A Game So Real It Can Replace Reality

The New Yorker had an interesting article on how psychologists are helping soldiers who return from Iraq with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder conquer the disorder through an elaborate desensitization program. That program uses a Virtual Iraq, which the psychologist runs like a conductor leading an orchestra, in order to repeat certain, stress-inducing stimuli until those stimuli cease to affect the soldier. Or that’s the theory anyway. From the article:

Virtual Iraq is a tool for doing what’s known as prolonged-exposure therapy, which is sometimes called immersion therapy. It is a kind of cognitive-behavioral therapy, derived from Pavlov’s classic work with dogs. Prolonged-exposure therapy, which falls under the rubric of C.B.T., is at once intuitively obvious and counterintuitive: it requires the patient to revisit and retell the story of the trauma over and over again and, through a psychological process called “habituation,” rid it of its overwhelming power. The idea is to disconnect the memory from the reactions to the memory, so that although the memory of the traumatic event remains, the everyday things that can trigger fear and panic, such as trash blowing across the interstate or a car backfiring—what psychologists refer to as cues—are restored to insignificance. The trauma thus becomes a discrete event, not a constant, self-replicating, encompassing condition.

Here is one question that the article raised for me: if virtual environments — especially ones that are not unlike video games, as Virtual Iraq seems to be — can help to desensitize PTSD patients to their traumas, does that also mean, by extension, that virtual environments can desensitize the population at large to violence, as video game detractors often argue? Now, I recently blogged on Grand Theft Childhood, the book that argues that there is no proven causal link between playing video games and increased violence in children, and I personally don’t believe that games and virtual environments can brainwash us so simply and completely. But obviously, under a psychologist’s care, and under the right conditions, virtual environments can desensitize us. Here it’s being used for good. But, as much as I love games, does this raise a legitimate point about the ability of games to influence our minds?

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