Video games are a great test of a player’s willingness to fail and then get back up again.  Losing health points, powers, and ultimately one’s life in a video game is a common occurrence, and players who do not learn from their mistakes don’t get too far in the game. The best games and those where players become most engaged are challenging, at times frustrating, but provide a way to understand the rules that guide the player’s moves or actions, as well as the game’s response to them. Many games change or shift these rules based upon the level of the game and the tools available to a player. These video game challenges practice and promote resilience and cognitive reframing that teach players how to stay alive and learn from video games. Let’s look at this from a psychological point of view and then explore some classic video games that require these skills. 

Cognitive Reframing: Being able to take a problem or difficult situation and adjust and solve problems. 

Cognitive reframing helps a person to look at a problem from a different perspective, putting it into a new context. This can create constructive cognitions about the future, resulting in optimism, hope, and faith. It can encourage optimism by empowering people to identify negative beliefs and evaluate their source. It can aid them in identifying pessimistic attitudes and generating alternative optimistic approaches, resulting in the development of social problem-solving skills, assertiveness, and relaxation strategies.

Cognitive reframing can also strengthen hope, helping individuals to believe in their capacity to produce workable routes to goals and to initiate and sustain movement towards these goals. Methods can include using hopeful stories and group support.

Games help practice, support, or acquire cognitive reframing when they:

• Feature difficult segments that may lead to a sense of frustration, requiring numerous attempts to succeed.
• Empower players to move past feelings of frustration by developing creative solutions.
• Feature challenges that, seem insurmountable at first, resulting in a sense of positive emotion, optimism, and self-esteem when finally overcome. Players can lean on this experience when another difficult segments arise.
• Shift rules and mechanics, disallowing players to rely on previously successful strategies throughout the entirety of a game.
• Task players with learning how to use new items, powers, or tools when they are introduced, facilitating creativity.
• Include segments where players are unlikely to know what to do off the bat, encouraging them to learn from their mistakes.

 

SimCityEDU: Pollution Challenge! – The player takes on the role of city mayor and must ensure inhabitants are both healthy and happy. The player must produce jobs so citizens can earn money to buy things such as food and video games while ensuring that they live in a green, healthy environment. As mayor, it is the player’s responsibility to make sure citizens are employed and content while also keeping pollution levels down and maintaining a healthy planet.

• • Cognitive Reframing – As players grow their city they must keep an eye on how their strategies play out, taking the time to re-assess their approach to ensure that citizens inhabit a bustling city and balancing that goal with the drive for a clean environment. If the city sways too far in either direction, it is time for players to rethink their tactics.

League of Legends – League of Legends is a free-to-play game of the Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) genre. This immensely popular and competitive online game pits two teams of players against one another for control of a map. Players select “champion” characters with widely varied abilities and team up to defeat a group of other players. Outside of battle, players work on leveling up a “Summoner“ page with different “masteries” for their favorite champions and manage a game currency that can be used to unlock new champions and runes that can power up their champs.

• • Cognitive Reframing – The conditions of the battlefield are always changing in League of Legends. To be competitive, players need to be flexible in their playstyle and adapt when the momentum of a match begins to sway. When problems occur, players have to find ways to work past them, turning setbacks into an opportunity to shift strategies. Players must adapt if an enemy champion seems to be getting too powerful, either asking for additional help from the team or rethinking the items they buy and equip to provide extra armor or attack power. Players should regroup and rally at the spot their defeated teammate was attempting to protect if a teammate gets killed and sent back to the spawn point, coordinating with each other on the best way to pick up the slack and maintain control of the area. Much as with strategic games such as chess or football, changing your gameplay to counter your opponent’s move is critical to success.  

Sid Meier’s Civilization V – In this immensely popular turn-based strategy game series, players take control of an entire civilization and lead it from the dawn of man until the space age, vying for the position of the most powerful empire in the world. As the leader of a specific civilization, a player can interact with other surrounding civilizations in any way he sees fit.

• • Cognitive Reframing – Victory in Civilization can come in several ways. A domination victory is the simplest to comprehend, as it simply means that your civilization has control of every surrounding capital city. A cultural victory comes from adopting five social policies and creating a utopian society. A diplomatic victory comes from establishing the United Nations and being elected as the World Leader (this may require some negotiation). And finally, a science victory can be achieved by winning the space race and eventually reaching “Alpha Centauri.” These victory conditions are reached in drastically different ways and alter the style of gameplay significantly. Remaining flexible and shifting strategies is very important in winning in any of these conditions and is necessary once rival nations become aware of your intentions and may seek to change them.