E-sports will make its debut this summer in the National Veterans Wheelchair Games

Around 40 years ago the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs launched an initiative for the veterans called the National Veterans Wheelchair Games. Initially, the number of games in the initiative was seven and now due to the addition of e-sports or videogames, there will be a new medal. Jamie Kaplan has been a frontrunner for video game therapy and he is a recreational therapist at James A. Haley Veterans’ Hospital. In the gaming room of the facility, there are a wide variety of gaming consoles ranging from Atari to Xbox and all the systems are modified for disabled veterans. Kaplan stated that they used video games to bring in veterans because that is something everybody is familiar with and they enjoy doing it.

VA along with Microsoft has developed adaptive controllers and their partnership was established in 2018. The main focus of the partnership is to create accessible gaming. The consoles make use of various external joysticks, switches, and buttons to make it more accessible to players with less mobility. With the adaptive controllers, most of the veterans would be unable to access the video games. The controller is named as Xbox Adaptive Controller (XAC) and it is available in all the 24 VA facilities in the U.S.