It's Game On For Family Lawyers
Web Extra: Clips from Earthquake in Zipland
When Jasmin Watson talks about her divorce, she sounds tired and a little frustrated. Mostly, though, she’s concerned about how her children—ages 9, 11 and 12—are holding up. They’re doing better, she says, thanks in part to a package that arrived in the mail from her attorney.
Inside was a video game called Earthquake in Zipland, a research-based video game designed to help school-age children cope with divorce. Family lawyer Lee Rosen, whose firm is handling Watson’s divorce, discovered the game’s Web site last fall while surfing the Internet for resources to help clients of his Raleigh, N.C.-based firm. After playing the game with his own kids, he ordered three dozen or so to give out to clients.
“We used to hand out books, but if you hand a kid a book, they know what you’re up to,” says Rosen, whose three offices handle about 700 divorces a year. “With a video game, it’s something to play with and it engages kids, especially boys.”
And what he’s hearing back from his clients is that the game is working. “There’s just not anything like it that facilitates conversations,” Rosen says. Watson says she’s noticed a change since her kids started playing the game, especially with her youngest. “She asks questions now. I don’t know if that’s just because of the game, but they all definitely got into it—they thought it was challenging, and my kids love a challenge.”
In the game, a superhero named Moose must repair his country after an earthquake has caused upheaval and chaos. As kids play through, they must perform certain tasks, including writing in an online journal, to keep moving to higher levels. Using the earthquake as a metaphor for their life, children learn that “even a superhero can’t put everything together exactly the way it was before,” says Hank Shrier, who directs marketing for the game’s makers, Jerusalem-based Zipland Interactive. (Click here to see clips of the game.)
The Rosen Law Firm was one of the first firms to order the game, says Zipland president and family therapist Chaya Harash. She hopes more will follow, especially based on the warm reception she received from both lawyers and judges when she presented the game at the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts conference in Washington, D.C., this past summer.
But Rosen says the game wasn’t an instant hit with the 11 other lawyers in his firm. “We basically handed it out to them and said, ‘You can give these to people if you’d like to,’ but largely they did nothing with them.” When Rosen demonstrated the game at a staff meeting, though, it clicked.
Rosen says the game doesn’t just help clients; it creates good will for the firm, too. “Clients are used to lawyers taking their money, but they’re not used to getting something, and when you give them a gift that also benefits their children, that’s something exponentially more powerful.”
That’s certainly reflected in Watson’s reaction when she received the game. “I was like, ‘Me? You thought of me?’ ” she recalls. “It made me feel like I wasn’t just another person—[that my lawyer] thought of me out of all those clients. It made me feel a little more important.”
