I am an air traffic controller! The rhythm of a shift is unpredictable. One minute I am idly tapping my foot along to blippy electro-funk; the next I am frantically giving orders to six aircraft at once and breathing a huge sigh of relief as one plane that is landing just misses blasting into the rear of another plane taking off from the same runway. Keep your holding pattern, flight 701. Flight 305, you are cleared to taxi. Flight 504, go to gate 16. Oh no, hang on…

There is a class of videogames built specifically to inculcate a feeling of what we might characterise as “cognitive panic”. Caught in a blizzard of decision procedures, the player has no leisure to plan but must manage a constant emergency. Moments of cognitive panic provide the adrenaline juice in most action games, whether you are defending an immobilized tank from marauders on all sides in COD4 or slicing round a corner while making weapon-management decisions in WipEout HD; but it’s real-time strategy games — such as the DS’s lovely Air Traffic Chaos — that are, fundamentally, hardcore cognitive-panic toys.

The obvious question is: why is cognitive panic pleasurable? When we experience it in real life, on one of those days where everything goes wrong simultaneously and there seems to be a never-ending hail of demands on your attention, it’s not usually very welcome. Indeed, the phrase “cognitive panic” is sometimes used in psychiatric medicine, to describe a panic attack with the mental symptoms (”fear of losing control or going crazy”) but not the physical ones (”feeling of choking”, “nausea”) described in the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual (DSMIV). Why would videogamers seek out the kind of stress that makes people seek professional help?

At the Naval Medical Center in San Diego, soldiers returning from war with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder are encouraged to play through reconstructions in a “virtual Iraq”, where things are initially calm, but then violent events and sensory overload are gradually ramped up so as finally to replicate the original trauma as closely as possible. Navy psychologist Karen Perlman was quoted in the LA Times last year as explaining: “Habituation occurs when they repeat their story over and over again. They start to learn they can tolerate their distress, they can work through it.” The treatment depends on the stress not being somehow diluted, but replicated as closely as possible, so that the patient can learn to manage it. Still, the fact that the “virtual Iraq” is known to be imaginary provides a crucial safety valve. “The great thing about virtual reality,” said research leader Lt. Cmdr. Robert McLay, “is that you can turn it off.”

On a more trivial level, could it be that cognitive panic as entertainment performs a low-level therapeutic role? If I learn to sail through the Expert levels of Air Traffic Chaos with a super-functioning Zen serenity, will I be better equipped to handle stressful situations in real life? Well, one should hesitate to make such general claims. The daddy of technical air-traffic-control simulators on the PC, ATCSimulator2, is pretty much obligatory among those who intend to train as air traffic controllers in real life, but you wouldn’t necessarily recommend it as an essential adjunct to a student of brain surgery. (She would want Trauma Centre, of course.) On the other hand, an ability to manage cognitive panic looks as though it ought to be high on the list of potentially “transferable” or generalizable skills that we can practise in videogames. More research on this question is needed.

Conversely, though, one might also wonder whether part of the reason why the generation of videogamers in their thirties and older express an increasing dissatisfaction with modern games is that maturing adults derive less and less pleasure from the unnecessary engineering of cognitive panic. After all, they’ve got enough to worry about with the credit crunch and the job market. Personally, I used to be rigorously intolerant of turn-based videogames, but in recent years I have much preferred Advance Wars to any RTS, and I prefer both Metal Gear Ac!d games to Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops.

This is not to say that my twitch synapses are burned out: I still prefer Guns of the Patriots to just about everything — which is, dear readers, why I keep banging on about it in these columns. But MGS4 is germane to the topic at hand, too: after all, its rhythm of stress and recovery could be seen as an allegory of gamers’ ambivalence about cognitive panic. Perhaps Old Snake represents a physical manifestation of the Gen X gamer’s ageing brain, increasingly vulnerable to stress and given to wondering whether it’s all worth it — but still, when it really counts, “pretty good”.