Loading ...Posttraumatic Stress Disorder is one of the most debilitating conditions afflicting veterans, accident sufferers, and anybody else who has witnessed something too substantially awful for the human mind to process. But now we have a tool to fight it… Nintendo!
Wait…what?
Okay, so it’s not exclusively Nintendo, but rather the game of Tetris in general that has been proven as a sort of ‘cognitive vaccine’ to the disorder in recent studies. If you, immediately following a traumatic event, whip out some Tetris and organize Commie blocks (instead of doing something more logical like calling the police, praying, or just going to your happy place where adorable penguin waiters serve liquid sunshine in buttercup glasses,) the likelihood of later PTSD flashbacks can be drastically reduced. This is because the brain has limited capacity and finite resources, and so occupying the part of your brain that generates mental images with something innocuous (like Tetris,) instead of something mind-bogglingly awful (like watching your best friend get raped by a Velociraptor,) can effectively do away with one of the worst aspects of PTSD.
In order for the effect to work, however, you have to immediately play the game after a traumatic event for about half an hour… which may make you seem a little callous when your best friend dies face down in the mud for the freedom of this country and you, in response, promptly whip out your Gameboy and start puzzle-solving.
It’s not just Tetris though; the part of your brain responsible for imprinting flashback images is the Visuospatial Recognition Center, and thus any Visuospatial game can do the trick. So feel free to mix it up, because though Tetris is definitely appropriate for the more serious situations, like war and murder, it seems a bit severe for somewhat less harrowing trauma, like walking in on your parents having sex. To deal with situations like that, maybe try something like Puzzle Bobble:
The cutesy dinosaurs and candy-like orbs might provide you with that extra little bit of comfort that helps to get your father’s ‘O-face’ out of your head before it permanently imprints, and you start to involuntarily recall it in other sexual situations. Because suffering from serious PTSD at least implies that you’ve been in some serious shit, and may get you some well-deserved sympathy – but nobody feels bad for the guy that just thinks of his dad every time he gets a boner.
For PTSD resulting from events that you’ve inflicted upon yourself, like trying to emulate Jackass stunts with your jackass friends, try something more like Dr. Mario:
The grating music and infuriating sound effects that accompany those descending viruses which destroy everything you’ve spent the entire game carefully crafting could serve as a suitable reprimand for wounds suffered by virtue of one’s own idiocy.
But perhaps most intriguing here is the way that these studies were conducted: Student volunteers were isolated in rooms where televisions played horrific, graphic scenes of injury and death for a length of time, after which they were allowed a half-hour long break. Some of the students were told to play Tetris during this break, while others were asked to sit quietly and do nothing. After a week, the students returned to report on any flashbacks they may have had, overall feelings of tension and depression, or sleep disruption due to the imagery.
Considering that the nature of these psychological experiments can’t be revealed beforehand for fear of skewed results– that was a pretty intensely fucked up thing for those volunteers to go through. Think about it: You sign up for psych research, thinking you’ll have to guess at hidden playing cards, or feel fruit with a blindfold on, or whatever other bizarre but ultimately harmless thing these tests usually consist of, and instead you get locked in a room watching torture and death, are told to play some Nintendo, and then you return a week later to rate your now-recurring nightmares on a scale of 1 to Life-scarring.
Though the control group (the ones that sat quietly and did nothing,) ultimately suffered more PTSD in the long run, at least the scenario made more sense to them: They were shown some fucked up shit, asked to absorb it, and then report back on how it affected them. They probably just think those scientists are epic dickheads. But the Tetris group? They will now forever puzzle over why, exactly, they were forced to watch graphic torture, told to play some retro video games, and then asked to rate precisely how destroyed their lives now were. They must’ve thought the scientists had long since gone mad, or else Nintendo was just doing market research for a seriously fucked up new version of Tetris.
You can read more from Robert at his own site, I Fight Robots
