Part 3: In Here, Clients Are The Leader; In Here, Clients Make The Rules*

In Here, Clients Show Their Mastery

Children can experience a unique sense of control during Minecraft play in ways they often can’t elsewhere offline. Their virtual creations can be more accurate and isomorphically veridical than their motor skills developmentally allow (even an adult like myself can construct in Minecraft with greater clarity of purpose than motor coordination permits elsewhere). They can stand proudly at the foot of entire homes, castles, monuments, and even cities they’ve built, showcasing a beauty and purpose far more complete than their drawings on paper can indicate.

One child brought to life a ghoulish melee, laden with meaning. He had placed along an entire wall of his house, like human-sized candelabra or empty suits of armor in a castle, a row of villains he had set up but hadn’t yet unleashed into any form of mobility or animated life. They stood tall above us like terrifying skeleton-demon armies, shoulder to shoulder in procession, like soldiers awaiting orders to come frighteningly to life. This curious and salient addition to his virtual home embodied internal conflicts he carried, the shadow-militias of thoughts and feelings he feared would be unleashed with unregulated expressions too big and too scary to breathe into life. Other children, for perhaps similar reasons, bring us into the Nether World, an arguably frightening yet strangely beautiful hellscape where they fray with embittered apparitions while dodging spilling lava-falls, crusading through ever-unfolding perils and, at best, their conquests.

Yet not all symbolic demonstrations are expressions of shadow-selves. That same grade school-aged child invited me to an incredible world he created, where well-manicured grass plains stretched in all directions toward the distant horizon. At the center was a cathedral-like structure, less a building and more a building-sized shrine or living-tomb, with three or four beacons of different-colored beams of light shooting up into the sky, infinitely high, unendingly reaching, tilted toward infinity and heaven and God (or whatever conception he might have had of what resides in higher, seemingly unreachable realms).

And this child stood, no, hovered, mid-flight in virtuous repose before the brilliant creations he could conjure and present virtually with a mastery that the bullies at school failed to see, with a skillful regulation which his furious, wonderful, impatient parents had never understood he possessed, and with a diligence and proficiency which his angry teachers hadn’t figured out were within his repertoire of behavioral responses. In his world, into which we can now walk when invited (Minecraft has literal invitations that are sent), we see the master in a true kingdom of sometimes otherwise entirely unseen prowess—a world where the boundaries of the ordinary dissolve into the extraordinary, and where his spirit can traverse the full spectra of the numinous.

....continued in part four of Seven Therapeutic Benefits for Clients in Virtual Worlds: In Here, Clients Discover Their Power To Take Care Of Themselves & The World, All Its Inhabitants – Sentient & Otherwise

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I believe it is incredibly important to abide by a largely non-directive therapeutic play approach with certain children to support their autonomy and its healing development. While we do not yet have a codified system for delineating which children are best served by non-directive versus directive play therapy in virtual worlds, I suggest from my experience that patients will quickly let us know who wants to lead, who wants to collaborate, and who wants to be guided. In my experience, it has served me well to abide by their requests wholeheartedly, oblige gladly, and without any impinging exceptions, grudges, or resentments from us, however playfully or appropriately they could occur.