How Video Games Help Expand Childhood Friendships

When I read Robert Bly’s book, Iron John, I was stunned by the observation he makes about modern male relationships. I have mentioned this before.

Contemporary business life allows competitive relationships only, in which the major emotions are anxiety, tension, loneliness, rivalry, and fear. 

While boys experience a natural pressure and desire for competition, they are not alone in this societal pressure to “win”. I personally believe we can do a better job of educating our children that there are more kinds of relationships than only competitive ones. As parents, what can we do about it? I believe video games can help.

Why do I believe this? Two words: Co Op games.

These are games where players are challenged to work together to achieve a common goal or objective. These are games where players have to work together, as if they were on the same team. This latest generation of games go way beyond the Halo co-op mode where two players are essentially playing the same game side by side. In this genre of games, the cooperation is integral to the overall game experience. In short, you can’t really play the game without someone else. Single player just doesn’t make sense

Game play is important for the social and emotional development of all humans.[1] What’s more, play is where we discover the boundaries of our capability and the edge of where our individuality intersects with others and society.[2] We all know the expression, It’s not whether you win or lose, it is how you play the game. And in our modern, “win at all costs” culture where winning has become “the only thing”, we lose sight of the META game, the game above that game. This is not only to win, but to play so that you will be invited to play again with others.[3]

Using multiple player cooperative games, a chance for gamers to learn how to play together in ways besides direct head to head competition. I like these games because they are ideal games for parents to play with their kids or together as a family. In the footnote there is a great article by the website Gamerant that lists 12 awesome games[4], my personal favorites are:

  1. Snipper Clips
  2. Tools Up!
  3. Overcooked 2

Only Snippers Clips is exclusive to the Nintendo Switch, but the other two games are available on practically whatever gaming system you already own including: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and MS Windows.

Snipper Clips

Exclusive to the Nintendo Switch, Snipper clips is a brilliant puzzle-based game that stimulates creative thinking. It contains all the polish and fun you expect from a Nintendo first party title. In a nutshell, players play as two (three or four) paper shapes that match the shape of their Nintendo JoyCon controller. To solve puzzles, they often must “snip” or “clip” each other, changing their shape to fit a pattern displayed on the screen. Players work together, solving these puzzles. Puzzles can also include physics objects like bouncing balls and climbing on top of each other to reach different parts of the level map. I find the game is best played on a big screen TV on the couch. I played it for hours with my daughter when it first came out. It was great time we spent together, and I used it to talk about game and puzzle design. I also took a back seat to let her guide me and give me directions in solving the puzzles. I used those times to share with her what would make it easier for me to follow her directions. Giving more young women a chance to successfully lead men in collaborative and cooperative tasks is also an area where we could help our children build a better future.

Tools Up!

This zany independent game by The Knights of Unity and published All In Games has a bit of jiggly humor and multiplayer messy fun. With this game you play a bouncy handyperson who must move around a house in a limited amount of time to remodel, repair, and revamp apartments and homes. What makes this game a little different is that you can easily make mistakes that you have to clean up which can cost you time. Don’t clean up that spilled paint? And you find your character slipping and sliding around the floor like a slap stick character from a black and white movie. The controls can take some getting used to (I often found myself pressing pick up when I meant interact, and interact when I mean to pick up), but after a found of the training rounds this kind of trivial learning curve goes away. What really makes this game interesting to me are the PLANS. You can hold them up and the game will show you what the level is supposed to look like. Then you have to go about doing it. Again, assigning roles, communicating, and forgiving each other for making mistakes is the name of the game.

Overcooked 2

My favorite of this genre has to be Overcooked 2. I first saw this game at the Nintendo booth at E3. I thought, a cooking game? Seriously. And the answer is YES, seriously. The nature of this game is that everyone plays a chef in a fast paced kitchen. Any chef can do any task, but no chef can do every task. You must work together to complete orders in a timely fashion. The progression is simple and the replay value for each level is nearly additive in itself. In fact, we use Overcooked 2 as part of a leadership and development program we call Culture Kitchen. There is nothing quite like seeing people work together in real time to understand the obstacles that get in the way of working together. What’s more, if you haven’t heard a room full of adults laughing out loud together at the same time while they work together, you are missing out.

