Q. A lot of your work has focused on supporting members of the armed services –Bravemind on the therapeutic side for veterans diagnosed with PTSD and pre-deployment combat stress management with STRIVE. What was the genesis of your emphasis on this population?

A. I always had an interest in helping veterans. I had previously worked with PTSD patients, primarily Vietnam-era veterans, during a clinical internship at the Veterans Administration in Long Beach back in 1985. Fast forward to 2003, I saw a video clip announcing the XBox game Full Spectrum Warrior – and it struck me just like the situation in Iraq. I was following the events of the war and thought we simply cannot have another Vietnam. We’ve got to be ready for these folks to come home and this technology is looking good enough that we can develop these kind of exposure therapy applications to be prepared. Though most people weren’t thinking that mental health and re-entry issues were going to be a problem as we were still in the ‘Mission-Accomplished’ era.

As it happens, I found out about Full Spectrum Warrior game because it was on the ICT website. ICT had received a contract from the U.S. Army and hired Pandemic Games to create it as a combat tactical simulation tool that the Army could use with the XBox for training because they had so much success with America’s Army as an online recruitment game. They wanted to go all in for training with squad tactics as you could put an interface into an XBox and it would unlock actual missions.

I went to ICT with a mission to take the art assets from the game and build it in away that allows the clinician to control the elements and put people in different locations. I paired up with Jarrell Pair who was the programmer and we pitched it to ICT and built a primitive prototype – with basically no funding – by Spring of 2004. We yanked one street out of Full Spectrum Warrior and put a person in headset running VR off of a laptop … and different keys on the keyboard would make things happen. Toggle would change the illumination in the environment from morning to afternoon to night … push a button and a bunch of guys in a jeep with guns would come pouring out of an alleyway and start firing … or an insurgent would pop up, or a helicopter would fly over. That was the root of all that came next.