Last time, we dwelled on the phenomenon that a game that was originally conceived as a cooperative (for example, D&D or a multiplayer sandbox like Space Station 13), for some reason, can be used by players for a completely different purpose, becoming a space of violence and bullying. Today, respectively, we will understand how children's (and not only children's) aggression is organized, how the sandbox format works, what aggression in the sandbox (and in the game in general) does, and how you can manage it.
Physics of emotions
In the following presentation, we will use the hydrodynamic model of emotion. Imagine, for example, that anger is a liquid. The more anger builds up, the stronger the pressure of the liquid in the pipe becomes - a single individual. There are two gates at the output. One corresponds to an internal brake - the idea, for example, that offending other people is bad, ugly, unworthy ... The second corresponds to an external brake - fear of punishment or some other negative consequences. What happens if the fluid pressure rises, and the valves (at least one of them) are tightly tightened? Either the liquid simply rips them off (and we see the individual in a berserker state), or the pipe itself collapses, and then we see either depression if self-destruction went on a psychological level, or a stomach ulcer - if on a physiological one.
Now for the children. If we look from the point of view of this model, then one aggressive child is by no means equivalent to another aggressive child. All of them will try to wreak havoc and destruction, but this will happen for various reasons.
- A child who has built an entire family around himself can often be very aggressive. He does not have an internal brake, because he does not have the need to slow down any of his own internal impulses. He wanted to watch TV - went to watch, wanted a doll - understood and got it, wanted to go to a shopping center - his parents put off their plans and went for a walk, wanted to hit his mother with his fist - of course, we will sympathize with mother. There is no external brake, because this child is practically not punished. Accordingly, as soon as he does not like something, he immediately expresses it in the most primitive way (with his fists), because he does not need to find more complex ways of expressing his feelings.
- A child whose aggression against peers is suppressed by corporal punishment, and not by the development of the ability to sympathize and negotiate, has a well-developed external brake and an almost absent internal one. Accordingly, while his behavior is controlled by a dad with a belt, he behaves like a bunny, and as soon as he gets into a situation where he is not controlled, he automatically becomes very aggressive and conflicting. And we will see a classic situation when a child walks along the line at home, and in the kindergarten he plays out on other children, distributing cuffs to the right and left. And to build his behavior without physical punishment will be very difficult, because an adult who cannot hit is not perceived by such a child as authority. Such a plot can often be observed in boys.
- An option that is more characteristic of girls is when a well-bred child from a soft, intelligent family is afraid to show aggression, because when he is aggressive, it scares his mother very much. She does not have the skill of interacting with foreign aggression, she does not know how to deal with it. And she conveys to the child the idea that this simply cannot be, because it is terrible. Here we will see a very strong internal brake - the child does not show aggression, because in his environment it is absolutely unacceptable. This is an important point that it is not punishable, namely, unacceptable. Accordingly, the child will try to restrain himself not only at home, but generally in general. However, the fluid pressure, as we understand it, does not disappear, and when it reaches a certain threshold value, we will see tantrums. And the stronger the childâs self-control, the more internal tension he has time to accumulate before he blows up, and the more violent emotional candles, respectively, he will give out. Such children are very grateful clients for game therapy, because when they start a socially acceptable way to let off steam (beat the clay with fists, for example, or growl like a tiger), it immediately becomes much easier for them to live.
- Among other things, the child may become aggressive amid overwork. Here it is necessary to make a reservation that the head is nevertheless slightly more complicated than the pipeline, and the braking systems are not metal structures, but the functional of the frontal cortex, which is generally responsible for the arbitrary regulation of behavior. The frontal cortex is a very energy-intensive thing. Accordingly, if a person is tired and exhausted, then the most costly functions (in particular, arbitrary regulation of behavior) begin to fall off. The most common situation in this series is when the child suddenly becomes rude, aggressive and tearful, and the next day falls off with temperature. If the child was demolished because he was tired, then educating and punishing him at this moment is completely pointless. He behaves disgustingly not because he does not know how to, or does not want to control himself, but because he can not - the battery is dead. The child at this moment needs to be explained that he was tired (so that he would not be scared of himself and understand what was happening to him), and give him a good rest - give him something warm to drink, put him to bed, read a book aloud.
Children who have some kind of disturbance in the functioning of the nervous system ("minimal brain dysfunction" is also considered!) Are often extremely sensitive to magnetic storms and outbreaks in the sun - like cores, they feel worse at that time and itâs more difficult for them to rule. If a child is often demolished without any obvious reason, it makes sense to track the weather in the sun - it may well turn out that most of its inexplicable tantrums clearly fall on the schedule of solar activity . On adults, this effect also works. It is useful for an adult who is sensitive to the sun to understand this to himself, because then he may wonder: âNow I want to kill everyone, because they deserve it or because the weather is bad in the sun?â
There are such reasons for anger ...
And here we actually come to the question of why there is a feeling of anger at all. The first moment is a reaction to frustration when we wanted something (we really need something), and we didnât get it, or they took it from us. This, for example, is the situation of a child in a store when he really wants a toy, and his parents do not want to buy it. When a child wants to examine the cupboard, and he is not tall enough to open the door, or when he wants to continue playing, but needs to go to class, he also experiences a sense of frustration. Frustration resistance in children is different, and this parameter can be developed by exercise. If a child periodically encounters situations when he wants something, but he doesnât get it, then he gradually gets used to the idea that this happens, and the next situation of this type annoys him, of course, but it is not a disaster for him. Another thing is if during the first few years of life a child received everything he wanted. For him, the situation of frustration is unusual and causes very strong feelings. The longer the period during which the child does not receive frustration experience, the harder it is for him to feel restrained when he still has to deal with him, and the more intense his feeling of anger will be.
The lack of freedom of action is associated with a constant experience of anger and irritation due to regularly occurring situations when you cannot do what you want, but you must do what you do not want. The child is in a situation of unfreedom almost until the very end of school, this is a characteristic condition for him. When he is very small, his freedom is physically limited. Although we teach the child that it is impossible to offend the weak, beat them and use force against them, we ourselves often do just that: if we are not comfortable with the childâs behavior, we can fix him physically, force him away, etc. The child is always in a weak position, where it is very difficult for him to defend his borders. In educational institutions, starting from kindergarten, violence becomes more subtle, but this is still a situation where there is little freedom of action and little space for choice. An adult can choose what he will eat for lunch, when and how much he will sleep, where, by whom and on what schedule he will work, what and from whom he will learn. The child does not have all these degrees of freedom. He eats what is cooked in the dining room, sleeps when he is told, studies according to a program that he cannot choose, mastering, among other things, completely uninteresting and unnecessary disciplines, and a significant part of his life is in the company of peers, which can be rude , and destructive, and manipulative, and you canât get away from them anywhere.
Even a very good kindergarten and a very good school with democratic relations between teachers and children have this general situation of unfreedom, laid down in the very foundation of the educational process. Therefore, children with such pleasure fantasize about how great it would be to blow up a kindergarten or school. Not because they seriously hate their teachers (although this happens), but because there is no way out in the educational situation. An adult can leave the institute, go to another institute, go to work, escape to India, in the end. The child cannot. The only way he sees (and even imagined) is to simply destroy the place that constrains his freedom. It is possible that this just determines the popularity of games with the plot âjailbreakâ.
The situation of weakness and lack of freedom is the root of children's love for the Hulk. The hulk cannot be stopped by force, the hulk cannot be imprisoned. If the Hulk gets in the way, he will simply break it into small pieces. At that moment when the child presents himself as the Hulk, he is internally freed from the situation from which he has no real way out.
A sub-option of frustration anger is anger amid experiencing failure. Any child (and an adult, too) wants to feel cool in something. It may be some small piece of life, but the main thing is that you can feel successful, skillful, experienced, effective there. A child can be proud of how many times he is pushing up from the floor, or how much he knows English words, or how cool he draws. Even if some things he does not work out very well, in any case, he has some space where he is well done. And what should a child do if he does not succeed? For example, he has a developmental delay or a slight degree of mental retardation, and it is objectively more difficult for him than his peers, because he has not yet reached their level of capabilities. And we, letâs say, are launching it in an inclusive group of kindergarten or in a mass school and demanding from it, like from everyone else. First of all, the child is constantly offended, because he sees how everyone can do something, but he does not. Then the learned helplessness begins to take shape - the child ceases to make efforts in the classroom, because these efforts, it seems to him, are futile: one way or another, he is still unsuccessful. The gap widens, the child becomes even more offended. And then he begins to fight, to disorderly and engage in vandalism - on the one hand, because he needs to put his inner strain somewhere, and on the other hand, because at that moment he feels strong, and this is the only situation in his life where he can feel strong.
