In the most recent New Yorker magazine, an article details how the Defense Department is using virtual reality gaming software to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, an mental illness afflicting soldiers coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan. The program, which takes soldiers back into the streets and battles in Iraq with scenes that look identical to a kid's upscale video game, is called Virtual Iraq.

More than a year before, Nextgov editor at large Bob Brewin wrote an article about using virtual reality to treat PTSD while working for Government Health IT. If you think gaming software – or virtual reality exposure therapy, as its practitioners call it – has no place in treating these soldiers suffering from PTSD, consider this from Brewin's article:

. . . Marine Cpl. Nicholas Beberniss, badly wounded by an anti-tank mine in Iraq, said virtual reality therapy helped him overcome his fears.

During his treatment for physical wounds at the Naval Medical Center San Diego, Beberniss volunteered for the virtual reality treatment. By studying his reaction to computer images of Iraq war zones, Beberniss was able to isolate situations that caused him stress, [Virtual Iraq inventor Albert Rizzo, a clinical psychologist at the University of Southern California] wrote [in a paper on the program].

Because of the virtual reality therapy, Beberniss also learned that his psychological reaction to the anti-tank explosion that wounded him was normal and helped him “realize it was an accident and nothing else,” Rizzo said.

The New Yorker reported similar results:

Of the five subjects who had completed treatment, four no longer met the diagnostic criteria for PTSD. A fifth soldier showed no gain. Rizzo would add, a few months later, the results for 10 others, eight of whom had got better.

Much like a therapist would take a subject back to a disturbing time to work through painful events, Virtual Iraq takes soldiers back to the war zone. A soldier told the magazine that Virtual Iraq, along with visuals, adds the sounds and smells of war, making it nightmarishly real -- but effective in coming over PTSD. "When it’s only visual, it’s not really real—it’s just a video game—but when the ground starts vibrating and you smell smoke and hear the AK-47 firing, it becomes very real. I’d be shaking. When it was over, I’d go home and cry."

With the New Yorker article, the usefulness of virtual reality and online gaming in government is becoming more evident, as Tech Insider blogger Anne Laurent wrote in her Agile Mind blog on May 13: "When the best magazine in America devotes six pages to a subject, you know it has arrived, so the transformation of online video games to real life is now official."