How to help your Autistic child practise healthy gaming

Gaming can be a great tool for connection, socialisation and confidence building, particularly for Autistic children. We spoke to gaming guru Jess Rowlings, co-founder and CEO of Next Level Collaboration, about why she loves games, how they can benefit Autistic children and how parents and carers can ensure it stays safe and healthy.

Can you please tell me a bit about yourself?

So, my name is Jess Rowlings. I am a speech pathologist by trade, a researcher at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education and CEO and co-founder of Next Level Collaboration.

I’m Autistic and have ADHD, but I didn’t get diagnosed with either of those till I was an adult. I knew for my whole life that there was something a bit different, but it wasn’t until after I finished schooling that I got actually got a diagnosis. For me, that answered a lot of questions I’d had about my life.

What do you do at Next Level Collaboration?

At Next Level Collaboration, we run social capacity building programs for neurodivergent kids. We use cooperative video games as a teaching tool to practice collaborative teamwork skills that are important for everyone to learn. We’re not really worried about things like eye contact and neurotypically-normed signs of listening. What we’re focusing on is that the kids are using these skills in whatever way works best for them.

The kids are all working together to reach a common goal and that creates the opportunity for them to practice these teamwork skills. They’re all massive gamers. They’re super passionate. They’ve got amazing levels of knowledge and vocabulary, so we’re building on something that they’re already good at, and using that as a springboard to focus on other skills for collaboration and teamwork in a situation where the game requires them to work together as well.

When did you first get into gaming?

When I was in grade five, we got a PS2, which back then was absolutely mind blowing. It was the coolest thing I’d ever gotten, and games were an area of strength for me. I was always rubbish at sports. But then I started playing games all the time and I realised that I was quite good at them, which was exciting.

My sister is also Autistic and we were different kids growing up, so we didn’t always share many interests. At times it was hard to connect because there wasn’t always much to bond over. But the PlayStation was a mutual interest for us. We’d sit there taking turns, and some games had levels that one of us could do but not the other so we had a tag team system. Gaming ended up becoming a special interest. I love playing, but the tech and the development side is also really interesting to me.

What benefits does gaming bring to your life?

It’s always heaps of fun to play games, but social connection has been a big one. When I was younger, I had different interests to a lot of the kids at school but gaming was something that I could talk to my peers about. As an adult, playing games with friends or watching them stream a game are always nice when you don’t have a lot of social battery left. It’s a nice indirect way to still have that connection, but with less demand.

If you have played a game for years and then someone else has picked it up, it’s fun to sit down and teach them. Gaming can also be great for self-regulation and decompression – Animal Crossing is a good example of this. You can wander around catching some fish, digging up some fossils, designing a beach. And for me, it’s a really nice way to do something that’s structured and familiar at the end of the day to decompress from everything else that’s going.

How do you think that gaming can benefit young Autistic people?

The big one, especially for the kids I work with, is that sense of social connection, meeting others like them and just belonging. We’ve had kids in a group that age between 7 and 15 years old, and what really ties them together is they all love games. It’s a nice way to just connect over something neutral, regardless of any labels that society might put on people. For the kids I work with, gaming is an area of strength and interest. It’s something that they’re good at. A lot of these kids might go to school, and they might not feel like they’re good at things, which is really sad. But they’ve got huge amounts of knowledge around gaming, and they love to teach others.

Some kids might not want to answer ‘how was your day?’, but if you come in and ask them ‘how’s your Minecraft build going?’, they often feel more comfortable. Games also have communication options like text chat, avatars or voice chat, which provides freedom to engage and express yourself in the way that works best for you. In a classroom, you might be limited to some communication cards or there might be an expectation to verbally communicate, but building in Minecraft, it doesn’t matter. It’s a really inclusive setting to communicate and socialise.

When would you say gaming can start becoming unhealthy for kids?

I think this really comes down to the quality of the time over the quantity. Gaming is designed to be a fun, positive experience. Let’s use basketball as an example. If someone is playing basketball a few nights a week, having a really good time, that’s awesome and healthy. But if it’s becoming a negative experience, they’re coming home feeling really stressed or maybe other areas of their life are starting to suffer because they’re spending a lot of time at basketball, then that would be an indicator that their relationship with basketball might be unhealthy.

If someone is feeling really frustrated or their gaming time is no longer a positive experience, then that can indicate things might not be happening in as healthy a way as they should. The questions to ask yourself are: how are things going at school? Is there balance between their other commitments, such as a part-time job? If there’s an imbalance, that’s a sign that it might be time to think about gaming and how we can make it more positive. Some people prefer more screen time, some people find that they do better with less and that’s totally okay, everyone’s different.

What can parents do to encourage healthy gaming habits?

The biggest thing I recommend is maintaining a culture of open communication and trust. If children feel like they’re going to lose their games or have less access to them, it can make them feel less comfortable to get help. So listening without judgment and maintaining a culture where they feel like they can come to you if they need is important. That way, if, for example, they’re playing online and see some inappropriate language, they’ll feel more comfortable to come and discuss it. These are teaching moments as well.

I think anyone with kids or teenagers knows that outright banning doesn’t work a lot of the time anyway, but for a lot of kids gaming is also their social connection and sense of belonging. If they feel like they’re going to lose that, it’s going to be a lot harder for them to come and chat if they feel like something’s not okay.

How can parents help their children stay safe online?

If you’re not sure if a game is appropriate, one good strategy is to look up a YouTube video of the gameplay and see exactly what it involves. I also recommend playing with the kids and getting them to show you how the game works. They love teaching adults! This can also help parents understand exactly what games their kids are playing and what the content is like. For parents, this is a good teaching opportunity to go through the privacy functions, blocking and reporting features and other online safety measures together, and discuss why and how to use them.

Unfortunately, people do not always show their best behaviour online, but this can happen anywhere in the physical world or virtual world. You deserve to be treated with respect and kindness everywhere you go, whether that’s online, offline, at the shops, or at school, and the same goes for gaming. Please have strategies to look after yourself and if someone is behaving inappropriately, you have every right to block or report them to protect your safety. It comes back to that open communication and trust so if someone has behaved poorly, there’s someone you can talk to about it and get support.

What would you say to girls and gender diverse children who want to start gaming but worry it’s maybe not the space for them?

I think the first thing I would say is don’t listen to anyone who says it’s not the space for you, because it absolutely is. Enjoy it! There’s actually more women than men playing games now with the rise of casual and mobile gaming. I recommend looking for communities of interest as well. A lot of online games have servers, groups or other communities for girls or gender diverse people. I also recommend learning how to use the safety tools, make sure you understand them and don’t be afraid to use them if you feel like you need to.

Want to learn more about healthy gaming? Amaze has developed a series of resources to help parents and carers better understand the world of video games. These resources cover everything from genres, parental controls, behaviours to look out for and practical strategies that can be implemented to promote healthy gaming. The four written resources and two videos are designed to help parents and carers build the confidence to support young gamers in their lives. You can find the resources by visiting this link.

About Jess Rowlings:  

Jess Rowlings is a qualified speech and language pathologist and researcher at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education. She is also the co-founder and CEO of Next Level Collaboration, a social enterprise that runs programs to support neurodiverse children in developing collaborative skills and social connection through cooperative video games. Jess was diagnosed with both autism and ADHD as an adult, and is passionate about the use of digital games-based learning to promote social capacity and inclusion.