Conclusions Takeaways

What I like best about these kinds of games is that they inspire you to beat your own score, not someone else’s. Though successive rounds you can learn to work together better, communicate more effectively, and explore the types of relationships that go beyond competitive, they go to collaboration and cooperation. These games make you feel good when you set a record because everyone did it together. These games all fall on the affordable end of the spectrum with Snipper Clips costing $41.08, Tools Up! has a free demo but costs $19.99 on Steam and Overcooked comes in at a very reasonable $24.99 on most platforms at the time of this writing (with Overcooked All You Can Eat – the complete library worth it for $39.99). I would encourage you to check out this genre of game and sit down with your family and give it a go. It’s amazing what you can learn about, and from each other when you work together. 

References

  1. Jun, P. & M.D. (2019, May 23). The Importance Of Play: An Interview with Dr. Jaak Panksepp » Brain World. Brain World. https://brainworldmagazine.com/the-importance-of-play-an-interview-with-dr-jaak-panksepp/
  2. Warren Farrell, P., & John Gray, P. (2018). The Boy Crisis: Why Our Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It. BenBella Books.
  3. Peterson, J. B. (2021). Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life. Portfolio.

https://gamerant.com/great-multitasking-games-like-overcooked/

4 Tips To Get The GameTruck Summer Party You Want

One of the most disappointing things we have to do is to tell parents, and therefore their kids “No”. As more and more states come out the Pandemic, demand for private, clean, safe, in-person gatherings at your home have never been higher. In most markets, GameTruck is running at full capacity, and many owners are adding staff and capacity as fast as possible to meet the demand.

One of the most disappointing things we have to do is to tell parents, and therefore their kids “No”. As more and more states come out the Pandemic, demand for private, clean, safe, in-person gatherings at your home have never been higher. In most markets, GameTruck is running at full capacity, and many owners are adding staff and capacity as fast as possible to meet the demand.

However, I wanted to share a few things you might consider to make it easier for your to get the party your child dreams of having.

Don’t Wait, Lock In Your Date

Many parents, as a response to uncertainty, have been waiting until the last minute (within days) to make the decision to host a party only to find out that supply is already gone. Pre-COVID advanced planners were booking 2-3 weeks out. Todays successful party planners are now looking out a minimum of 4 weeks and some are looking ahead six to 8 weeks. We totally understand that working with uncertainty naturally makes people more cautious. However, let’s look at the top three reasons parents wait, we believe there are solutions to these.

What if We Have to Cancel (because someone got sick)?

The GameTruck cancellation and reschedule policies are robust and designed to reduce stress not add to it. The risk of not getting your desired party date and time are starting to outweigh the risks of waiting until you have all the information. The parents that are getting their parties booked on the dates and times they want are leveraging these good faith policies to help mitigate uncertainty and risk. Which is worse? Waiting until you know and then finding out no teams and equipment are available because they are sold out, or booking early and then having to make a change at a later date?

I Can’t Make a Decision Until I See the Schedule

Sports schedules often drive the planning for many families. This is always a hard one because no one wants to schedule an event in the middle of a game or tournament. One of the ways we have seen parents manage this is to talk to the coach about booking the event BEFORE or AFTER practice. GameTruck has been to many ball fields, soccer stadiums, and basketball courts around the country. Surprising the kids with a party after a practice can be hugely popular. Since most practices happen during the week, this taps into time slots and days where demand is not so high and avoids some possible conflicts with game schedules. Regardless, you may find a pattern in your league. In Tempe for example, we rarely if ever scheduled a game on a Friday night or a Sunday. If you’re child’s favorite sport has a pattern like that, you can make a calculated risk and book an event when there has never been any historical practice, but if there is a surprise, you can reschedule the event to be after a practice. The goal here is to decouple the event planning for needing the full schedule in all its detail.

How Will I know if People Will Come?

Of all the concerns this one is perhaps the easiest to allay. In Fifteen years of operating GameTruck our experience is that the kids always want to play. Very often the reality is that too many kids show up, as in kids who were not invited but might have managed to tag along (brothers, sisters, neighbors). GameTruck events draw out the gamer in all of us. 

