AimlessUK

I have a student who's 5 years old. He's just started showing an absolute obsession for Minecraft. I know his mother well and she hasn't let him play much; only a few hours at the weekend. Never during the week. She debated letting him play it at all. I haven't played this game much, but like his mum, I'm tempted to let him play it, even though he looks like very high risk to get addicted. This is because on the one hand, this is making him a lot smarter. His 3D spatial skills are improving and this is starting to improve his pre-reading skills with less letter rotations etc. When we talked about the game, he came across as at least a year more developed cognitively. I've never seen him like this before. But on the other hand, in the last lesson he mentioned the game maybe 30x in an hour, and frankly, he seemed already obsessed to the point of broken. Looking at this game, there's a lot of LUDIC LOOPS and he's surely fallen into a few of them already. Minecraft was recently voted the most addictive game of all, after all. I just found that he doesn't even meet the minimum age requirements to play the game. I guess what I'm looking for is to give me a bit of a push to say bye-bye to the benefits of the game, because I don't think they're worth it, but I'm not entirely sure because the benefits are also quite extreme.

I'm teaching a diagnosed ASD boy to speak English. He's not diagnosed ADHD, but I feel this is the greater problem for him. He's played games for years. His parents think it hasn't done him much good. I see it like self medicating in a way. When he's gaming, his dopamine raises enough to actually engage his memory. However, we think he's even more reality de-associated and introspective as a result. When he first came to my lessons, we played some word games, and that worked great, so long as there was a lot of pressure and excitement. But I've ran out of sentence games now and they're wearing thin. I've started to move onto ways of putting speaking between him and ordinary games, but as you can imagine, this can be incredibly frustrating at times. No matter how good I get, I just can't be as consistent as a game. What I think he needs, is not so much communication help, but dopamine support. In research, I found that WimHof and COLD SHOWERS would help, but being mildly ASD and ADHD myself, I know that cold showers are even more brutal than ice baths. The thing is, I'm an English teacher. While I'm pretty close with the parents, it's not really my place to suggest blasting him with a ice hose every morning to improve his grades! So, back to gaming. Do you have any recommendations for ways to game together, but keep it social and outward-looking?