A short excerpt from a June 14, 2025 YouTube interview with Elan Lee about the social value of games. The clip highlights gaming as a tool to combat loneliness and bring families together, and includes a personal anecdote where Elan and his daughter made about a dozen paper/card games together.
The value of gaming as a way to bring families together or even learn. Whether it be conflict resolution or argumentation or logic sequences, etc. Have you ever found yourself making a case for the. I don't think health aspects of gaming is necessarily the word I'm looking for, but the ability of gaming to kind of solve, in a way, this loneliness epidemic that we seem to be venturing farther and farther into.
I think it is one of the most effective tools because. Well, first of all, like, when we play games, the first rule is, you gotta put your phone away. She looked at me and she's like, why are you sad? Like, I want to play again. Why don't you want to play again? And I was like, this is just broken. This isn't fun. And she looked at me and she said, let's fix it. It was this, like, you know, the clouds parted and the sunbeam came right down. And I just thought, like, this is it. Let's fix it. The next year, I sat down with my daughter and we got out the markers and the stickers, and we got out the little cards and scissors. When we cut up little pieces and we built. It's gotta be like 12 different games.
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