This, in particular, implies the need for adapted educational programs that meet the capabilities of the child. If we set the child with feasible tasks for him, then he may feel successful. And if, in addition, he is surrounded by those who are not too different from him in terms of opportunities, then his self-esteem does not suffer, and he does not need to compensate for the feeling of inferiority with the help of antisocial behavior.
I, mine, will not give anyone
The second important reason for anger is the need to protect their borders: their physical borders, their space, their property. Here, the child also has many reasons for stress. To begin with, the primary symbiosis with mom, which normally ends about a year, in fact, can end much later, and sometimes it lasts longer for a mother than for a child. That is, the child already felt like a separate person, and the mother continues to perceive the child as an extension of herself and speaks of him exclusively with the word âweâ: âWe go to kindergarten, we are sick, we want this doll.â Accordingly, the mother does not hesitate to violate the personal boundaries of the child - blow her nose, pull his clothes on him, put him down, as she thinks is right. Indeed, up to a certain point, a child simply cannot do some things himself. And then itâs already quite possible to ask him to put himself in order on his own: âHereâs your napkin, straighten your skirt, move closer to the table.â Sometimes mom misses this moment and by inertia continues to do everything herself (this, in addition to everything else, is much faster). As a rule, it is very unpleasant for a child to be manipulated like a doll. He, quite likely, really wants to break out at this moment, but he has to endure, and he suffers. He stands quietly with an expression of disgust on his face, and tension builds up inside him at that moment.
The child has almost no personal property as such, despite all the many toys that the child buys. The fact is that the child does not have the freedom to dispose of his things. If mom tore her jeans, then itâs a shame, of course, but itâs her personal business what happens to her jeans. If a child has torn jeans, he is scolded, and he has to listen to a lecture on how to handle things. That is, in fact, this is not his jeans, but mother's, given to him for temporary use, and she reacts to their damage as to the damage of her own thing. On the one hand, she is right, because she bought these jeans, and she will have to buy the following. On the other hand, what is it like for a child when almost all of his things are actually strangers, and they should be treated like other people's things? Now a child has a friend, and he wants to give him some cool toy. But immediately she pulls herself: "I canât give you this typewriter because my mother scolds me." What is happening at this moment? A child learns to be greedy. This is not that greed when the child just realized that there is such a thing as property right, but greed at the level of his life position. First, the childâs mother teaches: âLet their mothers buy toys for other children, there is nothing to give them their own,â and then he himself believes that giving his things to others is a stupid and harmful exercise. Cheap Chinese plastic in this sense is good because mom will not be upset and sorry for the money if the child gives his Chinese nonsense to a friend, and the child at this moment may experience the pure joy of giving, not overshadowed by the anticipation of how they will scold him. In this context, the love of children for all, as it seems to us, rubbish is very clear: pebbles, candy wrappers, glass. These things are the true property of the child, because they will not interest a single adult, and no one will tell him how to dispose of them. He can give them, exchange them for other nonsense, lose, break, modify, use them for creativity, and no one will say a word to him (because, most likely, he wonât even notice).
With personal space, the story is similar. Even if a child has his own room, only maybe by adolescence he will be able to decide for himself whether it will be in order or not. In kindergarten, the child has almost no personal space. If he chose a piece of carpet for himself to play on, he is not immune to the possibility that the company playing catch-up will scamper over this piece of carpet - right over his toys. He has his own bed in the bedroom, but again, someone can jump on this bed, crushing the bedspread. It seems like nonsense: the veil has moved out, it can be corrected. And for a child, this means that his personal space is not protected from outside intrusion. And this will also be a source of stress.
And now about how a child is different from a raccoon
Man, as we know, is a biosocial creature. In this case, this means that the childâs aggressive behavior is not instinctive, but culturally mediated - that is, it can be formed. The child learns from us how anger can be shown, which types of aggression are acceptable and which are unacceptable. In this case, of course, he takes something out of verbal explanations, but the main educational factor is how the people around him behave when they are angry. If a child is physically punished, he brings out the idea that if you are dissatisfied with something, you can hit the one who made you angry, and this personal parental example of violence works stronger than the parental words that you canât fight. That is, while the threat of punishment hangs over him, he will probably try not to give up, but at the level of beliefs he does not have the belief that to beat another person is certainly bad.
The same story with educational rudeness. All these expressions beloved by adults, such as âwell, quickly sat downâ, âquite stupid or something?â, Etc. The child, listening to these words, learns how to talk when you are annoyed or in a hurry. Then they bring these phrases to kindergarten and talk between them. Almost all the most disgusting and rude things that a child can hear from peers in kindergarten were gathered by these peers from their adults. Parents often cannot reflect this moment, because with them the child does not risk reproducing these expressions. Unconsciously, an adult believes that there is a special communicative position of an adult where he has the right to be rude to the child because he is raising him, and it seems to him that the child shares this belief, that is, that he will not use adult words, but will speak his own, childish ( corresponding in status). And the child throughout the preschool childhood does not know how to take into account the social hierarchy in communication. By the age of six, only he can have this ability (or maybe not). He memorizes phrases situationally, but without a social context. The educational rudeness of an adult is remembered by him not as a phrase with which the elder should swear at the younger, but as a phrase that anyone can use if he is angry.
But what is important here? The important thing is that if the child has access to speech, then he is able to mediate his aggression with speech. That is, do not immediately push a comrade with all his might, but first say: "Fuck off, you fool." From the level of physical aggression, the child rises to the level of verbal aggression. This is an important achievement - primarily in terms of security. In a word, of course, one can offend very much, but in any case, not kill or cripple. It seems whom a child of five years of age can cripple? And if this child, five years old, rises with the group from the first floor to the second, and it occurred to him in the area of ââthe upper steps to push a friend, while we understand that there are twenty children, but the teacher has only two hands?
Ability to curse at first has no direct connection with intellectual development. It is primarily tied to the communicative experience and the childâs presence of the necessary communicative patterns (even if itâs completely unprintable). Therefore, we can observe increased physical aggression in very smart children, which occurs against the background of a lack of communication skills. Often this is not due at all to the fact that an intelligent child is structurally unable to learn how to communicate. This is due to the overvaluation of intellectual development, when it seems to us that if a child does not learn to read and solve problems, then at that moment he does not do anything useful for his development, and he must immediately sit down to read and solve problems. As a result, a child can spend the first six years of his life in a society of adults only, and when he eventually finds himself in a society of peers, he does not understand how to behave with them. Communication with adults cannot fully prepare for this experience, because children behave differently.
Here we see, for example, how a boy who perfectly solves problems, approaches the table, discovers that his place is taken, and begins silently pushing another child from his chair. It is possible that in this situation the phrase would suffice: "This is my place, move in, please." But the problem solver does not have this phrase! At home, he has his own place at the table, which no one claims to, and he simply does not know how to behave when the place is taken. And there are many such situations.
We could say that this child does not need communication with peers, that he and one are good with his numbers, but this will not be true. At the moment when he first enters the peer team, he wants to communicate, he is ready to do it. His problem is that he does not have a technique. He tries to communicate with other children with the words that his own parents use when they want to communicate with him, because he has no other words. He comes up to someone and says: âLet me ask you an interesting task!â - or: âDo you want me to read you an encyclopedia?â And he sincerely does not understand why this does not work.
It seems that the solution is very simple: you need to teach the child those communicative patterns that he lacks. But in fact, catching up in one year with what all the others practiced the previous three years is not at all easy. As a rule, the child fails to do this, and then he goes to school with this deficiency of communicative skills. There the gap often widens. Those who at the previous age stage have learned to communicate and make friends, continue to communicate with existing friends and make new ones. A problem solver whom the social situation no longer encourages communication
(Yes, he already doesnât want to do something that still doesnât work out), continues to solve problems. At the same time, he develops academic skills, while communicative skills do not. And then we, of course, can explain his terrifying social awkwardness by the fact that in his mindset it is easier to deal with numbers than with people. But why didnât we support him in that it was more difficult for him? Why did we deal with him only in what was easy for him?
The cabinet, of course, is not to blame ...
The second ability of a child to control his aggression is the ability to redirect it from that object that directly causes anger to some other. If we return to the metaphor with the pipe, it is obvious that if we unscrew the valve, the water will flow and the pressure will drop no matter which way the pipe is turned. If the child expresses his anger, then he will feel better regardless of whom he expresses it to. A more favorable option is when the child chooses a piece of furniture or a toy as an object of attack.Of course, the closet is not to blame, but if the child does not have the resources to intelligently say: âIâm very upset that you donât allow me to leave right now, and Iâm terribly angry with you,â then definitely kick my foot on the closet better than kicking your adult. The adultâs task at this moment is to support the childâs self-regulation and respond to his feelings: âI understand that you are very angry with me, I am very sorry, but I canât let you go. Letâs beat the sofa, otherwise you can hurt yourself about the closet. â What is happening at this moment? The child learns what to say when you are very angry ("I am very angry!"). He also learns that he is understood and accepted along with his anger (that is, he did not become a bad person from being angry). At the same time, he will find out an acceptable way of expressing anger: an adult cannot be beaten, a closet is undesirable,and a sofa, for example, is possible.
