Useful Games for Therapy Addressing Social Skills

Many video games are a way to develop and sustain meaningful relationships with others. From a therapeutic perspective, this means they also have the potential to help individuals and groups develop their social interactions. This can include individuals with autism, down syndrome, traumatic brain injury or with sensory processing disorder.

We’ve worked with University of St. Augustine Doctoral Occupational Therapy student, Tyler Brinkman, to compile the following list of games useful for this purpose.

Each game on this list was subject to an activity analysis and was found to contain aspects of gameplay that predominantly utilize client factors and performance skills associated with social skills. Some of the identified client factors include higher-level cognitive function, temperament, personality, energy and drive. Commonly identified performance skills associated with social skills include: regulates, expresses emotion, discloses, and takes turns.

Skills that can potentially be addressed using video games include:

• Cooperation: Game where you work together to achieve a goal. This can be therapeutically useful to get people working with one or many other individuals to achieve a common goal. This can be useful for individuals who have difficulties with this skill and insist on soloing an activity.
• Impulsivity: Games that require restraint to manage resources and outcomes. This can be therapeutically useful to practice thinking before acting and seeing the unintended consequences. This can be useful to help individuals think about the consequences of actions and offset the tendency to act without thinking.

This list includes 10 games from the last 16 years, with 360 likes. They come from a range of different genres and play-styles and are all good games if you want to use games for social skills therapy. We break them down into the following areas:

• Cooperation
• Impulsivity
• Under Review