Video Games and Telehealth
When telehealth became the norm for many of us, we saw a lot of questions surrounding best practices, privacy, and because we specialize in the use of play, we directly received many questions about using video games online with clients.
Hoping to provide useful information, we hosted a webinar series introducing four of the most popular video games available along with basic tips on how to get started using these games in telehealth. We played the games live to better explain them and briefly covered how to play online and different ways to use them within counseling sessions.
We started with Animal Crossing: New Horizons, a brand new game that was also incredibly popular on social media. The webinar introduced privacy considerations when playing with clients online and concepts like self-expression, pro-social gameplay, and discussing emotions within the game.
After Animal Crossing we covered three of the most successful and popular games of all time: Minecraft, Roblox, and Fortnite. These games transcend what many people think about when they think of video games since they exist as media brands beyond their original games. Perhaps even more surprising, Minecraft has been around for ten years while Roblox and Fortnite are free to play. And all of these games are playable on many devices including computers, consoles, and smartphones.
If you have time to watch only one webinar, we recommend Roblox since it includes a 50-minute Q&A session at the end. We’ll be hosting additional Q&A sessions in the future so sign up for our mailing list to be notified of upcoming events.
The video game industry is the most profitable entertainment industry in the world. It is huge. It’s also very exciting and always changing. In just a few weeks since we hosted these webinars, each game has received multiple updates, Animal Crossing is much less talked about, and Fortnite changed its pricing so some things we mentioned in the webinar are now obsolete. That is why we’ll be hosting many more training opportunities soon.
This Video Games and Telehealth series was an introduction to these games as well as an introduction to using video games in therapy. Future training opportunities will feature these and other games, and dive much deeper into using video games in therapy.
Be sure to contact us if you have any requests for future trainings. You can also interact with Josué live every week on the Geek Therapy Twitch channel, where he and his team play video games 3-4 times a week and are happy to take requests and answer your questions.
Until next time, keep playing!
-Sophia and Josué