Part 5: Clients Build Real & True Beauty & Value, Whatever That Means To Them

The Importance of Pulchritude

Not all play in Minecraft is strictly utilitarian. Clients can also express value and bring forth beauty. The importance of beauty is vast. In virtual play therapy, we help foster spaces rich with potential to express culturally significant and aesthetically meaningful values—from the sacred and sublime to the wonderfully familiar and beautifully quotidian.

Through virtual play, clients can embody their individual preferences and cultural expressions, reflecting both their familial and intrapersonal worlds and the greater social contexts where meaning and value are deeply rooted. “Minecraft can be used as an efficient tool to communicate built heritage environments, considering identified criteria on immersion, motivation, and fidelity of simulation” (Garcia-Fernandez, 2019).

These examples clearly showcase appealing brilliance. Yet, in a nod to T.S. Eliot, not all beauty is bright.*

Children can powerfully, wonderfully, and importantly conjure a meaningful "shadow" through virtual worlds as well. This shadow can be, for example, an “extension of the family home” (Balmford, 2020) or a reflection of their inner concerns, among many other things. The expansive value is not determined by utility or beauty alone, but by its symbolic significance. In expressing themselves so fully, our sometimes incredibly isolated clients find they are not alone.

Therapy in virtual Minecraft worlds is not only about validation but about witnessing and sharing the child’s inner experience, living it together in ways words and other artful forms may fail to communicate. In these shared digital landscapes, we find a profound space for connection and understanding, where the inner worlds of our clients are seen, heard, and honored.

....continued in part six of Seven Therapeutic Benefits for Clients in Virtual Worlds: Clients Invite Someone Into Their Most Sacred Experiences & Learn To Ask For And Build Supportive Relationships Amidst All The Real Meaning Together

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*"I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you which shall be the darkness of God."

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