This will not work in a situation where the child is so tired and exhausted that he is no longer able to control his behavior. You just need to try not to bring the child to such a state, because there he will be inaccessible to the dialogue and calm down only when he runs out of energy (the pressure in the metaphorical pipe will drop to zero). And it will not be his cant, it will be our cant that we did not understand when it was time for the child to rest. In relation to kindergarten, this is the situation of a child who is constitutionally weak, exhaustible, weather-sensitive, and even an introvert, and we sent him for a full day to a group of thirty people. For the first two, three, four hours, he is still adequate, and then he takes over from the noise, the abundance of restrictions and complex communication and falls into a berserker state. What does it mean?This means that this particular child does not need to go to kindergarten for a full day. Or in any case, that the group for him should be much smaller. Because this particular social situation is extremely difficult for him, and she will only teach him that the team is very, very bad.
As we understand it, the object on which the child will transfer his anger may not be a closet. It could be another child or a domestic cat. This option is much less favorable, because it is not insensitive furniture that suffers here, but other living things. Such a strategy of behavior is chosen by children who have an external brake, but no internal one. Such a child does not hit his dad, because he is afraid of dad, and nothing prevents him from hitting an unrequited cat. Why doesnât it interfere? Because the feelings of others are not a value for this child. He does not care about them.
Let me pity you
Against widespread beliefs, love and care cannot be taught through prohibitions and repression. These are active installations that can be conveyed only by a positive example. Yes, we can regularly pull the child, reminding him that you can not tear grass, break branches, crush ants. But psychologically, these prohibitions are not supported for the child by anything other than the fear that he will be scolded. A completely different situation is when parents, together with the child, water the trees, grow flowers, and make feeders. When a child has a positive experience in caring for nature, then he simply does not have a desire to act destructively, because this does not fit into his picture of the world and a positive image of himself.
A similar situation with a feeling of compassion. Yes, we can regularly remind the child not to offend others. We can ensure that he abides by this ban (as long as we control it). But the child will observe it out of fear, and not out of real concern for the experiences of another. First he must see how an adult takes care of his feelings; he must see how an adult cares about the feelings of someone else; he must take part in this care, he must learn the specific manifestations of care, literally at the household level. Only then does the child really form the attitude of a caring person.
It all starts with a simple. Here the girl runs to the street with a porcelain doll - she could not part with her, could not help but share her joy and show everyone. The girl stumbles, drops the doll, the doll falls on the asphalt and shatters. What is the first phrase she will hear from adults? âItâs my fault, there was nothing to take her outside!â How many situations are there when a child has a tragedy, and we tell him instructively that he is to blame? Put, and to blame. Suppose, I didnât think, I didnât follow it (itâs not easy to keep track of everything when you have so little life experience). But he comes to us at this moment not for moralizing, but for sympathy. And at this moment we show him how to behave when another person has a misfortune. Our cold phrase âitâs his own faultâ teaches the child that the feelings of another person do not matter;you should not even pay attention to them. And the children then address the same phrase to each other. And then they grow up and become the very trolls on the forums that come to topics where people complain about their troubles and failures, and say: âWhat are you complaining about? Itâs your own fault. â
The explanation will wait. You can then talk about fragile objects and what happens to them when they fall. First hug, first regret, first think about whether it is possible to glue the doll. If you canât stick together, maybe you can make a new doll with a dress from the old one? Maybe the doll needs to be buried? Do not throw in a garbage can with potato peelings, but bury, for example, under a tree in a beautiful box.
If we teach a child the technique of first aid - the simplest, at least how to crush the âchillâ and apply it to a bump, how to glue scratches with a band-aid, how to wrap a bandage, the child will not need to fight to feel strong. He will feel strong at the moment when he helps someone who is hurt. And he will be more pleasant in the role of the one who saves than in the role of the aggressor. Lifeguard is a positive, socially approved role. You can tell everyone how you glued a person with a band-aid and you will be praised. You canât boast of a cone instructed by a friend!
An important point here is that the child gains something valuable for himself (experiencing himself as a savior, a sense of his own competence, the admiration of others). The ban gives the child nothing but a feeling of restriction of freedom, which is why the child seeks to throw him off as soon as possible. For care to become a childâs attitude, it should be a positive experience for him, and not some regular rule that annoyingly limits freedom of action.
When rage becomes a game
The third important ability that a child has is symbolization. In particular, most of his preschool childhood is spent in activities that only portray something real. He pretends to cook food, pretends to sell cars, pretend launches a spaceship. Similarly, he can pretend to be aggressive. At the same time, he uses his ability to transfer anger to another object, addressing it to a toy or character. At the same time, he can use the ability to verbalize aggression - not physically attacking a toy or a playmate, but simply describing what exactly the terrible he does with them on the plane of imagination. As a result, anger turns into a game, and the child, having not accomplished anything objectively destructive, experiences quite real relief. Therefore, children love games with aggressive stories:first war, then shooting.
What are the pitfalls here? Firstly, games with aggressive plots can scare adults. A five-year-old child, when he pretends to shoot from a toy pistol, already clearly understands that this does no real harm to anyone. That's why he shoots pretense. If he had seriously planned to attack someone, he would have rushed with his fists. And at this moment he does not want to really hurt anyone, but just wants to feel strong and invincible. Adults (especially women) look at this same situation with different eyes. They immediately begin to care about the pedagogical aspect of the game. What if the child at this moment is fixed arrow behavior? What if he decides that shooting is generally fun and good, and wants to shoot real people with a real gun? Among other thingsan adult in the news saw enough bloody photographs during his life to imagine what would happen to a real person if he wanted to, if you shoot him like that from a real gun. For a child, all this is deeply arbitrary, but for an adult, itâs a reality that you can potentially face, and he knows for sure that there is nothing good about it.
Immediately make a reservation that there is a reasonable grain here. In the fifties, when the comics contained realistic descriptions of the design of the crime, some children, having lost the story in their imagination several times, sometimes these designs reproduced in real life (and quite successfully). That is, technically a child can learn quite real violence from something for the worse. But which child? Comics in that period came out in print runs up to millions, and readers of a single issue could be several times more, because magazines changed and they changed hands. However, crimes committed by children were still isolated cases (albeit very frightening). That is, such a learning, while generally possible, occurred only occasionally, under certain specific additional conditions. Dr. Werthamwhich went down in the history of comics as a person who almost closed the industry, talked with these juvenile delinquents on duty as a child psychiatrist. Who did he see in his groups? He saw children from low-income families, neglected and abandoned, who were brought up not so much by their parents as street and comics. But were the comics to blame for the fact that these children did not find a better way to feel cool than to rob a store? The same goes for games. Millions of children play shooting games, but only individual children bring firearms to the school and open fire. These are not the children who play shooting games more than others. These are those children who have tremendous internal stress and no vents. These are children who have estranged relations with their parents, they have practically no friends, and when something scares or angers them,they donât have anyone to talk about their feelings - if they even know how to do it.
That is, in fact, the childâs emotional and communicative development plays a much larger role: how much the child knows how to understand his feelings and how to cope with them, whether he is able to talk about his feelings (whether he was taught to talk about them). It is important what kind of microclimate is in his family, how much he has warm and trusting relations with his parents. The game can show a violent model of behavior, but it is not the game, but the absence of other, more constructive options that drives the choice of this particular behavior model in real life. However, since the technical possibility of learning remains in games, cartoons and films intended for children, violence is shown in the most conditional and minimally reproducible form. And at the same time so that blood and naturalistic physical injuries are not visible,so that they do not accidentally associate with any positive emotions.
If a pretense child shoots a playmate and a pretense hits, then this hit for him is almost the same mathematical abstraction as glasses in a board game. He does not have the goal of harming him, he does not imagine the physical damage inflicted on his comrade in paints (if only because he does not know how it looks), and he understands that everything that happens is conditional. But what happens if at that moment a frightened adult gets into the game with eyes on the bowl and says: âYou canât point the gun at a personâ? An incredulous child at this moment understands that an adult fool cannot distinguish a game from reality. Adult authority falls sharply. A gullible child suddenly thinks that what is happening in his imagination in some magical way can cause real harm. How many children do their adults say:"You canât talk about this, otherwise it will come true"? A huge number of children believe in this - simply by inertia, because adults generally say a lot of this that they canât be tested in practice, and the childâs own experience is still too little to understand where he was deceived. If an adult is seriously frightened of anticipatory aggression, the child begins to be afraid of acting out the aggression and feels guilty when he has angry thoughts (what if mom gets sick and dies if I think badly about her?). What should he do with his anger, if it cannot be expressed, cannot be won back and even be undesirable to realize? We recall the pipe, where both valves are closed. Either the child will have tantrums and he will splash out his internal tension uncontrollably, or a neurotic disorder will form and he will torment himself - with fears,obsessive rituals or a sense of one's own sinfulness.
