The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Are Video Games an Escape Route Through Grief?

Episode Date: April 24, 2024

From MarioKart to MMORPGs, video games have come a long way from their rudimentary beginnings. In Western society some people are inventing new coping mechanisms to deal with loss and grief. Andre Stam is a psychotherapist who uses gaming as a way to connect with his young patients; Dale Andersen-Giberson uses Narrative Therapy to rewrite the dominant stories of his clients' lives; Simon Stanton's brother passed away when he was 11 years old and video games became a crucial aspect of his healing; Ryan Couldrey discovered a trove of his dead friend's games; Gabby DaRienzo designed A Mortician's Tale about cremation and funeral preparation.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Grief in video games is not something that is talked about in conjunction a lot. Maybe when you do lose a person in real life, like you're not completely unprepared for it. Every young person who comes into my office these days, I will ask, what are you playing? There's all sorts of fun games that help me feel like I'm able to keep my brain in order, even if I feel like I'm floundering in real life. I'm a Toronto-based video game developer and artist, most known for creating Immortician's Tale.

One of my biggest interests is the intersection of death and video games. When I was about 10 years old, there was a kid in my class and her mother who passed away in a very tragic accident. And I went through a pretty long period of separation anxiety with my own mom and dealing with pretty severe death anxiety. And for me, playing The Legend of Zelda Majora's Mask,

which is a game, if you're not familiar with it, it's very much about death. The whole premise is that there is a moon, it's going to crash into the earth in three days. And using time jumping mechanics, you're trying to save the world from the moon crashing into the earth. And seeing how different people react

was really weirdly therapeutic for me. So our lives are made up of stories with a plot and themes and parameters that often guide and will dictate who we are and what our identity is. And so a person will come in, perhaps in this case, saying, my partner died. It is devastating. I can't get out of bed in the morning. And I will never go to work again. Life will never ever be the same.

That would be an example of a single story that is dominating a person's experience. There are always multiple storylines co-occurring alongside the dominant story. And we can inquire about those alternative storylines and perhaps through the conversation make those bigger and more substantial in a person's life and maybe even have those out compete the dominant story so a person comes out of the relationship with someone like me much more immersed in an alternative storyline that is more preferred to them I'm the author of a editorial I published a few years ago

called Grieving Through Gaming. When we went to that hospice after my brother died, it was very not tailored to me as an 11-year-old boy. He was three years older. He passed away by a heart attack. No one really knows what happened. It was just sort of a random event, but yeah. Probably 30% of what we spent all of our days doing was playing video games. But it was weird not to have him just around, or he'd be like, 10 minutes till my turn. I could

sort of picture him there and like just something to tie me to him after he was gone. Not long ago, a friend of mine passed away suddenly. And he passed away by his own hand, unfortunately. And while we were helping his family clear out his home, came across a lot of his old classic video games. This was a piece of him that I could save, that wasn't lost.

When I was younger, a lot of single player games were actually multiplayer games. You'd play them single player, but you'd be on your friend's couch while they played, or while you played. I really want to play these games with my friend. I'll never get the chance to but maybe I can still kind of play those games with him and other people can share that experience with me. First game I played, save files were there. We played through it on a fresh save and then we went back and replayed the ending of his save there, we played through it on a fresh save, and then we went back and replayed the ending of his save to be like, well, where was he at at this point? The next game I put on, turned it on,

all the save game files were empty. That caught me so off guard that I felt like I'd failed him, that I had lost a piece of him. And I think the way I got around that was thinking, well, if we were playing this game fresh, if I was playing this game fresh with my friend, and it was a brand new game, we'd have to start from scratch somewhere. One of the things I do is I do video game-assisted therapy, wherein I take video games, and I sit with a client, and we play video games.

I had a client, the very first one I ever did video game therapy with, he came in, and five sessions, that's five hours, did not share anything. He refused because he did not want to be there. That's it. And so I'm like, would you be interested in playing video games? And within five minutes of playing, he told me more about how he was doing, how he was feeling, than the previous five sessions combined. As a narrative therapist, I'm interested in multiple things. I'm interested in a person's experience of the game as a resiliency. I'm interested in the meaning a person makes of the game. I'm interested in the community that is developed around gaming.

