By Damian Martinez, journalist at G&M News.
What are your responsibilities at the Board and what initiatives does the organization promote to combat problem gambling?
The Executive Board of the IGCCB meets regularly to talk about different projects, collaborations, and anything that is involved in the certification process for counselors, therapists, and other helping profession workers to achieve specialized training and education to understand specifically gambling and video games disorders. Usually, those two topics of training do not actually take up that much focus in a general clinical education program so if you get your degree to become a licensed professional counselor, you may understand what traditional or substance-based addictions are, but you won’t spend that much time learning how, for example, gambling disorder works. Our specific credentials help counselors to add to their training and knowledge and helps them be able to offer higher level treatment services to clients who are affected by these issues. Our Executive Board is tasked with monitoring, updating and organizing the certification process for people to get this specific kind of training.
As a counselor who has dedicated over 10 years of his career to understanding problematic behavior, specifically related to the Internet and online games, what does the concept of ‘responsible gaming’ mean to you personally?
Responsible gaming is an approach to people’s gambling choices that seeks to limit the number of consequences that they experience when choosing to have fun, to spend their time and their financial resources this way. There are different paths to treatment when you are working with a brand-new person with a gambling disorder. The most basic one is abstinence, and then responsible gaming is the other approach, which is thinking that the player doesn’t necessarily need to stop playing completely for the rest of his life. Gamblers need to learn how to do it in a way that does not jeopardize any aspect of their life. As my career has gone on, I’ve worked with a lot more people with different points of view of what they’re ready to do right now, and a lot more people are finding benefits from their treatment process with a responsible gaming idea in mind. Sometimes, people start with that idea of responsible gaming, and they eventually get to this point where they’re not gambling very much at all and maybe go a long period of time without gambling. That’s what responsible gaming looks like for them so, as a counselor, you must be able to talk with the person and figure out where they’re mentally so that they can create goals that will work for them.
Although there is really a lot of work around this topic, there are still pending issues. How could the gaming industry improve its actions regarding problematic gambling?
Actually, I think we’re in a much better spot now than when my career began. There are a lot of organizations dedicated to this, especially in the online betting, fantasy sports and casino verticals. These organizations have money set aside to work on these issues. Some entities are involved in treatment and try to secure funding for some innovative programs. Outside of the IGCCB, as the Director of Gaming Services at Cambridge Behavioral Health, I’m involved with a lot of different organizations, both in the casino and online gaming side of the industry, to help create educational programs, treatment resources, a telehealth provider network, and a lot of that is through direct collaboration with the gaming industry. If we have started across the globe to have this connection between gaming industry and treatment, and it’s starting to create things that did not use to exist, then we just need to keep doing more of that. We need to find what works and do more of that. There are people that need to learn to relax and enjoy playing, and also be aware there are resources to help them feel better in the aftermath.
Next November, your book The Gamer’s Journey will be published. What topics does it cover?
The Gamer’s Journey is a book about psychology and video games. I’ve always thought video games teach me the right strategies to understand how to make a plan, execute it, and succeed. The text is really my attempt to take the heroes journey from mythology and adapt it to our psychological journey in the current world, but instead of trying with mythology like the Odyssey, I use only video games. The idea is that video games have become the modern form of mythological storytelling, and that we can learn who we are in today’s world by looking at how we connect with the video games we choose to play, just like the Ancient Greeks understood what their society was by using the Greek Gods and Hercules.