Inner Worlds IX: Mike Langlois, the gamer therapist
On escapism, addiction, and therapy in imagined worlds
Reading Inner Worlds, you might have noticed that the term escapism comes up a lot. It’s natural when you talk to people about their experience with imagined worlds. But what surprises me is how pejorative that word is. No one wants to be called escapist. After all, escaping from the problems of real life bears the stigma of cowardice.
It’s ironic, because we teach kids to use their imagination. We want it to floruish. We’re happy to see them turn sheets of paper into treasure maps, sand castles into besieged fortresses, and floor into lava. But when they become adults, we expect them to be ashamed of imagination.
I’ve felt that shame myself. Many of my friends don’t know that I still play tabletop role-playing games (they do now, I guess). I don’t talk about it because, hey, who wants to bear that stigma?
To better understand what gives escapism such a bad rap — what makes imagination something to be ashamed of — I talked to Mike Langlois. He is known as Gamertherapist and the nickname serves him well. Not only because he is a therapist dealing with gamers, but because he is a gamer himself. He loves Minecraft and freely admits that he’d be playing the new expansion for World of Warcraft if he only had enough time. Unlike many others in psychology, Mike scoffs at the mention of video game addiction. We over-identify video games with addiction he claims.
Here’s what he has to say about escapism.
Wojtek Borowicz: Why is escapism a pejorative term? Don’t all of us need to escape mundane or stressful reality sometimes?
Mike Langlois: You’re absolutely right, part of the problem with that term is the implicit judgement. We see it used less often if it’s a socially acceptable activity. If anybody in the US started referring to watching American football as escapism, people would be puzzled. Football and sports are so ingrained in our culture that we don’t judge them, as opposed to more recent things like e-sports. When people want to play Defense of the Ancients or League of Legends, we think: that’s escapism.
What if we started thinking about video games as the opposite of escapism? A form of mindfulness, or concentration meditation. No one says you’re trying to escape reality by looking at a rock garden, it’s actually a form of concentration meditation. You could use video games for that as well.
Even if it is escapism, what’s so bad with that? It’s a coping mechanism. Blinking, for example, is a form of escapism, too. A blink allows you a moment of respite from whatever is going on in front of you, so you can calm down and regulate your emotions. A moment of escapism.
So there isn’t really a difference between playing video games, watching Superbowl, and a mindfulness exercise, apart from how they are perceived by society?
We have so many different ways in which we can choose to relax when we’re stressed or anxious. Someone wants to unwind watching a football game after a hard day at work: is that escapism? Sure. Is it bad? Not necessarily. The problem appears when you cannot unwind unless with a certain theme or with a certain game. The more restrictive we are with our coping mechanisms, the harder it becomes to use them.
Why do you think people invest so much time and effort in fictional worlds, from video games to fantasy novels? Is the physical world not enough to satisfy our needs?
It’s important to not reify one thing as reality and the other as not. If you’re playing World of Warcraft and end up losing to a boss or another player says something that upsets you, it’s not your virtual limbic system that gets upset. It’s the same limbic system that gets upset when you have a bad day at work or someone bothers you in the street. Whether the stimulus is in the same room or is mediated through television or something else, the same brain and nervous system is impacted.
Also, in your use of examples you’re talking about several things. People who are escaping by playing in video game worlds, or people who like designing video games. People that want to read books and people that want to write books. We can be consumers of other people’s fantasies or create our own. We use our imagination in both ways.
What drives people to that other way: to create, and not just consume, imagined worlds?
Think about video games as an art form. Why people create art? They don’t do it for just one reason. There’s lots of different reasons. To express yourself. To convey a message. To create an experience for somebody else. To be recognized and admired.
So what’s the difference behind what motivates people to explore imagined worlds — for example in No Man’s Sky — and what motivates them to build them, like in Minecraft?
People like to do both. But we’ve created this message that art is a rare thing that only a few are good enough to do. Indeed, it’s easier to play video games than to design them. But that doesn’t mean people cannot enjoy creating or designing their own worlds. Minecraft is a great example. Mojang gave people a platform, gave them building blocks so they could start playing and being creative.
No Man’s Sky has a different appeal than Minecraft. People like them both because they’re fun. Maybe it’s too simplistic an answer, but the very nature of play is that it’s fun and that it’s voluntary.
How do you cross the line between a healthy habit of exploring a fictional world to unwind and a toxic experience that turns into an addiction?
It’s tricky to measure. A lot of times you see it’s not the people themselves having a problem with what they’re doing but others around them. We tend to focus too much on how many hours someone is doing something rather than the quality of experience they’re having.
There is no one size fits all answer. It’s very complicated, you don’t just pick a number of hours. For example, if you were playing World of Warcraft several hours a night and you were a raid leader, you might feel a sense of empowerment. If that follows you to the next day and you’re able to translate it into leadership at work, and you have a satisfactory love relationships, and satisfactory work relationships, I don’t think that’s a problem, even if that costs a number of hours a night. People judge and think oh, they should be doing something else. But human beings have a right to be self-directed.
Although I don’t like the term addiction, when you see people feeling somehow forced into doing things, this is how you could define addiction. If the person feels they have to play but they’re not enjoying it, it takes away the essential element of play.
