Videogames as a Therapeutic Tool in the Context of Narrative Therapy

Videogames can have a significant impact on a person’s life. Researchers have looked at how videogames impact a person’s life ranging from their creative, mental, and physical aspects to even their social and political worlds (e.g., Montani et al., 2014; Sil et al., 2014; Alhabash and Wise, 2015; Bloom, 2015; Bock et al., 2015; Chang et al., 2015; Yeh, 2015; González et al., 2016; Nebel et al., 2016). Videogames in relation to psychotherapy have also been studied and discussed (e.g., Graham, 2014; Fernandez-Aranda et al., 2015; Franco, 2015; Llorens et al., 2015). Franco (2015) discussed the use of family therapy in treating videogame addiction. Graham (2014), in particular, looked at videogame addiction and how to apply narrative therapy to translate videogame skills from online videogames to clients’ offline lives. Rather than using family or narrative therapies to treat videogame addiction, it may serve narrative therapists to adopt videogames as a tool in narrative therapy. Videogames have been used in group therapy to treat individuals with traumatic brain injury (Llorens et al., 2015) and in conjunction with cognitive—behavioral therapy to treat individuals with bulimia nervosa (Fernandez-Aranda et al., 2015). Board games, videos, and art are often used by therapists to enable their clients to address therapeutic concerns. In that same vein, videogames can be integrated into the narrative therapy model as tools that can enable clients to externalize their problems and re-author their experiences.