I have been playing computer games since the late 1980s. The first computer game I played, Sleuth, was composed of ASCII graphics and text. You were trapped, Agatha Christie style, in a mansion with several other houseguests, one of whom was a killer. It was fun, but you definitely couldn’t say that the graphics were immersive or anything approaching virtual reality. In Sleuth, your viewpoint was an overhead view of a very simple floor plan. But since then, computer games have evolved, and graphically they are now as far from Sleuth as the space shuttle is from a caveman’s wheel.

As I said in a recent blog piece, I have often used computer games to escape from depression in the past. In fact, an increase in my computer game time is often my first indication that I’ve become depressed. So, as you can imagine, I was intrigued when I heard that scientists from the National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH) had done a study utilizing virtual reality technology from a computer game to measure the severity of depression in the study’s subjects.

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