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How to relax and love the atomic bomb
The most important thing you need to understand about the situation when the child has pointed a toy gun at you is that there is no hate or desire to kill it. There may be anger behind it, but the child expresses it in a very neat and safe way. He could kick an adult with his foot, he could throw an object at him, but he just stands with a predatory expression on his face and points a toy at the adult, which, most likely, will not work out. Is that water.
The child will be pleased if the adult is scared of the picture, but he does not need the adult to be truly scared. He will get even more pleasure if an adult puts his fingers in a gun and "shoots" himself in a child. If you play with me, then you accept my game, and if you accept my game, you accept my feelings that are behind it, and accept me with my feelings. At that moment, when the child is standing with a gun in his hand, he continues to want to be understood, accepted and loved.
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And now the question is: what is the difference between an atomic bomb and a nuclear power plant? As we know from the school physics course, the speed and controllability of the reaction. Aggression is a very powerful force, and sometimes we can observe how children, who at first seemed to fight for fun, playing out, at some point begin to peel each other seriously and for real, and on their faces at that moment it is written real rage. More often this can be observed in those children who generally have difficulties with self-regulation. They, for example, get to bed very hard, because they can not calm down. What happens during the game? They have fun, they get excited. Then they become more and more excited, at some point they can no longer control their excitement, and the aggression, which they gradually blew out through a half-open valve, breaks out completely uncontrollably. A minute ago, the child was playing, and now he attacks the defeat.
What do we do to prevent this from happening? The same thing that highly organized animals do: ritualize battles by introducing rules into them. The more rules, the more structured the process becomes, and the less likely it will become chaotic and uncontrollable.
How, for example, can you structure pillow fight? Firstly, only one pillow in one hand (if there are a lot of pillows, then two). Thus, we exclude the situation when one child has seized many pillows and attacks another clearly with superior forces. Secondly, do not beat unarmed. Here we immediately exclude the attack on "peaceful passers-by" who were not at all going to play it, but simply stood nearby. And also for those who dropped their pillow, so at the moment they canât defend themselves. Thirdly, do not beat the recumbent. Here we exclude situations when one player stumbled and fell, and the other begins to âfinish it offâ and can, in the wake of emotions, go over to defeat attacks. Fourth, do not attack in a heap on one. This is also about equal opportunities for the participants and to exclude situations when the group selects the weakest player as a whipping boy and begins to recoup on it. This is a very bad group dynamics, and it is better to exclude it from the very beginning. The fifth rule is not to hit on the head. Sometimes it happens that the hand slipped, the blow didnât go as planned, and the child accidentally hits not with a pillow, but with his fist, in which his pillow is held. Accordingly, we exclude punches on the head and on the face, there are mainly punches on the back and shoulders, where even a fist will not be very painful, if that. For some time, an adult resembles the rules, then the children learn them and play in accordance with the ritual.
We continue the analogy with uranium. The energy of anger is a gift of energy. It does not need to be specially produced in the child, it is already so - simply because of the social situation. We can just release this energy gently, avoiding an explosion. This happens, say, during a pillow fight. Half an hour later the children jump around the room with pillows, after half an hour they are sweaty, out of breath, dying of thirst and very relaxed. And this is actually a very good way to reduce the level of aggression. But here we may have a logical question: is it possible to make the work of energy that now just flies into the pipe?
Answer: it is possible. This is how board games like âbattleâ work. One of the easiest ways to play with your child like this is to hang on the game his favorite soldiers (superheroes, monsters, dinosaurs ...) chess mechanics with a cube. If you simply give the five-year-old boys figures of soldiers (superheroes ... etc.), then it is most likely that they will simply hit their figures one against the other, occasionally missing and hitting a friend. However, this does not mean that they cannot (or do not want) to play more difficult. First of all, we set the playing field into the cage. A chessboard will also work if there are figures of a suitable size. Next we need random number generators - one for moving, the other for a duel. A hexagon will come down for movement, but for a duel we need a bone with so many faces that we can exercise the child in simple mathematical operations at an accessible level. If the child is still guided only within a dozen, take the decahedron. With six years, for example, you can already safely use d20. With movement, everything is trivial - it happens just like in any walker . If two figures are on adjacent cells, they can fight. And here we immediately sweep away all knocking plastic on plastic. Want to go on the attack - throw an attack roll. The opponent throws a counterattack roll on his bone, and the winner is the one with the most. What's happening? The child voluntarily (and with great enthusiasm) practices the mathematical operation of comparison. Is it too easy to play? Add modifiers. If the Hulk fights (and we know that he is very strong), then his attack is not d10, but d10 + 3. And if Spider-Man walks (we know that he moves very quickly on his web), then his move is not d6, but d6 + 2. And so on. Here we already have operations of addition and subtraction. If the child really wants to attack, then the mathematics standing between him and the victory in the duel does not bother him, even if he is not a fan of mathematics. Accordingly, since the victory here is entirely determined by the randomness factor, and there are many individual fights in the game, each child manages to feel like a winner several times, and if his last fighter is defeated, this is not a catastrophic situation: in the end, we can always call for reinforcements !
Thus, using one board and several bones, you can transform the destructive energy of anger into computing power (and yes, it works great with excitable and hyperactive children). If we develop this topic, we will come to role-playing systems like Dungeons & Dragons. Yes, you can kill this monster. Only at first you need to roll the bone, add your strength bonus to it, compare the result with the creature's armor class, then roll another bone, add a couple of bonuses from additional abilities and weapon spells to it, and then, perhaps, divide the result in half, if the monster has resistance to this kind of damage. And so for an entire hour. As a result, after some time, the player learns to cheerfully juggle in the mind several different parameters, easily adding up to five different bonuses from various effects in order to kill one crocodile.
However, there are pitfalls. If we use a role-based system, then it is very likely that sandbox mechanics will be embedded in it, which implies freedom of action for the player. And here quite complex processes begin, but before we get into their consideration, we need to understand how sandboxes work in general.
Don't get in my sandbox
The sandbox in the general case is the format of the game, when all the elements are accessible from the very beginning, there is no special task for the player, and there is no external reinforcement either. There you have it, and do what you want with it.
Accordingly, the person playing the game can handle the sandbox in several different ways.
1. In the sandbox, you can do free manipulation. Especially this has, for example, a sandbox in the most literal sense of the word - like a box with sand. If there is kinetic sand in the box, then you can endlessly watch how it flows and crumbles into lace. This is the format of the game that can often be observed in very tired, emaciated children (or the same adults). Hands are busy here, and the head is resting, and you can be saturated with pleasant sensory experiences: a feeling of soft sand, juicy colors of the details of the designer, etc. A lot of board games can be used in this capacity with a tired child: take, for example, tiles from Listopad and put down an endless rug from them - the ground, strewn with bright autumn leaves.
2. When the sandbox is already familiar, and the person, in principle, already knows what can be done in it, a more complex format of the game appears - this is when the player sets the task for himself and tries to solve it. Remember the classic The Incredible Machine? In addition to the numerous engineering tasks laid down in the game by the creators, there was a sandbox mode where all the parts were available, and it was possible to assemble arbitrary mechanisms from them.
Naturally, the task set by the player himself can change during the game. He began, for example, to build an excavator from the designer, and then he realized that he made an excellent robot from him - and began to make a robot. Such a game can be as complex and highly organized as there is enough design experience and the ability to think (including spatial). In sandbox mode, a child can use, for example, such methods of connecting parts that were not originally provided for at all. This is a very developing format for an inquisitive child, because he wants and can set himself complex tasks and look for new ways to use components. But for a child with a mental retardation, say, this developmental effect will not work, because he just doesnât want to think just like that for fun, and he will do something as simple and monotonous as possible in the sandbox. For him, the format will be more developing when there are cards with tasks sorted by level of difficulty.
3. Another option for interacting with the sandbox is when a symbolic image of inner harmony is created in it. This is a very meditative, soothing format. For girls it is more interesting than for boys, and for adults more than for children. For example, it is for this format of the game that the Inner Garden sandbox is intended. There, the whole gameplay comes down to placing flowers, trees, houses, gazebos and the like on the playing field. In the same series - laying out mandalas and patterned "rugs" from mosaic details. Here we already see the use of the game as an interface for controlling consciousness - as long as the playing person creates order out of chaos within the game, a similar process takes place on his internal plane.
