What Shouldn't be Alarming to Those Arming: Video Games Add to Soldiers' Trauma

January 11, 2007--Recognition is beginning to dawn in some places that there is an unholy relationship between the combat stress that soldiers are subjected to in Iraq and the killer video game culture that they come out of when they join the military. Steve Robinson, a well known veterans' advocate who is now involved in developing programs to try to mitigate the effects of combat stress on soldiers involved in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, reported that he is now warning senior military leaders to keep soldiers in the combat zone away from video games. Robinson reported that in a recent predeployment training session, he told senior leaders that "The worst thing you can do is let your 19 to 25 year old soldier, who comes off the battlefield, go back to his forward operating base, get off a combat mission and keep his brain in combat mode by playing Halo 3 for the next four hours." He said that what the soldier who does this is doing is continuing to engage and replay in his head the day's events via the video game.

"What you really should be doing," Robinson said, "is giving the brain the opportunity to reset... to clear from your mind as much as possible the negative effects of what you witnessed that day because if you let it continue to play in your mind, what you end up doing is creating a trough." The effect is like pouring water down a hillside from a bucket. The water will find a natural path down the hill, and the more water is poured from the same spot, the deeper the path and the quicker the water reaches the bottom of the hill. "It's the same thing in creating these neuronal networks" in the brain, Robinson said. "If you get off the mission and go to the video game, all you're doing is reinforcing the speed with which that path travels and the response time that your brain and your body has to what it sees, and it also becomes deeper and more ingrained."

The next step, of course, is to more broadly recognize that these killer video games need to be banned altogether.