Perhaps nothing creates more anxiety for adults than imagining what their teens are up to when no one is watching. That’s why my ears perked up when I read this quote in a New York Times interview with Richard Tyler Blevins, known as Ninja, an American Twitch streamer, YouTuber and professional gamer. Blevins said: “You want to know who your kid is? Listen to [them] when [they’re] playing video games when [they] think you’re not.”
I wanted to find out if this was true.
Luckily, I read this as I was set to launch an after school program designed to learn what NYC teens think about the role of games in their lives. Working for SAENY and CCNY, in partnership with SIA, we opened the program sharing Ninja’s advice, asking the teens “1-3 things you might say while playing a game when you think your caregivers are not listening,” and why they thought the game generated this response. What I learned taught me about one place youth often need help and one game that seems designed to do just that.
I broke down and categorized the responses from the 20 teenagers, and then put them into comic strips to help us process them with the teens themselves. Here are a few examples (click to see a larger image)
The first category that emerged was the tone of their comments. Of the 25 distinct comments, I labelled 16 as negative (aggressive/mad) and 9 as positive (inquisitive/friendly). Tone, however, doesn’t tell the full story. “You’re trash” means something very different depending on to whom it is being said. To a stranger playing an online game, it’s aggressive and often negative trash talk. To a good friend, it might be playful teasing or banter. To the game itself (to a character in the game, or to the imagined game designer), it suggests a safe space to blow off steam. Finally, if directed to themselves, this can be an example of unhealthy, self-destructive feedback. It’s that self-directed negative language I want to address in this post.
If you create an X axis of Tone and a Y of Audience, it turns out there is activity in all 8 cells: positive language to strangers, negative language to friends, etc. But the largest cell, by far, is Negative language to Self, nearly double any other cell.
So how are we adults to think about this behavior, that a large percentage of youth gaming time may be spent in negative self-criticizing? One video game, it turns out, mentioned by some of the youth, presents one direction. It is called Celeste. I had learned about it recently from my son, who described it to me as “a precision puzzle platformer that follows Madeline in her journey to overcome anxiety.” One member of the after school program used Celeste as an example of a game in which you “keep dying and dying and then you always got to bounce back.” To me that sounds like an awful experience. Why would I want to subject myself to that sense of failure, again and again? But not to this teen. “It’s fun to struggle,” he said, “and then do well.”
Many games are like this – brutal to play but have emotional payoff for those who hang-in and overcome its challenges. What I think makes Celeste unique, however, is that the relationship between player and game (and the socio-emotional learning involved) is the subject of both the game’s narrative and often its gameplay. Celeste is about a woman, Madeline, attempting to solo climb to the summit of a mountain called Mount Celeste. She is plagued by self-doubt and anxiety, but recommits herself, again and again, to both her task and her ability to take it on. Along the way she has allies, like Theo, a fellow climber who helps Madeline learn how to meditate on a feather to control her breathing. And along the way Madeline faces enemies, like a dark mirror version of herself who constantly berates her abilities and encourages her to give up. Players call her “Badeline”; the game calls her “part of you.”
Over the course of Madeline’s ascent, the storyline increasingly focuses on her relationship with Badeline. At first Madeline views her as an enemy, a challenge to be overcome. Theo helps her to realize Badeline is part of herself, so she tries to ignore the barrage of criticism. When that approach fails, Madeline tries to befriend her, and over time she iterates healthier and more effective ways to address her inner critic.
Badeline is a game representation of all that negative self-criticism players direct at themselves; Celeste encourages its players to develop a critical awareness of these internal negative voices, offering a perspective to view the relationship in a more holistic frame and, through game play, trains them in techniques for facing anxiety in healthier ways.
Anxiety is a topic Madeline explicitly discusses with her allies throughout the game. And anxiety is certainly what I feel when I play it with my son. Most levels begin with a challenge that feel beyond me. I have no idea how I am going to get from one side of the screen to the other. The skills required for me to learn and perform with precision feel beyond me. The speed at which obstacles attack overwhelm me. My hands are sweating. I panic and jump when I should have dashed. I want to curse, again and again, or throw down the computer. Why won’t my fingers do what I tell them? Why can’t I get it just right?
But I only play, only COULD play, with my son by my side, like Madeline’s Theo, encouraging me to play, reminding me I can do it, always calm in the face of my stress, always a model that it can be done. He reminds me of the skills I have learned playing the game, about the breathing techniques it encourages, and then, every time… something shifts. Time slows down. There is clarity where once there was chaos. I tap with confidence into my skillset, get into the zone, and revel in the glory of the successful struggle.
When I complete that level, that level that once seemed impossible, my confidence increases, not just in my ability to defeat the game but in the process encouraged by the game itself and the power and potential of gaming with my son. So every time he asks me if I am ready to play Celeste, I know how to respond to my own inner Badeline, who tells me “You will fail this time!” and instead invite her to join me and my son as we take on the challenge together.
Note: if you would like to read more about Celeste and mental health, this three part article might be of interest here.
