Modern Warfare: Video Game Playing and Posttraumatic Symptoms in Veterans

Abstract

Many of the current generation of veterans grew up with video games, including military first-person shooter (MFPS) video games. In MFPS games, players take the role of soldiers engaged in combat in environments modeled on real-life warzones. Exposure to trauma-congruent game content may either serve to exacerbate or to ameliorate posttraumatic symptoms. The current study examined the relationship between MFPS and other shooter video game playing and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms among current and former members of the military (N = 111). Results indicated that video game play was very common, and 41.4% of participants reported playing MFPS or other shooter games (shooter players group). The shooter players group reported higher levels of PTSD symptoms than participants who did not play any video or shooter games (nonshooter/nonplayers group; d = 0.44); however, playing shooter games was not predictive of PTSD symptoms after accounting for personality, combat exposure, and social support variables. This may indicate that the same psychosocial factors predict both PTSD and shooter video game play. Although veterans may benefit from the development and use of clinical applications of video games in PTSD treatment, clinical attention should continue to focus on established psychosocial predictors of PTSD symptoms.

Commercial video games as a resource for mental health: A systematic literature review

“…The remaining four studies (Etter et al, 2017;Kaufman and Zhang, 2015;Rowntree and Fenney, 2019;Sundberg, 2018) employ surveys to explore the impact of playing on mental health. For example, Rowntree and Fenney (2019) used a cross-sectional survey to ask outpatients attending an Irish general adult mental health service about their gaming activity and the perceived impact it had on their mental health.…”

“…A first group of 9 papers (Colder Carras et al, 2018;Cutler et al, 2016;Elliott et al, 2015;Etter et al, 2017;Finke et al, 2018;Gallup and Serianni, 2017;Kaufman and Zhang, 2015;Rowntree and Fenney, 2019;Sundberg, 2018) investigates why and how people play with video games in their everyday life, with the aim to discover both their potential benefits and drawbacks for mental health.…”

“…The last paper (Etter et al, 2017), instead, examines the relationship between playing and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms among current and former members of the military.…”

“…FPS games, as well as their variant called Military FPS (MFPS), are used to address PTSD among members of the military in 2 articles (Elliott et al, 2015;Etter et al, 2017). They depict a gaming environment that is often modeled on real-life warzones and experienced from a first-person point of view: players interact within this world as soldiers having the objective of killing enemies.…”

The Paradox of Interactive Media: The Potential for Video Games and Virtual Reality as Tools for Violence Prevention

“…With exception of Malazita and Jenkins (2017), these studies mostly examine college-aged students unlikely to represent a broader spectrum of developmental stages and thus, there is a broad need for replication and extension of this work to consider more diverse populations-even more relevant given claims that gaming experiences are increasingly ubiquitous (Bogost, 2011). To give a rather specific example of emerging research into specific gaming populations, there is a growing body of research on combat veterans using video games as a coping mechanism for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD; see Banks and Cole, 2016;Colder Carras et al, 2018), including violent and military-themed first-person shooters (Elliott et al, 2015;Etter et al, 2017). This work is comparatively nascent in the broader literature on violent video games, early results suggest that rather than serving as triggers of PTSD, these games served both short-term (mood management and stress reduction) and long-term (well-being and socialization) psychological outcomes, although veterans also expressed concerns about maladaptive coping (such as playing excessively; Colder Carras et al, 2018).…”