What a PlayStation in a cathedral taught me about learning, listening and change
Years ago, I questioned the wisdom of putting a PlayStation in Exeter Cathedral.
On Twitter, naturally.
I’d come across a post about gaming and the cathedral, connected with a TEDx talk by games writer Andy Robertson. I shared it, wondering why you would put computer gaming in a place of worship.
He replied with some further reading.
Now, I was already “a bit of a gamer” myself, and the mother of two sons who also enjoyed gaming. It was a hobby we shared.
And if the word “gaming” immediately brings Call of Duty to mind, widen the picture for a moment. Think of building something in Minecraft, settling into the whimsical world of Animal Crossing, or creating a household in The Sims and seeing how life unfolds.
There are many different ways to play.
So gaming itself wasn’t what surprised me. It was the cathedral. I hadn’t made that connection.
His reply invited me to consider something I’d overlooked: the story.
A cathedral was already a place where people gathered to encounter stories, reflect on them and consider what they meant for their own lives. A game could offer another way into that experience, one in which you participated.
That exchange stayed with me and yesterday, a conversation brought it back.
Prefer the overview first? See the infographic map of the connections explored above.
The conversation touched on Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, a book I read in the early 2000s. We were discussing a familiar situation: one person is describing something that has happened, while the other is busy identifying the problem and working out how to fix it.
The solution arrives. The story continues. Someone gets frustrated. (Perhaps you recognise it?)
The person speaking may be trying to understand how they feel, share an experience or simply feel heard. The listener may be trying very hard to help. Both can leave the conversation wondering why the other person doesn’t understand them.
The book frames these differences through men and women. I’d be more careful about drawing those lines today. Janet Shibley Hyde’s review of 46 meta-analyses found substantial psychological similarities between males and females. We don’t need to put everyone on separate planets to recognise that people can approach a conversation with different intentions.[1]
Research by Carolyn Cutrona and colleagues offers a useful way of thinking about this: how well does the support offered match what the person needs? Emotional disclosure and a request for information may call for different responses.[2]
Coaching has sharpened my listening skills and highlighted how in converstaions we are often listening to answer before we have understood the purpose of the story.
And sometimes that purpose stretches beyond the person telling it.
When someone shares an experience of a difficult employer, an unexpected kindness or a friendship that went wrong, we may compare it with our own lives. Have I experienced that? Would I notice it happening? What might I do?
Some of what gets dismissed as “gossip” can serve this kind of social learning. In experiments published in 2012, Matthew Feinberg and colleagues found that sharing information about someone’s selfish behaviour could help protect others and encourage cooperation.[3]
That doesn’t make every conversation about another person helpful or fair. But it gives us reason to look beyond the assumption that such talk is always trivial. An evolutionary role for sharing social knowledge is plausible; we should still distinguish that explanation from something we can directly establish about our ancestors.
We can learn something without having to experience every consequence ourselves.
Which brings me back to the classroom.
When I taught business, computing and IT, I was often asking students to understand situations well outside their own experience. They could learn a definition. Applying it to an organisation, a customer or a decision was another matter.
A case study gave the theory somewhere to happen.
There were people involved. Someone wanted something. A decision had consequences. Suddenly, the information had a context.
I particularly remember what happened while teaching when I explained something through a spoken story. I would notice a shift in attention and body language. That was my classroom observation, rather than a controlled experiment, but it was a shift I learned to recognise.
Research helps explain why this approach could be useful. Raymond Mar and colleagues’ 2021 meta-analysis, drawing on more than 33,000 participants, found that narrative texts were generally better understood and recalled than explanatory texts.[4] A separate 2024 meta-analysis by Jaime Bayona and William Durán found advantages for case teaching over lectures in knowledge and skills, although it did not establish the same overall advantage for motivation and attitudes.[5]
A story still needs to be relevant and well chosen. It doesn’t teach a concept merely by being entertaining. But it can give learners a situation in which to examine the concept, question it and use it.
Of course, teachers have been doing versions of this for a very long time.
