because I'm hoping that the next time you all do it I get to be at the table I think that social workers

are really have their patients best interest in heart and sometimes what they think is in their patients best interest may not actually be what is in the best interest of the patient and I think that that's something that we see in terms of the code of ethics but I guess my biggest concern about the code of ethics is it doesn't emphasize the positives and the exciting new ways we can engage with technology as much as it focuses on the kind of intimidating fear parts of it, that somehow if you're not careful, you're going to be doing something unethical or going to get sued. And anytime we talk with professionals about, you know, not being ethical

or being sued, I think we fearmonger. If you think about the code of ethics, there is not at all this level of detail that I've ever seen about sexual contact with patients. We know that's unethical but we're not talking about that in detail we're not having dozens of workshops we're not constantly writing articles you know about that to the level that some of the stuff about technology and ethics gets talked about um and in fact the first I think is a much more prevalent and concerning problem that is pretty clear you have actually said that gaming does have benefits but is there also a possibility that it can become an addiction even so

that's where it's tricky because I can't say that gaming has such a power and impact without also addressing that it can actually be something that could be a problem I think the term addiction is a problematic term for video games for a couple reasons one is because I think that it conflates some of the other addictions and conflates a severity or an acuity that I don't think is necessarily there I think that the opioid addiction that is impacting rural America for example is much more troublesome and much more of a public health crisis than kids that aren't doing as well at school or are staying

up too late because they're playing too much fortnight and I think that when we start calling gaming on addiction we really flatten the meaning out and I think it's it's a term that should be really kept for things that have severe medical problems that are severely disruptive in terms of relationships and legal work cause severe monetary problems so I tend to be someone that doesn't like the use of that word in terms of gaming now that said that doesn't mean I don't think video game playing can become problematic for kids or adults but my experience is usually that people are trying to cope with some

problems the best they can with whatever their behaviors are even if we consider them maladaptive behaviors and so my focus is usually trying to understand what is it about playing games that kids are or adults are are finding compelling however if you really wanted to focus on the question is gaming a problem or not I guess I would go back to mice my kind of study and understanding of the concept of play and that there was a thinker in 20th century named Johan Huizinga who talked about the nature of play and he talked about how play is freedom and so if you find somebody that is playing a video game or

plant doing anything to a great deal the question I'd have for them is when you're playing do you have a sense of freedom do you feel like you're free to stop do you feel like you have a choice and if somebody is feeling like they don't have freedom if they are feeling like they don't have a choice then in fact the playfulness has gone out of a video game and and that is often the time when maybe we do want to talk about how to alter that behavior so that it's not harmful. Yes, I was wondering if you've ever run across cases like that, Michael? Well, people usually don't come to me to stop playing video games or reducing time because

my approach is really to discourage that sort of work because I'm much more focused on understanding why a video game is being used by the kiddo and then and in fact one of the things that video games really do is provide some resilience but there was some research that showed that in the game development field that when you're playing a video game eighty percent of the time eight zero percent of the time you play a video game you are failing at it and yet people try it they fail they try and they fail again now if kids were able to go to school and have an 80% resiliency rate around academic tasks we would be loving that and so there's got

to be something that we can do to tap into the power of video games and the resiliency that they're encouraging in kids and and I I would rather focus on that than how many hours someone is playing and how to get it from four hours to three hours or three hours to two hours. That's not where I think we need to be focusing. We've also learned that you've been working at the University at Buffalo on the issue of race and emerging technology. Could you tell us a little bit more about your work in that area, Michael? Oh, I'd love to. So a big shout out to the University of Buffalo in that they have allowed me over the past few years to do online classes and online projects with them

that are just firsts in the nation. I was able to do a play therapy intensive online class using Minecraft. They've always been really supportive and so they were supportive of my first foray into being a producer of a series. Social workers can do so many things and that includes being series producers. They were trying to get at the University of Buffalo their faculty in the Social Work School and the staff to become more appreciative of how technology really is something that goes hand-in-hand with social work and I said okay let's do a yearly series and let's have the first year be on race and

emerging technologies and so we got to do a few different projects we got to do a roundtable on black Twitter where we talked about the social phenomena of black Twitter in the black community and what it might mean to people both in and out of that community I got to do a roundtable with some academics and clinicians and game designers all of whom were people of color with the exception of myself and one other participant and talk about race and racism in the gaming industry as well as what the images were sending out there in from from video game production might mean to people that were either

indigenous people or african-american or Latino we got to talk about coding a little bit we got to do a series that had three different parts and one part was my old college friend and director, Andre Lee, who did The Prep School Negro. He came and we had an airing of the film, and then we talked about how that experience might have been different in today's age of social media. It was so rewarding to produce something like that, and I would love more social workers to be able to take a look at it. I really do believe that social workers have their patients' best interests at heart, that they really want to continue to educate their practice in a way that is going to enhance their patients. And that if

you can just help them see how technology can really help them do that, they will be willing to take the risk of learning it. Because I think a lot of times people are daunted by emerging technologies and left to their own devices might avoid them. But if you started to help them see how using a new thing like Twitter or learning about a video game could help them unlearn racism or help them reach their kids or their adolescent patients, I'm pretty sure that they would jump at the chance. Wow, that is a great way to end this. We would like to thank you for being our guest on Social Work Talks. Thanks so much. You're welcome. Thanks for having me, Greg. You have been listening to NASW Social Work Talks, a production of the National Association

of Social Workers. We encourage you to visit NASW's website for more information about our efforts to enhance the professional growth and development of our members, to create and maintain professional standards, and to advance sound social policies. You can learn more at www.socialworkers.org. Don't forget to subscribe to NASW Social Work Talks wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks again for joining us. We look forward to seeing you next episode.