Coming Soon: War Video Game Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder?

[REVISION: After the first two responses below, I revised this post slightly to clarify the question posed. I've added some notes below on sources and will follow this tomorrow with a post reviewing psychological research on the subject.]

With the holiday launch of Infinity Ward's Call of Duty 2 and Bungie Studio's HALO 3, you might want to prepare your kids for more than their new game boxes. Prepare them for dealing with potential trauma, and reality. While the US military uses war video games to help returning combat veterans cope with post-traumatic stress as they ramp down from the psychological challenges of war, many adolescents are ramping up with exciting and tense shooting games of a different nature.

For starters, watch the many long trailers game makers offer on the sites to get a feel for what players see. The games are more powerful, life-like and gorgeous than ever. A scrawny thirteen-year-old with keen eye sight and a nimble thumb can now very quickly master the Mark-19 automatic grenade launcher, rapel from a helicopter, and kill about three hundred and fifty strangers without leaving the comfort of his Harry Potter bean bag chair. But what will be the toll?

Now I jump in here with proud video war game experiences from my youth. But perhaps the most illuminating moment came a few years back when I was helping a teenager who was quadraplegic. The boy had just gotten into the university and quickly fallen for a girl across the hall. He also had spino-muscular atrophe, so his body and hands were not capable of hugging or gripping, much less wooing the girl of his dreams. And so he absolutely loved escaping that tension by getting on his Wii and blowing the Hell out of space troopers, battleships, tie fighters, commandos, and anything else he could do digitally. Visually it was stunning, and no one was getting hurt.

When I met him, Rockstar Games' Grand Theft Auto II had just come out, so I stood in as his surrogate hands. He would shout "Go in there! Turn! Okay, now steal that car!" We'd have a blast driving through the city. "Okay now get out of the car and go in that building. There's a sniper rifle." Okay, so I pick up the rifle. "Go to the roof. This is cool. Watch!" I move up to the roof. Down below are the cops trying to bust us for stealing the car. "Shoot that cop!" It's a game, I aim in, pull the trigger. That's when I realized how different the new games had become. We could see the bullet enter the character's head and blood explode out the back. I turn to my young friend. "Why don't we just steal cars or rob banks or explore?" He became furious. "Take the gun and shoot that old lady!" "No!" I argued. "Shoot her!" "No!" That was it, maybe the end of the friendship. "Mom!!!" He yelled. "Daniel won't let me play my game!"

Question is, are these games going to keep getting more real and more bloody to the point that players can experienced prolonged hyper-vigilance or even trauma? (See sources below and in a follow up post which will be linked here shortly)

Teenagers may want to learn about violence perhaps to find some power they don't have in real life. Banning or prohibiting the games will only drive the games overseas or underground. The game makers explain that they try to make the games so that the player can choose to do good, like save hostages. If the players choose to kill indiscriminately, that's not necessarily the game makers' intentions.

Parents and concerned people who wonder whether kids bring the violence to the game or whether the game plants a seed in their mind that wasn't there beforehand would do best not necessarily to commit themselves to banning such games but perhaps to finding better games which give kids that chance to be a powerful adult, perhaps even see some fireworks, but which are more about saving lives, exploring new worlds.

According to reader Kelsey Atherton (below) and game sales rankings, war shooter games are not the most popular games among the player population, so other games are out there. Another way parents and concerned people can counter whatever potential effects these violent games have is to talk to the kids about the affects of violent video games which may include heightened tension, aggression, re-experiencing of previous traumas related to violence. Considering the literature, I pose the question. Although video-games obviously do not physically traumatize the player, could prolonged hyper-vigilance, tension, and exposure to gore not only numb the player but also lead to a new variant form of PTSD? (Sources below)

War video games are not all bad. They can be great fun. The point here, like with whether to allow your kids to see war films or join the military (yes, seventeen-year-old kids), is how to introduce it to them so that they get the most productive experience rather than the rare but well-documented side effects. It's a complex topic and like anything else could be healthy or unhealthy depending on the kind of experience.

Before participating in the discussion below, I again highly recommend going to Call of Duty 2 and watching four or five trailers in a row so that you can feel what players enjoy, what the sustained exposure feels like, if you don't have the game at home. The trailers go from abstract violence to some pretty ugly hand-to-hand combat. They're visually stunning.

[Photo by Simononly.]