Buddhist teachings make extensive use of stories and parables. The Lotus Sutra’s “Simile and Parable” chapter, for example, includes the story of children in a burning house. Within the teaching, the narrative communicates ideas about danger, understanding and how people can be guided towards safety.[6]
Across many religious traditions, stories offer a way to explore questions about how to live. Think of the Good Samaritan or the Prodigal Son if you are familiar. A person can return to a familiar story at a different stage of life and find a different question waiting there.
This was the connection I had missed when I first encountered Robertson’s cathedral project. In his account, Exeter Cathedral incorporated Flower, a PlayStation 3 game, into worship exploring creation. His wider argument was that games could be considered as meaningful cultural experiences alongside books and films.[7]
The controller changed how someone encountered the experience. It didn’t remove the possibility of reflection.
That also connects with something I have long valued about gaming: the opportunity, in some games, to try a decision, encounter the result and try again within a fictional environment. A review by Isabela Granic and colleagues explored potential cognitive, motivational, emotional and social benefits of gaming.[8] Those possibilities vary considerably with the game and the circumstances. Online interactions and commercial game features introduce their own risks, and success inside a game does not automatically become a skill outside it.
Still, participation adds an interesting question to a story: what happens when I make the choice?
Long before our children pick up a controller, though, they are already encountering stories about how the world works.
Some come from books we read together. Others arrive over dinner, in the car or while we talk about our day.
Who did we trust? What did we notice? How did we describe a mistake? What happened when someone needed help?
We don’t always know which details a child will carry away.
Research on parent–child reminiscing gives us one window into this. In Growing Memories, Claire Mitchell and colleagues followed up a study in which mothers had been coached to talk with their toddlers about past experiences in more elaborative ways. The adolescent follow-up linked that early intervention with aspects of later personal narratives and wellbeing.[9]
Other research shows a more specific route through which expectations can be learned. Peter Muris and colleagues found that information communicated through parents could influence children’s fear beliefs about unfamiliar animals.[10] That is a narrow experimental finding, rather than an explanation for every adult belief. But it illustrates how something we hear can affect what we come to expect.
For me, this invites curiosity rather than blame. The lesson an adult intended and the meaning a child made may have been different. Experiences beyond the family matter too, and our understanding can continue to change.
In my work now, people sometimes begin to notice that a familiar judgement about themselves sounds less like a fact and more like something they learned along the way.
That recognition creates a question: does this still describe me? Does it help me live the life I want now?
This is one reason I use stories and metaphors within coaching.
A person might describe feeling stuck, carrying too much or coming to a crossroads. Before I introduce an image of my own, there may already be something valuable in theirs.
What does “stuck” mean to them? What are they carrying? What can they see from where they are?
The meaning belongs to the person. A metaphor can give us another way to explore their experience, with room for them to notice possibilities and develop their own solutions. A small qualitative study by David Britten explored clients’ metaphors for coaching and the richness of the experiences they described. It offers insight into that use of language, rather than proof that a particular metaphor produces change.[11]
And this is where an important qualification belongs: a story or metaphor can also make communication harder.
Someone may want the main point first. They may enjoy a story but find a long spoken account difficult to follow. An unfamiliar metaphor may add ambiguity when a direct explanation would help.
Neurodivergence makes adapting communication particularly relevant, but it does not give us a reliable shortcut to anyone’s preferences. Kalandadze and colleagues’ meta-analysis found differences in figurative-language comprehension between autistic and non-autistic groups, with core language ability playing an important role; differences were small and nonsignificant when groups were matched on language ability.[12] Dyslexia does not itself imply difficulty understanding spoken stories: research distinguishes decoding difficulties from oral-language difficulties, while recognising that they can coexist.[13] And research on children with ADHD identifies challenges in aspects of narrative organisation; it does not establish a universal preference for storytelling.[14]
So I ask, adapt and check. Would an example help? Shall we make the meaning explicit? Would a diagram be easier?
The map near the beginning of this article is there for precisely that reason. It is also an honest representation of how these connections appeared in my own mind.
In hypnosis, stories, sensory language and imagined experiences can offer further ways to explore a possibility. A client might rehearse responding differently, imagine a place they associate with calm, or work with a metaphor that makes sense to them. Visual imagery is one option; people vary in how they experience imagination.
