“So long, nerds.” – Technoblade
I woke this morning to a colleague’s email, giving me a heads up that Minecraft streamer, Technoblade, had died after living with stage 4 cancer. Though the heads up was in case one of my young client’s experiencing sadness, distress, or expressing curiosity about death, I felt and embraced my own sadness and having spent many more hours than I care to admit watching his content I felt the loss of his potential.
As a Psychologist, Minecraft is a central platform in one of my work roles, working with children and adolescents with Autism and ADHD diagnoses. Our client’s often face challenges to traditional therapies, therapists, and many have some difficulties creating and maintaining connections with others. Despite their challenges, they often talk of particular streamers and their feelings of connection. My clients feel this connection because they feel understand, valid, seen, and they are met on their own level.
As I reflected, I also felt the general frustration at how in a modern sense we dismiss and downplay the ways of the world now. We lament that kids are no longer playing in the park, digging in the dirt, skinning their knees and learning from their failures.
Minecraft and online platforms are not trivial things in kids’ lives. It encompasses the best of the things we want to see in young people and ourselves. It has relationship, storytelling, and considerable lore. It fosters exploration, problem solving, resourcefulness, planning, and strategizing.
There is research pointing to dopamine equality between in-person versus online interactions with others. Add to that a special or shared interest and it is likely the quality of the connection is real. Nobody is going to argue that online-only relationships should supplant face to face relationships, but it is important not to buy into the dark and often conservative rhetoric in media that can trivialise these relationships as having a poor or unreal quality.
Often, the darkest aspects of internet and gaming are given precedence in media and the benefits trivialised. In our scramble to protect, we feel powerless and often go too far toward behaviour curbs without understanding the hows and whys and whats of the times in which we live.
We should not dismiss the importance of online relationships in shaping us and our experience, particularly for individuals who are living with mental health challenges, neurodiversity, disability, or just favour these relationships. We need a more nuanced view of modern relationships and the way online persona, streamers, game platforms, and online relationships in general can meet and fulfil the human nature factors of storytelling, connection, shared interests, and representation that encourages people to build their tribe and see themselves represented in the world meaningfully.
Comentarios