Don’t Starve – or Miss Social Cues – Together

When the quarantine started back in March, I never thought “Oh good. Think of all the opportunities we’re going to have to improve our skill sets!” That never happened and I want to be clear about that. But, now with 4 months of this brave new world under our belts, many of us, by necessity, have found ourselves happy to be learning skills we never thought we’d need.

On the other hand, these challenges can also create learning opportunities. When working to solve minor technical problems, both kids and adults need to draw upon their emotional regulation skills. Being aware of the challenges involved in being heard when others are talking requires impulse control and an ability to focus on reading the room. And providing feedback in a way that avoids the prospect of embarrassing a member of our group by calling them out in public has led our counselors to develop creative limit setting strategies involving the chat function, breakout rooms, muting, and cutting video. It’s tempting to view these adaptations as nothing but cumbersome hassles. But the fact is that they’re hassles we all – kids and adults – need to learn to manage. It’s not unreasonable to assume that we’re going to need to draw on them for quite awhile.

What we’re also coming to see is that working remotely can provide opportunities for therapeutic growth that are hard to come by when working in-person. This summer, we’re offering a series of one-week electives. For one or two hours per day, kids and counselors connect remotely to pursue one particular activity. Last week, I co-led our maiden voyage into the multi-player computer game Don’t Starve Together. By all accounts, it was a huge success.

In Don’t Starve Together, you and a group of friends find yourselves dropped into a world with nothing but the clothes on your back and your ingenuity. The goal is to survive as long as you can and that involves working together to find and gather resources, and defend yourselves against an array of creepy and surprising threats. DST has a dark, rich, Tim Burton-ish kind of feel to it. Many of the objects and creatures you encounter in your journeys must be approached cautiously as there’s always a possibility that that cute little frog you see may just try to kill you. The game is not entirely dissimilar to Minecraft but there’s more structure, much better art, and more of a defined goal to it.

Our first day in the world of Don’t Starve Together was not a smooth one. As we suspected, group members had trouble reining in their tendencies to talk over each other, which created a good deal of frustration for everyone. We also found, in what should not have come as a surprise, that if you plop 4 distractible boys down in a limitless world that’s theirs to explore, there is no rabbit hole too minor to fall into. That first day saw us struggling to make progress as we spent much of our time trying to help our fellow players work their way back to the group after straying to explore some new landscape feature.

What my co-leader and I quickly realized was that this game resembled some of the open-ended problem-solving games we play in our gym. These games present groups with one goal or problem that can be solved any number of different ways.  For some groups, these games can provide great learning opportunities. To succeed, you have to be able to express yourself clearly, listen to what other people are saying, be flexible, negotiate, compromise, see the big picture, and work cooperatively. Counselors have opportunities to provide feedback and coaching which, in the right circumstances, can be very productive. In the wrong circumstances, it can all get overwhelming. When little or no structure is applied, the games can become too frustrating for kids to get anything constructive out of them. The first day of Don’t Starve Together seemed to be heading down that path. So, at the beginning of the second session, we added some structure to the game. We emphasized the importance of avoiding the strong temptation to talk over each other. We also told the kids that while everyone’s ideas were still important and worthy of consideration, my co-counselor would assume the role of the expedition leader and would ultimately be in charge of charting our course. We also emphasized the fact that the choices that one player makes can have a huge effect on everyone else. While these ideas come into play in our gym as well, they proved more important than usual in playing this game. That’s because you can’t negotiate with the computer. If the group spent a lot of time trying to rescue a player who had drifted away from the group, they would often find themselves in trouble at “night,” in the dark, with no food. When the game gives you the message “You all died from starvation,” kids can’t plead with the computer to give them one more chance. We have to start again. The game structures in a strong, cooperative imperative. If you don’t work together and collaborate, you don’t last. Even if you’re really invested in pursuing your own agenda, the need to work together keeps staring you in the face. That idea presents itself early and it hangs over everything you do in the game. Our kids got really good at working together and we found ourselves surviving longer and longer as the week went on. Most importantly, we all had a great time.

The kids we see have always had a strong interest in all things digital. With so much of our social engagement happening remotely these days, that interest becomes a potentially important way of staying connected and it’s important to be able to get everything you can out of it. Our remote programs offer some great chances to work on these skills in a fun, supportive way. We still have a good number of openings in our remote programs this summer, including Don’t Starve Together. If you’re interested in being a part of these programs, take a look at our course catalog. You’ll also find listings for our new, in-person, outdoor program, as well as some groups for parents. Hope to see you somewhere in our brave new world.