War takes a terrible toll, not just in lives lost but in psyches shattered. Depression in the armed forces is widespread, and suicide rates among members of the military are higher than they've ever been. In addition to more traditional treatments, soldiers have been looking to video games to help them cope with the…
By now, you should all be aware of the 1997 incident in Japan where a number of children were hospitalised after watching an episode of Pokémon. It was weird, and more than a little dangerous.
When you're a problem solver like Joe Ricks, nothing stands between you and your dream. For Ricks, the dream was the holy grail of any kid growing up attached to a controller: making video games. So determined was the cash-strapped man, that he risked it all to get the education he needed. Joe Ricks enlisted and went…
I've always gotten the sense that a lot of men and women in the United States Armed Forces enjoy a good game of Call of Duty—the fast-paced first-person shooter is a good way to blow off steam.
With only a few short weeks before Christmas, Razer prepares to take preorders on their dedicated gaming laptop, the Razer Blade. Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan explains what's changed since the "world's first true gaming laptop" was revealed in August, and talks about the Army origins of the laptop's sleek and sexy design.
This week was the first time we heard of publisher 505 Games' Blackwater, an FPS that would cast you in the role of Blackwater Worldwide mercenaries. The topic seemed thorny—the mercenary company, now renamed Xe Services LLC., has been at the center of a multiple of controversies and the subject of highly critical…
You thought laptop glare was murder on your eyes? Try sending a fleet of wheeled robots down into the horrors of battle using nothing but your icy stare.
Brothers Ondrej and Marek Spanel—who spent their childhood in communist Czechoslovakia playing Atari games "bought on the black market"—are the surprising originators behind a military-training game employed by the governments of at least five major nations. Among the brothers' sources of inspiration: heavy metal…
Are you desperate to take your videogame performance to the next level—and willing to indulge in some high-risk behavior? Hint: you'll need a 9-volt battery and a wet sponge!
Long hours, hard work, crap weather. Then there's the boredom, the long hours of boredom, followed by the bursts of heart-pounding adrenaline. This is war.
In movies humans fight off alien occupation forces, explode alien ships, and mind-control aliens with the power of love. How on earth can we think that would happen?
Everybody knows that armed forces around the world train using what are essentially advanced video games, but it's rare we actually get to see one in action up-close like this.
Stars and Stripes, the foremost independent publication covering the United States military, examined the Army and Air Force's recent decision to forbid Medal of Honor from being sold in their exchanges. One enlisted man blasted the decision as shortsighted.
You can call the devices the U.S. Army is testing out at Fort Dix in New Jersey wrist mounted phosphorescent OLED Displays is you want. We're calling them PIPBoys.
It's amazing, even years after getting out of the Army, how much it colors your everyday life.
A U.S. soldier plays Red Faction: Guerrilla inside his tent at a forward operating base in Dand district of Kandahar Province in Afghanistan. as seen on Boston.com - thanks Gordon.
The Army is remaking its basic training for the first time in 30 years to cope with a generation that, as the general in charge says, has a courage and physique shaped by, you guessed it, video games.
Back in 2006, the US Army approached Microsoft with a lucrative contract offer: supply a ton of Xbox 360 consoles to the Army for the purposes of training soldiers. Microsoft's answer? No, thank you.
Army officers are practicing counterinsurgency strategies for Iraq with using a video game plainly inspired by SimCity. In fact, a frustrated officer unprepared for the fall of Baghdad asked for such a thing by name years ago.
Soldiers who grew up in the burbs playing video games instead of shooting varmints in the country, or avoiding trouble in a bad neighborhood, are singled out by Army research as particularly poor at spotting roadside bombs.