What’s wrong with addiction? What would be a better term in context of video games?
I tend to keep it complicated. What problem are we talking about? Is a person playing video games because they’re feeling depressed and powerless? Then it would be more useful to look at gaming that’s unpleasant or excessive as a symptom of depression rather than the game itself as a problem. Here’s the thing: if people are playing video games and driving some enjoyment and self-esteem out of it, we don’t want to take away one of their avenues to do that. You want to find other things that can perhaps be put in that place if they decide they don’t want to play video games as often.
The problem is that we over-identify video games with addiction. Rather than looking for the cause of the problem, we look at the chemical dependency.
What makes virtual worlds so appealing that these people cannot leave them?
The job of a therapist is to ask that in a different way: what in that world gives you a sense of meaning or a sense of value? They wouldn’t be doing that if there wasn’t something they were trying to work out, understand, or experience. My goal is to try and figure that out with them.
If they’re playing a role-playing game like World of Warcraft I want to know what kind of class they’re playing. What race they’re playing? Why do they do certain things? What motivates them? You need to understand the meanings of it so that you can help people decide if there are other places in their lives they can find those meanings.
Have you seen examples of people for whom the line between real and fictional worlds became too blurred to distinguish one from another?
Not really. I certainly worked with people who had thought and psychotic disorders. People suffering from psychosis may hear voices or see demons, but that’s not attributed to video games in particular. I think what you want to know is: do people ever become so immersed in video games that they become psychotic? But that is not my experience. Because for a game to really work as play, a person needs to know it’s a game. If you don’t have a good sense of reality, you’re not gonna enjoy the game. What’s fun about Call of Duty is that it looks like we’re shooting people, but we aren’t really shooting people.
Are there outliers who gravitate more towards violent imagery as a way of expressing feelings or viewing their existence? That’s possible. But the majority of people that play video games are not violent. The majority of people who play World of Warcraft don’t go on the streets with swords, attacking people.
Reversing the issue, can imagined worlds also be used as a form of therapy?
Absolutely! I’m glad we’re getting to that because that’s what I’m much more interested in. In my experience it can be used very powerfully. I teach a course for graduates of social work and psychology. As part of of the course requirements, they have to play World of Warcraft up to a certain level. One of the people that took the course was also a survivor of trauma. She told me about how having played a hunter with a companion pet that kept her safe in this game world actually helped her gain a sense of empowerment and recover from some of her trauma. She said to me that the game changed her life.
Video games are also very good at promoting resiliency. 80 percent of the time you’re playing a video game, you’re failing at it. But you don’t give up. You keep playing. And the fact that you keep trying actually encourages resiliency.
Why we don’t hear stories like that more often?
The media often grabs a headline that is more interesting than statistically significant. In 2010 a Korean couple were playing games at a gaming cafe and their child died of neglect at home. Suddenly we started calling that an example of an epidemic. But if you break down the numbers, it’s much more boring than that. But think of what makes a better headline. 0.000000000063% people who play video games contribute to infanticide or Korean couple lets child starve to death while they play World of Warcraft?
The language and spin make it seem more prevalent. My friend Christopher Ferguson is researching correlations between video games and violence. And even if there are some, it doesn’t mean they’re causal. Correlation is not causation.
What about game developers? Are they doing enough to prevent their creations from trapping people in addiction?
I think video game designers are responsible for creating great works of art and enjoyable experiences. We wouldn’t ask if a brewmaster is responsible for people’s addiction because they provide materials that may cause people to drink.
Something that I do notice with increasing concern is the money crossing over from the real world to game worlds. The model of free to play but with in-app purchases can be a problem. It introduces an economic motive that gets tangled up with play — something that should be voluntary. In an ideal world I’d like to see games divorced from giving people the opportunity to buy things.
Doesn’t that put the video game industry in an ethically difficult position? Gameplay uses mechanics designed to hook people up to keep them playing. Introducing money to these mechanics creates a financial slippery slope for players.
I wish we could find ways for game designers to monetize their work without the crossover from gaming to gambling. But I don’t think we should saddle game industry with responsibility for people’s time management. Part of being an adult is learning your own time management. You wouldn’t want every opera that was made cut down to 90 minutes because somehow we decided that our use of time in opera is excessive. We don’t assess other works of art in that way and I don’t think we should hold video game industry to a higher standard.
Are you a gamer yourself? What kind of worlds do you spend the most time in?
Recently I’ve been enjoying a return to Civ V just because I enjoy the idea of building civilizations. I have played No Man’s Sky but I took a break and I’m playing Dark Souls now. I tend to gravitate towards sort of medieval fantasy settings. And of course Minecraft. I love Minecraft.
If I had the time I would be playing the new World of Warcraft: Legion expansion pack. If you’re a therapist, one of the things you can do that’s helpful for patients is help them determine what their constraints are. For example if they’re interested in medieval fantasy but they don’t have a certain amount of time to commit to it, help them make an informed and empowered decision like I guess I won’t have time to play the new World of Warcraft expansion until summer vacation but in the meantime there are other things I can play that will allow me to keep control of my time.
Liked that? Read other conversations about imagined universes at Inner Worlds.