4. The last option, the most interesting from the point of view of the therapeutic use of the game, is when the playing person - most often unconsciously - begins to visualize his feelings, attitudes, desires, anxieties in the sandbox ... in general, the inner world. Hence the sandplay - a game with a sandbox - as a genre of analytical therapy. This is a characteristic children's genre, although it can also be used with adults, because for a child the natural language of expression of feelings is a game. He experiences not through reflection, but through acting out. Therefore, many things in the childâs game plots need to be understood not literally, but as a metaphor for his experiences.
Sketch from practice:
Boy, five years old, diagnosed with early childhood autism. Every week he comes to the game session, takes out a railway, puts two or three fragments of the rail on the carpet, places a steam locomotive on them, and then says: âThe train will not go anywhere.â
It was impossible to get into this plot in any way, it was impossible to develop, the author of the plot held on to him with a death grip. Something very important expressed for him this plot.
A few months later, when I had already abandoned the hope of drawing something out of this story, the boy put a man in a steam locomotive and said: âThis is dad. Dad won't go anywhere. â
All this time he was going through a divorce of his parents.
Dialogue
As you know, a person can play alone, having a sandbox at his disposal, or he can play with someone. This, for example, is the situation of a large physical sandbox in the yard, or a designerâs box in a kindergarten group, or a space station in Space Station 13. And here all sorts of interesting processes related to the mismatch of game tasks begin.
For example, in one corner of the sandbox, a girl makes a beautiful kindergarten by sticking grass and flowers in a certain way. She has some idea of ââhow all this should look as a result, and she is trying to implement it. What will happen if another girl approaches her and tries to poke flowers too? Predictably, the first one will be unhappy and either say: âNo, donât touch it, this is my kindergartenâ, or it will start to command: âNo, itâs not here, itâs over there.â Even if both girls came to this sandbox with the goal of doing something beautiful, it will be very difficult for them to achieve true cooperation, because each in his head will have his own harmonious image, deviation from which can be very annoying. The same effect then greatly complicates the work of the team to representatives of creative professions: if they make one common product, and everyone has their own idea of ââbeauty, then any forced compromise can be experienced as a destruction of harmony and cause resentment.
A more complicated situation is if one child builds a sand castle in the sandbox, solving the engineering problem of erecting high towers from crumbling substance, and the other comes into the same sandbox to win back the feeling of anger. For the first, the castle is his brainchild, he makes it with great care, very carefully, he already managed to get attached to it. For the second, this castle is a great thing that can be epically destroyed. Further it is clear: the castle is trampled, the author of the castle is sobbing. Sometimes adults try to comfort the victim, telling him: "Well, he just played, well, think of a castle, nothing bad happened." In fact, it happened: when you put so much soul into something, yes, it is insanely insulting when someone came in and in one second broke everything that you had so hard half an hour to build. The castle is, letâs say, a toy castle, but the feeling of grief at this moment is real. It is possible to comfort the author, not depreciating his work and his experiences, with the words: âAnd let's make another castle, only cooler than it was?â At the same moment, the second child needs to feel (at least stop and notice) that his actions can offend and upset another person very much; and it would be good if he also participated in the repair of the castle. At this point, we talk about boundaries and emphasize simple rules, such as the fact that someone elseâs building cannot be destroyed. If these boundaries are not set on time, then those children who have a very constructive, rich, highly organized game begin to quietly hate the team in general and the kindergarten or playground in particular, because when they create something cool, it definitely comes someone else destroys everything. The result is a paradoxical result: it seems that we are launching the children into one space so that they socialize there, but it turns out that some of the children after that want to play exclusively at home. And here it becomes clear the need for a moderator - that person who will protect the boundaries of the players and ensure their emotional safety.
Raising a child like a sandbox
A lot of parents perceive their child (especially the first one, especially when they are young) as an option to play in the sandbox. It seems that a child is such a person that you can form to your liking, developing all the skills you want, putting all the ideas that you think is right in him, conveying to him all your values ââand ideals. That is, such a process of character development, only in real life. And no one will tell you no if you want to do something completely unusual with your child - after all, this is your child, you have the right.
In fact, the child at this moment is an object for his parents. They have a feeling that it is they who develop the child, they create a personality out of him. Manifestations of children's subjectivity (when a child, for example, begins to resist development in one direction or another) can be perceived by them as something negative, because at this moment the child interferes with the creative process of parents, does not allow them to make of themselves what they conceived. This fight of wills - between parents with their educational idea and a child with his own abilities, desires and interests - can go on until admission to college. It often happens that a person receives not the profession that suits him and which he himself would like to receive, but the one that the family insisted on. Children with weak temperament break down and lose themselves, trying to fulfill all the requirements of their loved ones. Then it is very difficult for them to feel what they want, because they are not used to being aware of their desires. For such children, the free-play format is sometimes simply unavailable because they donât know how it is to âdo what you wantâ? And children with a strong temperament rebel against pedagogical violence, and then it can be very difficult for them to learn anything, because they get used to resist and defend their subjectivity at every step.
It is often difficult for parents to realize that a child is not a blank sheet, but from birth, a unique subject with his own temperament, constitution, talents and limitations. If this is the first child, then there is no one to compare him with.Parents usually do not remember themselves at the same age, and they observe other children much less often than their own. How can they understand that in the behavior of a child is determined by age, what by upbringing, and what - by individual characteristics? No way.It turns out a paradoxical thing: the childâs teachers are often better aware of the individual characteristics of the child and his abilities than his own parents, because they relate to his peers and can evaluate, for example, as slower, less attentive or more reasonable, and parents see just a separate child, without context. Attempts to build a dialogue look, for example, like this:
- It would be nice to play such and such games with Vasya. He, you know, is pretty slow .
âAnd nothing is slow,â mom says, who understood this as a curse. - I have a completely normal child!
Failure in building a dialogue between mother and teacher is a serious problem, because each of them has only a part of the puzzle pieces, and not one of them sees the whole picture. The teacher does not know what is happening at the childâs home (this would make many things more clear in his behavior), and the mother does not know how the child behaves when she does not see him, and what he is compared to other children. As a result, for example, mom does not receive feedback that would allow her to understand the consequences of her educational strategy. Subjectively, she remains in the sandbox, where she can do whatever she wants with the child.
Sometimes the installation âyou can do everythingâ is broadcast by the mother to the child: creating from him a âfree personalityâ, she experiences others as an annoying hindrance to the childâs self-expression, and it simply does not occur to her to teach the child to be attentive to other people. At this moment she is only interested in one person - a child. She lives as part of this project. There are no other people who also have any needs for this setting. The child brings out from this the idea that his desires are overvalued. Attempts to talk about the fact that this is not necessary, this is an unreasonable educational strategy, often lead to the same reaction as a girl who plants grass in the sand: "Do not meddle, this is my child." Not because mom really knows how to do it better, but because the game she is playing at this moment does not involve other participants.This is her purely personal game in pedagogical creativity. Therefore, it does not take into account the future life of the child (what it will be like for him to live among people, accustomed to thinking only about himself, how he will be able to create a family with such an attitude), nor the needs of other people, but only comes from the image that she had in her imagination .
Early development is sometimes such a game in creating a young genius. It is characteristic that usually the main question is not asked from the very beginning: this particular child is located for early cognitive development, will he pull it, will he be interested? There are children who, with great pleasure, learn to read in four years with minimal help from adults. And there are others who learn to read at age six, "so be it." These are different children with different starting characteristics. The second important question, which is also usually not asked, is what will the child live if we succeed in all our pedagogical manipulations. Exaggerated example: let's say he goes to school at five, to college at twelve. How will he make friends among all these people,who are several years older than him? How will he find friends among his peers who know how much less is he that he can hardly find a common topic for conversation with them? How can he get out of the role of a child prodigy so that he is perceived not as a curiosity, but simply as a living person? (And how can he come to terms with the fact that he is no longer a child prodigy, but an ordinary adult?)
This, for example, is what the grown children of the Nikitins wrote about - itâs great when everything is easy for you at school, but itâs very difficult if you jumped through a couple of classes, you have 2â2.5 years of age difference with all of them, and you you find yourself in a situation of social isolation. Typically, they did not want their own children to have the same experience.
The more a child is different from other children, the more difficult it is for them to accept him and the more often he will face rejection. The more unusual the trajectory of development we build for him, the more unusual a person he will succeed - and, accordingly, his socialization will be more difficult. At that moment, when we decide to make some uncommon ideas out of a child, we choose a future for him (without asking him, without his participation), in which it will be very difficult for him to live. But when raising a child is a sandbox, such a thought simply does not attend, because the sandbox does not have a social context (and even, by and large, there is no time perspective). This is a situation closed to itself.
