I Beat the Level: Children's Use of Gameboy as Therapeutic Communication

Child psychotherapy is meant to focus on interpretation of the child's symbolic communication as expressed in dramatic play or structured board games. Technological games, however, have been thought to be overly structured play with nonsymbolic modalities that restrict communication by absorbing the child with the machine and excluding the therapist or the therapist's interventions. This represents a challenge for a child therapist confronted with a child who prefers technological games and communications to traditional playroom materials, as today's children increasingly are.

This article discusses ways that children's play with Gameboy can reveal psychodynamics and can be understood as projective material. It focuses in particular on one child who presented with socialization and communication difficulties, and who played computer and electronic games at home as his only play. In treatment, he brought his Gameboy with him, and sessions then revolved around his play with the electronic game. Far from restricting communication in this case, the game represented the child's best mode of expressing himself and the therapist's best mode of communicating with him on his terms; it allowed child and therapist to work together to relieve the child's difficulties.