There is relevant neuroscience here, although it deserves careful language. Nadine Dijkstra and colleagues reviewed evidence of substantial overlap between processes involved in imagining and seeing, alongside important differences.[15] It would be a leap to turn that into a claim that the brain cannot distinguish imagination from reality, or that every story recreates the same experience in every listener.
Then I watched Karen Eber’s TED talk, How your brain responds to stories—and why they’re crucial for leaders, and found myself making connections across all these experiences.[16]
The cathedral. My classroom. Gaming with my sons. The stories families share. The language people use when they are trying to understand themselves.
Eber explores how leaders can use stories alongside data to help people engage with an idea. Research by Greg Stephens, Lauren Silbert and Uri Hasson found coupling between aspects of a storyteller’s and listeners’ brain activity during communication.[17] That is fascinating evidence, without needing to claim that brains become identical or that a story guarantees trust.
It also brings me back to a very practical leadership question: what does this information mean to the people hearing it?
I had met versions of that question as a teacher, a parent, “a bit of a gamer” and now as a coach. Watching the talk helped me see the connections together.
Perhaps that is why the exchange on Twitter stayed with me for so long. Longer than the app did….I had asked why someone would put a PlayStation in a cathedral. Someone replied, gave me something to consider, and allowed me to make a connection for myself.
Years later, I am still finding meaning in it.
If you are beginning to question a familiar story about yourself, that can be a useful place to start a coaching conversation. We can explore where it came from, what it means to you now and what you would like to do next.
References and further reading
1. Hyde, J. S. (2005). The gender similarities hypothesis.
2. Cutrona, C. E., et al. (2007). Optimally matching support and perceived spousal sensitivity.
3. Feinberg, M., Willer, R., Stellar, J., & Keltner, D. (2012). The virtues of gossip: Reputational information sharing as prosocial behavior.
4. Mar, R. A., Li, J., Nguyen, A. T. P., & Ta, C. P. (2021). Memory and comprehension of narrative versus expository texts: A meta-analysis.
5. Bayona, J. A., & Durán, W. F. (2024). A meta-analysis of the influence of case method and lecture teaching on cognitive and affective learning outcomes.
6. Lotus Sutra, chapter 3: Simile and Parable. Religious primary text.
7. Robertson, A. (2012). Finding the meaning in video games. First-person TED Blog article.
8. Granic, I., Lobel, A., & Engels, R. C. M. E. (2014). The benefits of playing video games.
9. Mitchell, C., et al. (2022). Growing Memories: Coaching mothers in elaborative reminiscing with toddlers benefits adolescents’ turning-point narratives and wellbeing.
10. Muris, P., et al. (2010). Mom told me scary things about this animal: Parents installing fear beliefs in their children via the verbal information pathway.
11. Britten, D. (2015). Felt sense and figurative space: Clients’ metaphors for their experiences of coaching.
12. Kalandadze, T., et al. (2018). Figurative language comprehension in individuals with autism spectrum disorder: A meta-analytic review.
13. Snowling, M. J., et al. (2020). Dyslexia and developmental language disorder: Comorbid disorders with distinct effects on reading comprehension.
14. Jepsen, I., et al. (2022). A systematic review and meta-analysis of narrative language abilities in children with ADHD.
15. Dijkstra, N., Bosch, S. E., & van Gerven, M. A. J. (2019). Shared Neural Mechanisms of Visual Perception and Imagery.
16. Eber, K. (2020; posted 2021). How your brain responds to stories—and why they’re crucial for leaders. TEDx talk and transcript.
17. Stephens, G. J., Silbert, L. J., & Hasson, U. (2010). Speaker–listener neural coupling underlies successful communication.
Teresa Harris Boag is an Executive Coach & Behavioural Change Specialist and founder of ETCH – Elevate Training, Coaching & Hypnosis UK Limited. A former Assistant Headteacher with more than 23 years in education, she brings leadership experience, neurodivergent and emotions coaching, and hypnotherapy to her work with individuals and organisations.