In the news, virtual reality immersion in combat environs eases post-traumatic stress disorder. Psychologists contributing to the VR include USC's Albert Rizzo, quoted: "We're very enthusiastic that this is really going to start to make a difference."
Want to make a difference? Rather than placating the aftereffects of a trauma, make the during-traumatic stress virtual instead of real, too. Make games, not war.
Psychological substitutes for war are not a new notion. It's been a prominent theme at least since the Great War. As the Harvard physician, Walter Cannon noted in 1929's Bodily Changes in pain, hunger, fear and rage:
"No large acquaintance with the character of warfare is necessary to prove that when elemental anger, hate and fear prevail, civilized conventions are abandoned and the most savage instincts determine conduct. Homes are looted and burned, women and children are abominably treated, and many innocents are murdered outright or starved to death" (page 380).
Given that Cannon recognized "scarcely a decade passes without a kindling of martial emotions," (378) he recommended games as a substitute for war. This was 1929, so he recommended Olympic sports to satisfy the human instinct for rage and conflict, which that book cites experimental proof thereof. Sports he says relieves this rage:
"As explained in an earlier chapter, in competitive sports the elemental factors are retained--man is again pitted against man, and all the resources of the body are summoned in the eager struggle for victory" (387).
That was 1929. Now, in 2007, a new alternative is available. If psychologists, programmers, and artists can digitally emulate the environment and conditions of war through technologies of virtual reality, they could do so to preempt the actual war. Whereas advocates of media censorship harp on violent videogames, such things as videogames could be a step in the direction of venting steam from normal, healthy humans who have the evolutionary baggage of rage, which served species' dire competition when survival resources were scarce, but whose instincts threaten mass destruction now that resources for survival and extermination are plentiful.
Rather than federally funding America's Army, the videogame to recruit youths to fight and one day need post-traumatic stress VR to salvage their damaged brains, how about converting America's Army into America's Sports or America's Playground, where the combat is recognized as play and kept as play, and the only recruiters around are for VR tournaments.