Reimagining Play Therapy for Adopted Children and Children with Trauma

Project Background: Thousands of children are adopted both domestically and internationally every year. Many come from institutional or foster care and suffer from repeated trauma, abuse and neglect, which negatively affect their transition and attachment with their adoptive families. To help, social workers often use a counseling technique called play therapy to encourage children incapable of verbalizing and expressing themselves to communicate and work through difficult subjects using objects and toys.

Problem: How might we utilize play to help adopted children and children with trauma work through past traumas so that they can form healthy attachments with their families?

Process: Using the lens of attachment and a constructivist approach, this project harnessed experience design and design research to analyze, diagnose and map out factors that affect the experience and transition of adopted children into their adoptive families, as well as detail the challenges they face in engaging in true, child-like play. From there, researchers worked hand-in-hand with a play therapist to analyze the research and explore new and innovative ideas to harness the make-believe world.

Design Solution: Mythos is a role play video game for adopted children and children with trauma. Children participate in the game as a stuffed bear. They can customize the bear’s name, age, color and choose a superpower. Age determines the difficulty level of the game, as well as the complexity of exercises. Superpowers are based on character traits, such as funny, strong, smart, kind or curious, and evolve over the course of the game.

The game uses the 12-step hero quest to mimic the process often used in recovery programs. The story begins with a tragedy, where their bear finds themselves far from home and lost in the desolate, fantasy-like land of Mythos. Each level represents a different chapter in the story.

As they participate with their bear on the trauma journey, children explore, locate and collect objects, use their imagination to solve puzzles and overcome obstacles, and pick up a variety of skills in order to advance the game.

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