Role-playing system as a sandbox
One of the most powerful experiences from role-playing systems - and especially the pen & paper format, where the functioning of the gaming universe is fully provided by the master - is the experience of limitless freedom. You can apply for any action you want: you can send your character to hunt giant rabbits, you can send him to a tavern so that he gets drunk there unconscious, you can start developing techno-magic weapons in the conditions of a fabulous medieval ... An interesting point here is how it is the player who chooses the line of behavior if we - at least at first glance - do not restrict him.
If a player in life constantly feels that his freedom is constrained and limited (and this, for example, is the normal state of almost any schoolchild), then his natural impulse is, firstly, to immediately use freedom to do what cannot be done in real life and secondly, release the accumulated tension by playing violent or destructive acts. Therefore, despite the existence of socially acceptable methods of acting out aggression relative to the game world (such as shooting orcs in a nearby forest), we will naturally observe the asocial behavior of game characters: for example, attempts to kill, rape or rob civilians. The player at this moment experiences freedom through the denial of the restrictions imposed on him by society. At that moment, he behaves like a child during a crisis of three years,who strives to do everything contrary to parents. It is important for a three-year-old child to feel that he is acting according to his own decision and his own will, and not according to the instructions of others, and at first he determines his will from the contrary - as that which is strictly opposite to parental instructions. When he learns to directly feel his desires, he will no longer need such an object of denial.
A player placed in an open world situation with freedom of action begins with the same thing: he defines his freedom as the ability to do everything that has so far been forbidden. For example, this determines the popularity of the Fallout series games - there the player has open access to those areas where in real life there are most restrictions, prohibitions and taboos: that is, violence, sex and drugs. Itâs not that the player really really wanted to rob, kill and stunned in real life, but the experience that he can do this in the game is for him a confirmation of complete freedom of action. And an important part of this freedom is the ability to freely display aggression.
And again about the closet
As we recall, aggression can be redirected from one object to another, which actually makes it possible to win back. And here the player again has a choice between kicking a living person and kicking a piece of furniture, which in this case is played by orcs and goblins.
Theoretically, if we run several players as a team in one plot, then this is the cooperativeâs game situation. In fact, if we declare players as a team, this does not mean that they will support each other. We can observe in the team of game characters the same dynamics options as in a natural team: some of the characters may seek to act independently of others, someone may try to take a leadership position and impose their will on others (and this may cause other players to protest), conflicts may arise between the characters of the players, or several characters may take up arms against one.
And here what matters is the relationship between the players. If they are familiar both outside the game and generally treat each other well, then the likelihood that they will attack each other's characters is generally small, because if they are interested in their good relations, they are unlikely to want to spoil them. After all, there are plenty of cabinets around ... I mean, orcs.
Another situation is if the players see each other for the first time in their lives and then, most likely, will never meet again. In this case, there is no external brake in the form of unwillingness to spoil the relationship - because there is no relationship. Some players, however, will trigger an internal brake - the belief that spoiling another personâs pleasure in the game is not good. These are, in fact, those who, at the previous age stage, learned to respect other people's borders and not trample other people's sand castles. But other players can come - those who have a very strong need to win back aggression (very high pressure in a metaphorical pipe), and at the same time the feelings of another person are not absolutely important for them. That is, those who have forgotten to explain that breaking someone elseâs building is not good.Their game is egocentric - they satisfy their psychological needs in the game, ignoring the needs and feelings of other players. And here we can see an attack on a foreign character. Not necessarily it will be a physical attack - perhaps it will take the form of verbal humiliation and insult.
Reality unreal
To convey to the aggressor the idea that you donât need to do this in the game can be a rather difficult task. The first argument that goes into play: âWhat is it? This is all not really. â
If we were talking about imaginary shootings of five-year-old children, then this would be true. There are conditional pistols, conditional wounds, and conditional characters (just a bandit, just a soldier, just a robot), and if you were killed, it's okay - you have four more lives. Such a game usually does not leave strong emotional traces, because it is as abstract as possible. That is, of course, there are children of five to six years old, whom the game of war games can seriously scare, but this is usually not the problem of the game as such, but the problem that this particular child is very impressive, with a very high level of anxiety, and he still does not have a clear idea of ââthe line between the real and the imaginary. Such a child and a plush toy can be seriously scared (yes, it happens).
With systems like Dungeons & Dragons, the story is different, because they are designed for deep immersion in the game. The master, for his part, is trying to make the game universe as real as possible for the players. Players devote much attention to the creation of their characters: they think through their appearance, behavior, prescribe the background (voluntarily or involuntarily conveying to the character their own feelings and life stories). The result of this is that the player is deeply identified with his character and very vividly experiences everything that happens to him. Thanks to this, the experience that a person gains in a game can have almost the same powerful effect as if all this had happened in reality.
On the one hand, this means that during the session, players can experience very strong feelings of gratitude, care, unity, for example, when they save each otherâs characters from death, when they treat each other, when together they manage to do something something that none of them could do alone. They will recall some of these episodes with great warmth years later. But this also means another thing: if a playerâs character is in a traumatic situation, then this can be a destructive experience for the player himself. Sexual violence in the gaming session remains imaginary, but the feelings of horror, insecurity, shame and anger that the player is experiencing at this time are real. And these feelings can also stay with him for many years.
The burden of the master of the game
For the master, this means that as a moderator of the game, he is responsible for the psychological safety of his players. The master, as we understand it, may or may not be aware of this responsibility, accept it or refuse it. If a company of high school students plays, and the master is the same high school student as everyone else, then it is very likely that he will not be able to fully ensure the safety of the game, because he is not psychologically mature enough to be responsible for other people. (Heâs not very good for himself ...) Therefore, in such a situation, the psychological safety of a game session will be determined primarily by the quality of relations between the players. If close friends play, then they just don't want to attack each other. And if this is an arbitrarily recruited company in a club? Here the situation is already quite possible,when something went wrong, and the master pulled back and makes no attempt to steer the players out of a clearly destructive plot. Formally speaking, he did not sign up to be a group therapist. Its task is to ensure the functioning of the world at the level of gaming mechanics.
If the master is nevertheless set the goal of ensuring the psychological safety of the players, then he has several tools at his disposal.
The first and most obvious tool is the equipment of the group. If a group is made up of people who are already friends with each other, the probability of acting out aggression on living people is small. It is unlikely that the player will decide to attack his friend, and it is unlikely that he will want to attack his friend's friend (although this option is not excluded). If the players are not familiar with each other, then it makes sense to introduce them before the start of the campaign - at least to make sure that there is no personal incompatibility between them. If two players have a pronounced hostility towards each other, the likelihood of clashes between their characters increases dramatically. About what to do in such cases, Gary Gaigaks, one of the founders of D&D, wrote very simply: âPlayers who canât tolerate each other should not be on the same team.â Yes,there is a technical possibility to establish relations between two people, having them sit down to play in a co-op or to do something together. But D&D is a dubious tool for this, because it leaves players with too many opportunities for intra-party aggression.
The second security tool is the designation of acceptable boundaries. From the point of view of the player, if he is in the sandbox, where everything is possible, then this literally means that everything is possible. For players from adolescence and older, at this place we are faced, for example, with the problem of sexual violence in games. The situation is complicated by the fact that in many popular settings the topic of sexual violence is embedded at the canon level. (Where did you think the half-orcs came from?) But if you know that in the framework of the setting this basically happens, how can you explain to the player that he cannot do this? Suggestions were made that a player who does not agree that sexual violence should be played with him should indicate this with some special badge. To assess the humiliating nature of this decision, imagine a rule of thumb,which requires employees to wear special badges if they object to harassment at work, and if there is no such badge, obscene jokes at the lady and grabbing her by the ass are considered acceptable.
