The best-known SnowWorld player is lieutenant Sam Brown who, during his first tour of duty in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 2008, suffered third degree burns over 30% of his body. An IED buried in a road hit the vehicle he was travelling in and exploded into a fireball, engulfing Brown in flames. His injuries were so severe he had to be kept in a medically induced coma for several weeks. Back in the US, Brown endured more than two dozen painful surgeries, but none were as bad as the daily ritual of caring for his wounds. When nurses attended to his burns and helped him perform the necessary physical therapies, he experienced the most excruciating pain.
In 2012, NBC News reported on Brown’s experience and how the pain of dressing burn wounds could be so intense it could make patients relive the original trauma. In Brown’s case the procedures were so unbearable that on some occasions his superior officers had to order him to undergo treatment.
For Brown, help arrived not in the form of new kinds of medicines or dressings, but by a video game. Brown was one of the first participants in SnowWorld’s pilot study, which was designed in conjunction with the US military, to test whether it really could help wounded soldiers.
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