Not every video game is like an isolated experience. For example, Dark Souls is considered like one of the hardest games in the universe, right? It kind of redefined genres of action games. But even in Dark Souls, you can leave messages for other players and when they play their game they see it. Whether they're joke messages or like, hey good luck, or hey there's an enemy up ahead, like warning messages, kind of creates the sense of community even though you're not directly talking to that person. People will often talk about the funeral was was so social and there were so many people there the funeral was so social

and there were so many people there, it was so good just to go back to my community of people online after that huge day and not talk about it or immerse myself in the fantasy of it. And so this is people actively responding to the difficulty through accessing the game. We in the West are not very good at navigating death and loss. And so after the person has heard,

I'm so sorry for the 50th time, it can be really powerful to reach out to an online community of trusted members and get something different. Video games oftentimes are the only thing they can use to help, to calm down, to feel relaxed, to feel in control, because you're controlling somebody on the screen. You're controlling the gameplay.

And when it comes to grief and loss, that is so important because you have people that have chronic grief. They don't know what to do with it. So I got to learn more things about my friend by loading up his save points and seeing where he was in the game. I would set a very prescribed time that I would play. I would play on, say, I think it was Tuesdays and Sundays, which kind of became kind of like my therapy sessions to give myself the space and time to grieve my friend, to really take some time to not just focus on the fact that he passed away, but to

celebrate him. And being able to share that experience both with people who knew him and complete strangers, I think we all found a little bit of catharsis. It gives you an opportunity to just engage your brain and just do something. And then through that something, you can have a memory. Like, I don't know, maybe a character in a game reminds you of the person you've lost. Or an environment reminds you of a place you went with them. Often the camera is what we call a first-person camera. So the camera is like your

perspective. Another method that we use is like silent protagonists, right? So like a mortician's tale, you have a character that you're controlling, but there's no dialogue options. The protagonist doesn't say anything. So even though, you know, we're not, I'm not a little elf boy running around Hyrule, I can still project my feelings onto this character because they don't have a preset personality. There's so many games where you have a character but you can also customize them how they look how they act what kind of things they do what their personality is. So if you have this like badass lady who's not afraid of anything maybe that's like a really cathartic thing to play as that's like a kid to be like yeah that could be me. You have

people that like to play the bad guy and they to play as, as like a kid, to be like, yeah, that could be me. You have people that like to play the bad guy and they'll play the bad guy in a video game and they enjoy it. And then they play the good guy and then they can play around with it. They can have that freedom to explore the video game to become whatever they want to be. I've worked with lots of people in the LGBTQ community.

And that was one of the areas where they first explored another gender or a non-binary identity or a different look or a different voice and then explored through the game who they were and explored also responses to who they were in online communities and it has been a godsend for so many young people exploring alternative identities. You're going to be treated differently because you're experiencing this thing. You can just have that experience that isn't tied to your grief because especially early on everything is going to be a tight time

to your grief because even if you are going to counseling even when you come home you're still going to be a bereaved person the emotions are real the connections to a video a virtual character is just as real as a connection to a physical person sometimes it sneaks up on you i remember i bought this one game called brothers a tale of two One of them, the older one, had dark hair, the younger one had blonde hair, and they were about the same heights as us, the same ages, roughly. And that's the reason why I picked it up,

but it has this amazing feature where you have the one controller, but you play both brothers at the same time with each joystick. And the reason why they did that is because grief is debilitating and it can make even the simplest things very difficult to do. There's a couple of games that stood out for me

in both the past and present day. Like right now I'm playing a game called Baldur's Gate 3. Every time I play that game for an hour or more, something surprised me because the characters surprise me. I am so invested in these characters that do not exist that I get teary when they tell me that they're worried that the weird ticking time bomb in their chest is going to go off. But it's okay because they know when they go they'll be with me. There are video games that do have this kind of, we call it permadeath. A character or an NPC will die and that's it. You lose that character for the rest of the game. So a really good example of this is the Mass Effect series. If you do certain actions in

that game, those characters can die and they're gone. And so those kind of choices, when you make them, that is kind of almost like a safe way to practice grief like you're still grieving for this thing even though it's not like a real person or a pet when you play a video game the video game character usually has a tragic story let's take breath of the wild Zelda he starts off being the champion of the princess. He has friends. He has an entire castle behind him. He has everything.