Again, if a player has a formed internal brake in the form of concern for the feelings of another person, then we can expect that he will not play like that. If this brake does not exist, then the idea that your freedom ends where the other personâs personal space begins is inaccessible. And in this case, clearly defined boundaries and taboos on the game become necessary. That is, the master, for example, announces from the very beginning that sexual violence, pedophilia, bestiality and torture will be unacceptable at his play. Then the players know that this is definitely not possible, and the master has a clear reason for everyone to remove from the party a player who is not ready to respect other people's borders. If the game basically implies sexual content (and this is the expected topic for youth and adult teams), then its quantity and quality are discussed before the start of the game.It is important to make sure that all players understand the boundaries of the acceptable, on the one hand, and are ready for the presence of rating content on the other. The range of possibilities here is wide (from minimalistic interaction with non-player characters - prostitutes, as in Planescape: Tornment, which almost completely comes down to paying for their services, to a detailed description of sexual intercourse), and if we do not stipulate in advance which of this range is acceptable, then players are very likely to silently focus on their own desires and tastes, not conforming to each other's comfort zone.which is almost completely reduced to paying for their services, to a detailed description of sexual intercourse), and if we do not stipulate in advance which of this range is acceptable, then the players are very likely to silently focus on their own desires and tastes, not conforming to each otherâs comfort zone friend.which is almost completely reduced to paying for their services, to a detailed description of sexual intercourse), and if we do not stipulate in advance which of this range is acceptable, then the players are very likely to silently focus on their own desires and tastes, not conforming to each otherâs comfort zone friend.
The third tool is limiting the space for wagering. Here the logic is the same as above when we talked about chess with a cube. If the destructive impulse of a player is so strong that he cannot control it on his own, then we drive this player into the grip of the game mechanics. The more structured the game, the less it is from the sandbox, but the less, on the other hand, the likelihood that something will go wrong. Firstly, we immediately exclude the game in an open world format, but use modules with a strictly linear plot. Secondly, we leave a minimum of space for free social interaction and a maximum of time allotted to battle scenes. Thirdly, we limit the available options for worldview, excluding the possibility of creating a deliberately evil character. The latter is due to the fact that if we allow the player to create a villain,then he will be able to justify any hostile actions against team members by the fact that he has such a villainous role. This does not mean that you should not allow anyone to create and win back evil characters in any campaign. Technically, a party may consist of some villains who together solve the task of capturing the world, or it may contain a single black magician (recall Raistlin from the Spear Saga), in which pure misanthropy quite coexists with the ability to work in a team. But these are rather risky and non-trivial subjects for wagering. You can experiment with them if the players are in good relations with each other, they are quite mature and conscious people, and they are in good control of their destructive impulses. It is definitely not worth issuing a license to an unfamiliar player to be a villain.that such a villainous role. This does not mean that you should not allow anyone to create and win back evil characters in any campaign. Technically, a party may consist of some villains who together solve the task of capturing the world, or it may contain a single black magician (recall Raistlin from the Spear Saga), in which pure misanthropy quite coexists with the ability to work in a team. But these are rather risky and non-trivial subjects for wagering. You can experiment with them if the players are in good relations with each other, they are quite mature and conscious people, and they are in good control of their destructive impulses. It is definitely not worth issuing a license to an unfamiliar player to be a villain.that such a villainous role. This does not mean that you should not allow anyone to create and win back evil characters in any campaign. Technically, a party may consist of some villains who together solve the task of capturing the world, or it may contain a single black magician (recall Raistlin from the Spear Saga), in which pure misanthropy quite coexists with the ability to work in a team. But these are rather risky and non-trivial subjects for wagering. You can experiment with them if the players are in good relations with each other, they are quite mature and conscious people, and they are in good control of their destructive impulses. It is definitely not worth issuing a license to an unfamiliar player to be a villain.Technically, a party may consist of some villains who together solve the task of capturing the world, or it may contain a single black magician (recall Raistlin from the Spear Saga), in which pure misanthropy quite coexists with the ability to work in a team. But these are rather risky and non-trivial subjects for wagering. You can experiment with them if the players are in good relations with each other, they are quite mature and conscious people, and they are in good control of their destructive impulses. It is definitely not worth issuing a license to an unfamiliar player to be a villain.Technically, a party may consist of some villains who together solve the task of capturing the world, or it may contain a single black magician (recall Raistlin from the Spear Saga), in which pure misanthropy quite coexists with the ability to work in a team. But these are rather risky and non-trivial subjects for wagering. You can experiment with them if the players are in good relations with each other, they are quite mature and conscious people, and they are in good control of their destructive impulses. It is definitely not worth issuing a license to an unfamiliar player to be a villain.in which sheer misanthropy quite coexists with the ability to work in a team. But these are rather risky and non-trivial subjects for wagering. You can experiment with them if the players are in good relations with each other, they are quite mature and conscious people, and they are in good control of their destructive impulses. It is definitely not worth issuing a license to an unfamiliar player to be a villain.in which sheer misanthropy quite coexists with the ability to work in a team. But these are rather risky and non-trivial subjects for wagering. You can experiment with them if the players are in good relations with each other, they are quite mature and conscious people, and they are in good control of their destructive impulses. It is definitely not worth issuing a license to an unfamiliar player to be a villain.
The fourth tool is group cohesion management. Here the same logic as in general in cooperative games, about the mechanics of which we spoke last time. If the monsters are strong enough to be defeated only by coordinated efforts, the players are interested in each other. If each player has his own set of abilities, and the game tasks facing them require all these abilities at the same time, then the players are interested in cooperating and coordinating their actions. On the other hand, when a team fails, it can cause a conflict, because players can begin to blame each other for this failure. We remember that psychologically, players invest a lot in their characters, and if the characters die, the players experience a real sense of grief.If the master does not set himself the special task of attracting the attention of players to the fact that they behave suicidally, then it is better to send reinforcements at the last moment than to allow the team to die first and then quarrel.
Ultimately, it all comes down to the fact that the monsters must be strong enough to force the players to unite, but not strong enough to kill the team. In addition, they should be sufficiently accessible, because if they have to be long and difficult to find, players may be tempted to find another object for themselves to act out aggression. And if there are not enough of them, then players can begin to compete for the opportunity to chop the creature into cabbage, and this is also a potential source of conflict - like any competition for resources.
Everything was normal
When trying to discuss the boundaries of the acceptable, we may encounter the fact that the same words for different players mean different things. What is, for example, an insult? If one player called the other, for example, a whore, is this an insult or not an insult? It may turn out that for one player this is an extremely offensive and unacceptable word, and for another - a normal everyday language.
With respect to adolescents, the mat is often really a common language. Firstly, it allows them to relieve internal stress, and secondly, it symbolically means the liberation from tyranny of adults (who have the audacity to indicate which words are permissible and which are not). And at a certain age stage in some social groups, we can really observe how adolescents quite peacefully speak completely unprintable words to each other. Some adult communication environments work in approximately the same way. To convince a person that his normal everyday language can be offensive to another person is a non-trivial task. Players with very different cultural codes may be easier to split into different teams than to establish mutually comfortable communication between them.
And here we come to a wider problem - the problem of the usual level of aggression. As we recall, aggressive behavior of a person is social in nature, he learns him. In the same way, a person learns from those around him what is an acceptable, acceptable level of aggression, and what is beyond. And here it is important to understand that acceptability is not some real property, but the subject of the internal agreement of a particular community. The point of reference, which for an individual individual sets the initial idea of ââthe normal, is the level of aggression that he observed in his childhood at home. In particular, if family members tend to yell at each other during conflicts and yell at the child, if he is doing something wrong, we can expectthat a child raised in this family will also use a cry in conflict situations (and will not be very surprised if they shout at him). If we regularly apply physical punishments to a child, then this, accordingly, normalizes physical aggression for him. Emotional violence, regularly applied to a child, normalizes emotional abuse for him, insults normalize insults, and so on.
Aggressive behavior, which does not rely on the problems of self-control, but on the effect of normalization, is extremely difficult to correct. Therefore, for example, family therapy is powerless to establish a relationship in a couple where one of the spouses is an abuser, if the abuser is quite sure that to beat or humiliate his wife is a normal and correct educational effect. He will not stop behaving this way because he has no problem with what he does. He is fine with this, and he is quite pleased with himself. If his woman has a problem, then the only thing a woman can do in this situation is to find another partner. The situation of a child whose parent believes that beating is a very good and correct pedagogical device is much sadder: he cannot independently get out of the situation he is in. Third parties,as a rule, they are powerless to convince such an adult that he is wrong. Regarding his life experience and his picture of the world, he does everything right. âI was beaten in childhood, and I grew up normal! That's why I grew up because they injected a mind into me! âThe child, accordingly, over time accepts physical abuse as part of a normal family life, and in the future, as you can expect, he will also practice it in his family. Thus, destructive methods of interaction are extremely stable at the level of the whole community, transmitted from generation to generation by the method of learning.over time, accepts physical abuse as part of a normal family life and, as can be expected, will continue to practice it in his family. Thus, destructive methods of interaction are extremely stable at the level of the whole community, transmitted from generation to generation by the method of learning.over time, accepts physical abuse as part of a normal family life and, as can be expected, will continue to practice it in his family. Thus, destructive methods of interaction are extremely stable at the level of the whole community, transmitted from generation to generation by the method of learning.
