Kim Wheeler Poitevien, a licensed clinical social worker in Pennsylvania who counsels children and teenagers, saw more young Black patients gravitate toward games like Fortnite in response to racial violence during the summer of 2020. Soon the kids were enthusiastically leading each other around the game space, their shyness forgotten.Īnd sometimes it’s within a game world’s digital boundaries that patients may feel more safety and freedom to work through intense emotions. Eventually, one boy mentioned Brookhaven, a roleplaying game set in a bustling city. Everybody has their cameras off,” says Goldman. In a Zoom session with two elementary school boys, Goldman kicked things off by asking the kids to name their favorite Roblox game. Goldman began training other clinicians to use online gaming in their work, starting with Roblox, a platform with millions of games that’s especially popular with kids ages 5 to 12 in the United States. As he and his colleagues struggled to connect with clients virtually, he wondered if gaming could help his patients too. In the bright, immersive world of online gaming, Goldman found solace-and he started to have fun again. But he didn’t start to feel better until he turned to a familiar pastime: video games.
“I was exercising, I was meditating, I was doing yoga,” says Goldman, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Santa Clara, California. In the early weeks of the pandemic, Monet Goldman tried different strategies to cope with stress.
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