Limit the amount of viral violence your children are exposed to. It's not just radio games and movies; children see a lot of murder and crime on the local news.
For them, the right kind of gamification might be turning their sales pitches into a competition with other team members, complete with a digital leaderboard showing who is winning at all times.
Their play, and ours, appears to serve no other purpose than to give pleasure to the players, and apparently, to remove us temporarily from the anguish of life in earnest.
In Tuesday's column, I explained how an organization called Playworks is helping to address this problem by placing full-time coaches in schools to teach children how to manage their play.
The best thing is to let children encounter these challenges from an early age, and they will then progressively learn to master them through their play over the years.