Consider an Alternative Activity

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is laser-tag-gametruck-3.jpg

Sometimes the biggest challenge to getting something that will make us happy is not knowing what else might do just as well or better. GameTruck is a fifteen year old brand that is enormously popular. We are blessed that so many thousands of people every day think of us when it comes to hosting their child’s birthday. However, the real point of a GameTruck party is not video games, although there is plenty of that! GameTruck is really about delivering recognition and celebration in fun engaging ways. We believe friendships are made and maintained shoulder to shoulder. The joy of sharing your interests with people who care about you is at the core of what makes our events so powerful and popular. Did you notice that I did not mention equipment? When people think of GameTruck, of course they think of the GameTrailer, but did you know we also offer GameTruck @Home in many markets? The GameTruck @Home option allows you to have a video game party without the truck and trailer. What many parents don’t realize is that the Net Promoter Score for GameTruck@Home parties is higher than for game theater parties. I wrote an entire article explaining why. GameTruck @Home is successful alternative to the trailer. In a similar manner, Gelly Ball is proving to be a popular option when the better known LaserTag option is unavailable. The action based outdoor target game is proving to be enormously popular in its own right, and a great alternative to LaserTag. 

4 Tips Summary

Unprecedented demand has pushed out the event books for GameTruck from 1-2 weeks to nearly six weeks long. Here are four strategies to getting an alternative event.

  1. Don’t wait, lock in your date. 
  2. Remember you can reschedule
  3. Decouple your plans from their sports schedule
  4. Consider an alternate event activity

The bottom line is that sometimes, especially when we are feeling a lot of stress, we start to experience tunnel vision becoming fixated on the one solution we must have. However, if you take a step back, and look at what is causing the uncertainty, you can often find strategies to calm the situation down and move forward with a good plan.

The bottom line is that we would love to host your party, however as demand has increased, it is making it nearly impossible for us to honor last second bookings. Both you (and we!) will have a much better experience if you can find ways to book in advance, choose dates and times that have more availability, and find a way to decouple needing the sports schedule to plan your party. Finally, consider some of our alternative offerings. It is possible that any one of these strategies, or some combination of them can unlock the chances for you get the party you want.

The Power of In Person Play

A year ago, practically the entire world became “isolated gamers”. People who had never thought about gaming before started to look for ways to stay connected to their friends online, and play become one of the best ways to stay in touch. Gaming is powerful because it’s participatory. And yet, desipite everything online video games have to offer, I still believe that in-person gaming offers powerful connections for people for three reasons.

  1. The 7/38/55 rule
  2. Behaviorial Feedback
  3. Persistant Interactions
Gaming for Team Building

Each of these are tied to how Homo Sapiens evolved to work together in groups. These rules or effects govern how we socialize.

The 7/38/55 Rule

Humans so not weight all forms of communication equally. Sometimes call the lyrics, music, and dance of human communication, the words themselves constitute only 7% of the information we process with other people. Tone, how we speak, cadence, and rythm count for 38% of the information we process. I’m sure you’ve heard the expression that Text does not have a tone. Emails, text messages, written communication can struggle to convey the emotional content of a message. That is one reason we add emoji’s, to try and provide non-verbal cues as to meaning and intent. But if tone is powerful, body language and facial expressions make up more than half the information we communicate together. Human beings have been watching each other for a very long time. In one example, I can tell whether my wife likes a new food before she even has a chance to tell me about it. I can also tell when she doesn’t like it.

I once heard actors described as emotional athletes. They can convey to us more than content, they can transmit feelings that we can understand and relate to. I know when we worked on the Cars video game, the quality of the video games and the animatics jumped noticably when the professional actors started to deliver the voice lines.

Then, when the animators created the facial expressions and body language, that jumped the emotional content and appeal an order of magnitude. One really interesting – although not scientific result – that supported the 7/38/55 rule happened on the Cars video game.

Some very taltented coders (several with Phd’s) created code that would extremely accurately translate spoken language into the exact motions a mouth and tongue must make to produce those sounds. The idea was to feed the phonetic translation of the words to the machine to let it animate the characters saving time and money. It was really brilliant technology.

It was also beyond creepy. One of our lead animators, did a test. He put up the autogenerated phoneme software – which was extremely accurate, but none of us watching felt connected to the scene. Then he replaced the computer generated scene with a new one. Instantly we all loved the new scene better. He explained what he had done. He had turned off the hyper-accurate rendering of the mouth sounds, and he had instead put in the facial expressions that aligned with the emotions the actors were trying to convey. It turns out, we do not actually pay attention to how people make sounds with their mouths. We hear the sounds, but our eyes, our instincts are more attuned to the expressions on peoples faces. (And if you are curious, turning both on was also pretty horrible). In the end we stayed with hand animated scenes to match the expected expressions with the actors tone.

