What our experts say

Playing is important at all ages! Children and adults play, so why shouldn’t elderly people? The widespread belief that games/toys are only for children can make using this tool with seniors seem unthinkable. And yet, games can be a very helpful facilitator in supporting elderly people with a neurodegenerative pathology. When caregivers play a game with an elderly person, the framework of the interaction is that of the game. As a result, being the caregiver or the person requiring care no longer matters; both are players and therefore equal in terms of the rules, with the aim of enjoying a moment of well-being. Since making mistakes is permitted in the context of the game, it is not considered a failure, provided the game is adapted to the person’s abilities.

« Games are a tool that stimulate abilities and prioritize the notions of fun and shared play. »

This adaptation (along with preparation) is the key to a successful play session for everyone involved. The game can be used as a tool to stimulate and maintain abilities, and then, once the disease reaches a very advanced stage, it can help prioritize the notions of pleasure and shared play. However, this step can be a pitfall in support if care is not taken to avoid infantilizing the person. Elderly people must be able to continue exercising their free will, regardless of their pathology and its evolution. So, they should be the one to choose the game they want to play, or how they want to play it, and the professional should follow their lead with the help of Access+ games.

Nowadays, board games have their rightful place in our family relationships and friendships. The benefits games provide are all the more important for children, as they help develop many skills.

When a child plays a board game, provided it has been carefully chosen (level of complexity suitable for their age, visual appeal, sense of accomplishment, entertainment, etc.), an emotional opening is almost immediately created. This natural openness allows the child to use their intellectual and executive resources without necessarily feeling the effort they are making. Moreover, due to the inherent social nature of board games, this fun activity helps children develop social skills. They need to demonstrate flexibility by being open to the other players’ ideas and adjusting their reactions to the other players’ actions and to the rules of the game. Children also learn to engage and strengthen their cognitive and executive functions, as well as the specific skills a game requires: controlling emotions and impulsivity, planning and organizing, memory, language or logic and mathematical skills, etc.

« The Access+ line of games is specifically adapted to support remediation for cognitive disorders. »

Board games have proven to be an excellent way to stimulate these functions, which can be lacking in children experiencing cognitive, developmental or other types of disorders.

Once adapted, this fun medium becomes a very good evaluation, activation and remediation tool for a child’s development.

The Access+ line of games is designed to help families and practitioners reach these goals. It offers a variety of games that have been adapted to make them easier to play and that introduce people to social games (simplified rules, visual and tactile adaptations, etc.). What’s more, these adjustments lighten the mental load (not requiring several elements to be juggled at once) and make it possible to play in specific contexts. This line of games is expressly adapted to support remediation for specific cognitive, executive, social, behavioral or learning disorders. Each Access+ creation therefore has the subtlety to easily create an emotional opening and moments of simple pleasure while stimulating certain functions and skills that may be lacking, to gently work on these.

Play to heal, perhaps… but play to soothe, strengthen and grow, without a doubt.

This is probably why games are among the many facilitation tools we use every day in care services, whether to stimulate a fledgling memory, improve impaired attention and projection abilities or revive tired motor skills.

But games do much more than that: They create a moment of sharing, a space in which performance counts much less than how everyone interacts. Players learn to recognize their own emotions, to accept them, to express them and to compare them with what the other players are feeling. They learn to relate things, sometimes about themselves, and above all, how to build shared memories. Games provide a means of escape. They open a time and space in which one can forget or cope with a difficult day-to-day life.

« Play to soothe, strengthen, grow […] play as a means of care, without a doubt. »

The new Access+ line of games not only makes the fun of games accessible to caregivers and those they care for. It does much more than that: It makes it possible to use games as part of care by adapting them, transforming them so that everyone—families, therapists and patients—can grow in conjunction with others.

Play to heal, perhaps… but play as a means of care, without a doubt.