At MacGibbon Psychotherapy we’ve started using role playing game therapy as a way to allow our clients to connect and work on interpersonal issues in a group setting.
Role Playing Game Therapy is group therapy that brings clients together with a therapeutic GM (Game Master) and a therapist to actually play interactively in a game and work on issues like personal interaction, social connection, compromise, conflict resolution, all kinds of different things that can be worked on in a gaming setting.
As a therapeutic Game Master my role is to bring the group together, provide them challenges, work with Heather, the therapist, and figure out challenges that best work for the group week to week.
One of the things that we’re able to do well together is, her acting as a player joining the game and myself as the game master running the game – it creates two different two different sort of roles for the players to players to engage with. And it’s worked out well with that.
Yeah, it’s also been really helpful in terms of being able to focus on particular issues for clients. The clients meet with me individually for therapy and so we talk about what are their personal goals, what are the issues that have been getting in the way, and then Matt and I will sit down and convene before the game sessions and talk about how that might be worked out in a gaming setting so that they can practice whatever it is that they’re working on.
And in those discussions, it’s important to realize that everything is HIPAA compliant. We make sure all of our clients understand that we will be discussing these things. And I’ll ask, I’ll basically ask Heather what sort of are the issues of the week? How can, and what are the most important things that we should be focusing on?
And I’ll do my best to tailor that week’s session to work with those issues. For example, if somebody is having family issues, I might bring family into the game session with either a parental figure being involved in the game, as an NPC, non-player character, or some other way.
Sometimes some people are having just some connectivity issues and then we’ll try to create some puzzles that the group works on together.
Yeah, and I found that it’s really helpful for clients with ADHD and clients that are on the spectrum to have a place where not only are they in group therapy and they’re like addressing their therapeutic issues, but they also have a task that they’re working on together because it, it allows them to work on, communication, interpersonal interaction, interpersonal effectiveness and things like cooperation, collaboration, and conflict resolution in a ways that are less risky to the clients than doing it out in the world without the kind of frame of the therapeutic setting.
Do we want to talk at all about how it’s caused people that were unsure about therapy to get very much involved in therapy?
Yeah. We’ve had some clients who really came for the game playing aspect, but have stayed for the therapy and have really engaged with the therapy in ways that they never imagined that they would and been able to reach Work through a lot of their depression or their trauma in ways that have been extremely helpful But it was facilitated by participating in the game the gaming group
And the other thing is with Heather as a player in the group as an ally of the group They start to think of Heather as an ally in therapy as well.
So it really creates a strong rapport.
A strong rapport.
So far, we’ve just been using Dungeons and Dragons or actually Pathfinder. But we’re going to be setting up other groups and other games as well.
About 20 percent of our clients are gamers, and not everyone in MacGibbon Psychotherapy wants to do gaming. About one in five of our clients that are interested in gaming therapy and because of that we’re obviously increasing our therapists and we’re going to be increasing the number of GMs, the number of games and the number of GMs we use, hopefully for different experiences.
So, I think our general hope is to have About 20 percent of our clients are going to be involved in game therapy and the rest probably are just going to be sticking with individual therapy. Yeah. But that number may grow or shrink, but we’re definitely seeing, we’re definitely seeing it grow.
Yeah. We’re seeing a lot of interest.
You can find more about RPG therapy through our sort of sister website battleyourdemons.com where we talk about our particular game therapy. You can look up Megan Connell who wrote the basically the book in which we base our gaming therapy, and there’s other resources that we hope to have on our website soon.