Video War Games Veteran Coping With Digital Flashbacks

Randy, an avid war-gamer, is having game flashbacks, and suffering from Post Traumatic Gaming Syndrome (PTGS).

His heart is racing faster than a hummingbird on crack cocaine, his muscles are as tense as knotted steel, and perspiration soaks his clothing like a giant sponge. There isn't much help for those like Randy who continue to suffer. Randy is a PC wargame veteran, and a victim of Post Traumatic Gaming Syndrome (PTGS).

PTGS was first identified around the time of the first video arcade games, sometime in the mid-to-late 1970s. In the early days of gaming, people scoffed at the peculiar condition, as no one truly believed that video games could causes stress--they were meant to relieve it!

"If you told your doctor that you were having flashbacks of Pac-Man's pixelated pastel-coloured ghosts hunting for your soul, he'd have laughed you right of his office," said Dr. Max Payne, one of a handful of psychologists specializing in gamer-related psychological conditions. "Or you had visions of a giant monkey stealing your girlfriend and hurling oil barrels down at you, you'd probably be admitted for observation. It wasn't until the release of Doom that the medical profession started to take PTGS seriously--far too late for a generation already lost to Space Invaders, Hamburger Sam, and Joust."

The disorder is better understood now, and wargaming veterans, those computer geeks that spent far-too-many "tours of duty" playing Quake, Unreal, and Half-Life, are now starting to get the help they need.

"Post-gaming flashbacks aren't that unusual, but the experience is just that much more intense for players of Counter-Strike or any of the Tom Clancy games, although it has been known to occur in immersive first-person games such as Deus Ex and System Shock II," said Dr. Payne. "But really, it's not any different than when you've played too many hours of Tetris. For the victim, the blocks will continue to fall, and fall and fall and fall."

PTGS sufferers may not be aware that they are suffering. They may conclude that it is just a residual effect from playing video games from dusk until dawn every weekend.

"Those in the military have resources available to help them deal with stress," said Dr. Payne, "but the gamer, living entirely in isolation either in his parents' basement or above their garage, not only has no coping mechanism, but often is not even aware that there is a real world not more than five feet from their monitor."

But it isn't just the gamers playing habits that are responsible. Games have become so visually complex that it's difficult to distinguish gaming from reality. War games in particular are so immersive, the sounds so true, and the polygon counts so high it's inevitable that gamers will not only believe their environments are real, but mentally suffer as if they were.

Gamers that play hour after hour of Call Of Duty or Medal Of Honor can still hear the bombs going off in their heads, even days after they have stopped playing. Teenagers that immerse themselves in a Tom Clancy game will tend to sneak around their own homes as a residual effect from the stealthy in-game missions.

"I'm afraid to close my eyes," said Randy quietly. "I keep seeing the simulated grenades and sprite-based rockets exploding all around my virtually-mapped environment. I hear the 16-bit sounds echoing in my ears. I see my own animated death, but then I respawn, forced to replay the same level over and over again in my head."