Today, the learning individual is at the center of teaching. The goal is to enable people – through self-directed learning – to participate reflectively in the information society. In this context, the linguistic diversity is of particular concern in L2 classrooms. Therefore, counseling language learners is becoming increasingly important for teachers to promote language learning autonomy (Claußen & Deutschmann 2014). In a practice-oriented seminar at the University of Bamberg, we train student teachers in systemic-constructivist counseling before they conduct online coaching with school students. To enable student teachers to reflect comprehensively on the importance of conversational techniques, virtual gaming simulations (VGS) guide them through different phases of the conversation. At meaningful moments in the coaching simulation, the students – taking in the counselor’s perspective – select the most appropriate behavior towards the coachee from a pool of possible reactions. Subsequently, the resulting flow of the conversation will help them to evaluate the suitability of the reaction. In that way, the interactional scope of the counselors expands as they learn to anticipate the consequences of their actions (Brookfield 2017). Thus, the VGS format works on all facets of Martinez’ (2021) counseling competence model. This holistic approach to competence development also reflects the process of counseling, which is composed of different, interacting levels of understanding (Königs 2015). Since, in addition to the educational-psychological studies, unlimited practical experience would best prepare future teachers for their profession (cf. Groundwater-Smith et al. 1996), VGS provide a remedy: student teachers can gain experience in a protected setting without doing ‘harm’ to the student body. While various educational fields have implemented VGS already, their promising opportunities in teacher education are far from being fully exploited (Bradley 2020).