Then one day he loses it all. It's all gone. And he wakes up 100 years later and then you have the start of the game. You take that on as a persona and you absorb it and you recognize that no matter how big bad things get, you can stand back up. You can rebuild. If you have that sort of voice in the back of your mind that's saying, you know,

you should probably get off your ass and do something else, then it can sort of, I guess, kneecap what you're doing to heal yourself. It isn't just a distraction. One of our goals with this game was to be as accurate as possible with things like cremation and burial and embalming, while also trying to find this line of what is palatable for people. We made the game very stylized. The people are very exaggerated, almost cartoony. So you're seeing the actual processes of embalming and cremation,

but it is a bit more palatable because there's not like blood and guts and it doesn't look like a real person. It wasn't our intention to make an educational game. It was just wanting to be accurate so that people can maybe, this is their first time understanding like what goes into a burial or cremation. And so then, you know, a year or so after playing the game, when someone they know died, they're able to be like, okay, well, I know what goes into a burial.

We can make those choices based off of that knowledge. And I think that by being honest, by understanding things, being more open to learning about these things, it becomes less scary. And we can make decisions for ourselves and our loved ones so that when someone does die, we're prepared. I might ask something like, I know it's been so hard for you to get by through this,

but were there ever stories about how your grandmother got by? Yeah, they used to do these sewing circles. And they would get together and talk about things. And wait a second, maybe that really helped them get by. So those are things that can be rediscovered. The other part of responding to the loss of ceremony around death and dying is the construction of new ceremonies.

Isn't the world of video games ripe with possibility around that? In 2020, Animal Crossing New Horizons came out like a week after we all went into lockdown for COVID. Some of the furniture you can get are gravestones. And what people started to do, brand new to this game, were creating graveyards on their island. And that sounds creepy, but all these examples that you would see on Twitter were less about it being like creepy, Halloween-y, spooky, and more about creating a space to plant flowers or to grieve someone. And that was especially poignant during this time where we couldn't go outside, we couldn't have funerals. There's no grief, there's nothing of the sort in that game, but to see them using that as a tool for the grief is very beautiful. I remember I made my mom play a game called Life is Strange.

It's one of those games that sort of sneaks grief in there because you play as a girl whose best friend lost her dad and so you're sort of like the support person. It's an opportunity for that older generation to not only connect with a video game but they can connect with their children. One thing I've experienced with my parents is that our grief processes were like entirely different. Losing a child and losing a brother, you experience these people in different ways. And, but just doing something together

sort of just can just bring you together for that. I guarantee you there's a video game out there for everybody, including the people that are like, video games are a waste of time, they're only for little children, you know? And I think a lot of that is on us as an industry. We're really bad about making things more accessible to a wider audience.

The Wii was the first console where they showed families, older people, moms, little girls, all playing this game. You get to play and try new things and critical think, and all these processes now get to place on video games. I still need free play. As an adult, I still need free play. Playing is incredibly important to everything we do. A lot of these games that my friend was playing were really long games, like dozens of hours to complete.

The very first game I beat was one of those games and it had a really long convoluted story with lots of like, you know, love, loss, evil villains, etc. But what really got me at the end was when the credits rolled, because that was the end. That was it. It was done. And I didn't want it to be done. By that point, I didn't want to leave this world behind and I didn't, it felt like I was almost closing a chapter of my friend in that process. Thanks a bunch. Cheers.

But being able to share that with the audience and talk that through with them as well, he's not really ever going to be gone for me or for the people that knew him, as long as we keep his memory in our heads. The Agenda with Steve Paikin is made possible through generous philanthropic contributions from viewers like you. Thank you for supporting TVO's journalism.