This is also one of the reasons Zoom & video calls can be so fatiguing, there is no alignment of visual cues. We don’t know where to look. In a real in person environment, the audience or people in attendence tend to focus on the same point – the speaker. These are subtle cues as to what is important. On a video call everyone is looking everywhere else and it’s distracting. We hear the words, and possibly the tone, but our brain is in overload trying to figure out what to pay attention to. One additional thing on that topic, we are so tuned to live human to human interaction that, research has shown an inperceptable delay of even a few milliseconds is enough to influence (generally to the negative) how we preceived the other person in a conversation.

Behavioral Feedback

The 7/38/55 rule gives us guidance how we communicate in non-verbal ways, but there is another dynamic that is enormously important. How our behaviour affects others. There was a joke about the “Murder Hornets” last year, that they read the room and then left. But the idea that we can understand that joke, that we can “read” the room speaks to how we read other people, and specifically how our actions affect others. As a professional speaker who has stood in front of a lot of audience, I can tell you that you become very attuned to how the audience is responding to everything you are doing. This same mechanism of feedback is crucial for all levels of interpersonal communication. Social Emotional Intelligence is built upon being able, or at least willing, to make the effort to understand how the other person feels, and specifically how our actions and attitudes affect other people.

birthday party

The law of reciprocity is how humans gauge our interactions. We can gather more information when we can hear and see people, but we also need to see their reactions to our communications. When people spend too much time staring at glass ( a phone screen, or device), it can interrupt that feedback loop. People lose touch with how their actions affect others. This may be one of the single largest contributors to the rise of “synthetic autism”, non-autistic children who seem to exhibit the behavior of treating people like things. When people come together, in person, those incredibly fast dynamic interactions happen in real time. The good news is that we are wired to be together, so repeated exposure to groups and interpersonal reactions coupled with intentional “social stories” can develop and improve emotional maturity and resiliency.

Persistant Interactions

One consequence of the rise of games online games with solo queue, or instant player matching is that you can lose the persistant interaction with other people. These features have good intentions, to get people playing together as fast as possible and to eliminate downtime, however they can create the “infinite friend” effect. This means that if anything, even the slightest annoyance pops up, players just move on. There is no need, no incentive, to work things out, to negotiate to share. Strangely, in an effort to make gaming more social in many ways it has become less social.

educational-video-games

In person events force a change. A player on the couch next to you just can’t vanish and be replaced by someone new every round. Players have to stay together and work out what they will play together. Some waiting, some negotiating will take place. This is a good thing. As people, we are shaped by both our nature and our culture. The more we press for inclusivity and diversity the better our skills need to be to interact with and understand people who have every different live experiences and backgrounds. When our default mode is interact people as if they are only there to entertain us, that can make other situations much more difficult than necessary.

Conclusion Take Away

Online gaming is clearly here to stay, and there are many positives that have come from more people being exposed to the power of connected play. One thing I do hope that comes from this is a greater respect and appreciation for in-person play. There are so many benefits from seeing each other, hearing each other, recognizing how our behavior affects others, and how their behavior affects us, then staying togehter and working it out. I believe gaming can be a powerful tool when used properly to help – not only young people – but people of all ages learn how to interact in healthier more supporting ways. So when you think of a video game party, don’t only think about the celebration and the fun. Also see if you can see the social dynamics as play, the way players interact and mingle, the way they engage each other and bond.

end of school year party ideas

Play is the mechanism that we discovery the boundaries of our social groups and our culture. It is how we explore not only the world, but the social fabric that ties us together. When we play together, in person, the digital shackles are removed so to speak and the entire bandwidth of human communication becomes available. This is one reason I beieve GameTruck parties are so memorable, they encompass a play, learn, grow embodiment of fun. We rarely forget those experiences, especially when they happen during a time of rapid development like childhood. GameTruck is most popular at the same time children are moving into those preteen years, and learning how to connect with their co-horts and build an identity outside the family. Giving kids the experiences and tools to develop better social bonds is a healthy byproduct of what we do.