The normalized level of aggression is a blind spot for a person. He either does not notice him at all, or does not attach much importance to him and does not experience significant discomfort, moreover, in both roles, both the subject and the object of aggression. If you spank a child once (or once threateningly promise to do it), then this will be a significant event for him, exceptional, going beyond the normal. And he will be very scared. If this situation repeats itself regularly, addiction will develop to it. The child will begin to perceive her everyday: "Well, yesterday they spanked us again." The more everyday violence is perceived, the less it is able to regulate behavior. For the child, this process of normalization is a means of adapting to the environment - if he was so scared every time as when he was beaten for the first time,he would turn into a neurotic. Further, based on his experience, the child believes that there is nothing wrong with the cuffs - nothing bad happens to him when they beat him. Accordingly, it will be psychologically easier for him to hit another person - first a peer, then his own child.
A similar story with verbal aggression and emotional abuse. Accordingly, if there is a player in the game who behaves in an unacceptable way for others, without even noticing that he is doing something wrong, then two things must be understood about this. Firstly, most likely, re-education of this player will not succeed. As a maximum, he will learn that other players are thinly organized sissies, and will independently decide that it is better to play with other, normal people. Secondly, this playerâs tolerance for aggression is, most likely, a means of adaptation, which first allowed him to survive in the family circle, and now, probably, allows him to survive in the same aggressive social environment. If he becomes more sensitive to aggression, it will immediately become much more difficult for him to live in the environment where he is.What can a master do in this situation? Only one thing: do not include this player in the team for which he is uncomfortable.
Segregation
The problem of coexistence within the same environment of people who have different habitual levels of aggression, we will encounter mainly in those environments where people find themselves against their will: that is, for example, in educational institutions. But even there one can observe a tendency to stratification on this basis. A parent who believes in the favor of a tough hand is more likely to choose a strict teacher for the child, and the family, where it is customary to agree with the children, will take the child out of the garden in horror, once having heard the teacher shouting at the children. Teachers, in turn, will also be selected into one team more or less of the same type, because a sharply different teacher will be uncomfortable among colleagues who do not share his convictions.As a result, in some environments more teachers with a democratic teaching style and children who can be negotiated will accumulate, and in other environments, children who are still accustomed at home that their behavior is controlled by screaming (therefore, they donât respond to calm speech) will accumulate, and teachers who are just screaming and inclined to communicate. Therefore, teachers working in different kindergartens and schools may have diametrically opposed experience with regard to how children behave and what methods are effective with them.may have a diametrically opposed experience regarding how children behave and what methods are effective with them.may have a diametrically opposed experience regarding how children behave and what methods are effective with them.
The fact that a home child from a soft family will be extremely uncomfortable with teachers who communicate screaming is pretty obvious. He has not developed a habit of screaming, and it is much more traumatic for him when he is faced with such a system of relationships than for a child who has lived like this all his life. Less obvious is something else: a child, accustomed to a high level of environmental aggression, will feel uncomfortable in a mild environment, and he will function worse in it. Firstly, if the childâs behavior is regulated mainly by fear, this means that he has external brakes, but no internal ones. Accordingly, in a situation where there is nothing to fear, his behavior will automatically be disorganized. Secondly, if he falls into a team where the average level of aggression is significantly lower than his, then against the general background he immediately looks very unpleasant,an ugly type that no one wants to be friends with.
Speaking about the benefits of educational institutions as a means of socialization, they sometimes express the thesis that being in an aggressive environment of a mass school (as opposed to a greenhouse home environment) in some way adapts a child to real life. There is a certain rational grain in this, because the experience of functioning in a peer collective cannot really be obtained at home. But here you need to understand that there is no âreal lifeâ common to all. There are many different environments with different conditions, and an adult, unlike a child, has a choice in which environment he will live and work. He can choose friends, he can choose a team, he can choose a region and even a country of residence. This is on the one hand.And on the other hand, finding a child in an educational environment with certain properties adapts him only to environments with the same properties, but not generally to any team. An aggressive school environment adapts to life in harsh environments, but does not adapt to soft ones. The school of humanistic orientation adapts to the same humanistic environments - but does not adapt to aggressive ones. Thus, when a child attends school, she prepares him not just for life, but for a certain life among certain people. And when choosing a school, this point is important to consider. In short, for a person to be able to live in a humanistic society, he needs to train from birth to live in a humanistic society and first have a democratic environment at home, then in the garden, and after that in school. Then he will grow up to be the manwhich the humanistic environment will not reject if it comes to it from the side.
Mom anarchy
So far, we have figured out how aggression works in a role-playing game, which has a moderator actively included in it. And what happens in multiplayer computer games with similar mechanics, where the moderator, if any, does not constantly monitor everything that happens there?
First, the effect of anonymity comes into play. The situation of anonymity removes a significant part of the external brake. When other players are strangers to you who most likely will not recognize you the next time you come across you, there is no reason to worry about maintaining a good relationship with them. You can do anything in the game, and it will not affect your reputation among those people who know you personally, because they donât know about it.
On the other hand, the internal brake also works much weaker if we only see his nickname from a person. The more abstract and conditional information about the creature, the lesser degree of sympathy we feel for him. Itâs one thing if the news dryly tells us about one and a half hundred victims of the explosion, and another thing when we are shown photographs of a specific victim with a felt text about how the explosion broke his life. Obviously, it is much easier to empathize with a particular person whom we can imagine.
In sum, this gives us a much greater willingness of a single user to unmotivated aggression against another user. Further, the effect of the distribution of responsibility in the crowd is superimposed on this readiness: everyone was chopped, and I started chopping, but what is it? If a lot of users come to the server with the need to act out aggression (and we expect most of them from the school audience), then most of the users will demonstrate aggressive behavior in a short time, and even having a moderator will not save you, because two percent of users can be banned, and ninety percent of users are pointless to ban - itâs easier to close the project.
Space Station 13, for example, was conceived as a simulator of a space station. Most of its mechanics is a multi-user sandbox with a cooperative based on separation of roles. At first glance, we could expect that the player, going to the server and choosing a profession, will try to win back the representative of this profession. But for some reason, he went to play a space station, and not a multiplayer shooter? In practice, everything turns out to be much less smooth. Firstly, as the player discovers, after he is suddenly killed several times by strangers, the mechanics of the game suggest the possibility of dunking a friend at any time with any object that has turned up on his arm. Secondly, killing a comrade with an object is much easier and faster than any work task. Thirdly,if most of the station is trying to kill each other, attempts to work are generally meaningless, since it is a cooperative, and any profession requires close cooperation with other specialists. Thus, an aggressive player receives immediate positive reinforcement in the form of a sense of strength and impunity, and a player who planned to use the sandbox for its intended purpose, learns that the cooperative is a completely stupid thing, and nothing good should be expected from a bunch of people gathered together.that a cooperative is a completely stupid thing, and you donât have to expect anything good from a bunch of people gathered together.that a cooperative is a completely stupid thing, and you donât have to expect anything good from a bunch of people gathered together.
What jambs do we see here? First, freedom of action in the absence of constraints. If we give a player the technical ability to attack another player, and he has no reason not to do this, then with a high probability he will do this - he will attack another player. On a private server, where a specific company of players plays, this problem is solved by the fact that the players in the team are familiar with each other, and they can agree in advance that they will use the sandbox as a sandbox, and not as an arena for gladiatorial fights. On a public server, where the extremely low quality of communication is expected, this problem can only be solved by the grip of game mechanics: technically eliminating the possibility of causing damage to a team member or even cutting out all the mechanics related to military operations.
The second point is that antisocial behavior here is easily feasible and self-reinforcing, while prosocial behavior is hard to do and has no additional means of reinforcement, other than the moral satisfaction that a player should theoretically experience from performing work tasks. This automatically encourages aggressive behavior of those players who do not want to think a lot and understand the station equipment for a long time. For example, if only a laser cannon could be used as a weapon, which must be assembled for half an hour with the participation of four more specialists, the number of people wishing to use it would immediately fall by an order of magnitude.
And the third point is that attacking a living person here is much easier than specially designed for this bot. There are few bots, they rarely fly, far to follow them, and fellow astronauts - here they are, in the next office. Having made a conveniently located arena with a large selection of weapons and a system for issuing prize points for defeating creatures, we could easily redirect the aggression of those who need to play it back there.
And what follows from all this?
A very simple idea follows from all this. If a person inside already has a feeling of anger, then it will tend to break out. And then we either control this destructive impulse by providing acceptable methods for its manifestation, or this impulse controls the player and the game, which contributes to the consolidation of undesirable patterns of behavior and can potentially lead to psychological injuries among other participants in the game and negatively affect their socialization.
As usual, your thoughts on this subject are welcome. If you have an interesting experience related to game aggression, please tell about it in a comment.