They Don’t Know Anime from Avatar
A quick update on my intrepid co-author, the gaming therapist Shavaun Scott. She put together a small conference series directed towards therapists looking to get educated on how games can interact (in good, bad and ambiguous ways) with other mental health disorders and overall bodily health. Over the past couple of weeks we’ve had some cheeky exchanges. One of the funniest and/or saddest was that most of these therapists she presented to “didn’t know anime from avatar.”
Where I’ve been standing on this is a pretty basic statement: games are experiences. We all go through our lives experiencing different things - for the people who play, gaming is just one more venue where we can experience. It’s also a venue where we can have entirely different lives, at times divorced from reality altogether; meaning that it poses unique benefits and challenges for the people who venture boldly across the digital plains. So Shavaun and I were both a bit put off by the ignorance exhibited by the therapist in [this blog] from Shavaun’s site.
With Shavaun’s not-inconsiderable talents usually being spent in giving help to a broad variety of people with problems, I can’t help but hope that she gets to the point where the bulk of her time is spent training the other ground-floor therapists out there. The people with the unique, all-too-often unseen compounding factor of game addictions.
/end tired rant babble
Neils Clark :: Apr.15.2008 :: Games ::
