PTSD from a video game?

"What troubles me, is not that video game violence is becoming more and more like real life violence, but that real life violence is starting to look more and more like a video game."

-As Real as Your Life

I've just been pondering this statement in light of my previous post on violence as the quest for self identity. I know very little about the military, what I do know comes from movies and video games. I do know that the real world battlefield is becoming more like a video game, with remotely controlled aircraft, automated assault, and bomb diffusion robots. War has evolved tremendously over the course of human development. Thus far, the soldier has had to often confront his enemy as another human being. Today, and into the future, we will be confronting our enemies as data, as bits and blips on the same screen you're reading this text. Most people would argue, naively, that this is a positive separation.

Here's a crazy fact: There are pilots of remotely controlled military aircraft, who basically show up for work every day, play what looks like a high tech shoot'em up video game, and then go home to their wives and kids. They are the ones who suffer the highest rate of post traumatic stress disorder. Maybe it would be better to tell them it was just a game. Think about that for a while...

I learned that last fact in a talk I recently saw by military theorist P.W. Singer.

AMY GOODMAN: The relationship with games? You write that the best pilot is an eighteen-year-old kid who trained on an [Xbox] video game...?

P.W. SINGER: Yeah. He was actually a high school dropout who wanted to join the military to make his father proud. He wanted to be a helicopter mechanic. And they said, “Well, you failed your high school English course, so you’re not qualified to be a mechanic. But would you like to be a drone pilot?” And he said, “Sure.” And it turned out, because of playing on video games, he was already good at it. He was naturally trained up. And he turned out to be so good that they brought him back from Iraq and made him an instructor in the training academy, even though he’s an enlisted man and he’s still—he was nineteen...