‘A warehouse of doors’

North America’s largest gaming convention has something for everyone, including veterans.

On the first weekend of August, Gen Con 2025 brought more than 71,000 visitors from around the world to downtown Indianapolis for four days of gaming of all kinds – tabletop, video, virtual, role-playing, re-enacting, historical miniatures and more. They took part in nearly 30,000 unique ticketed events spanning comedy, film, entertainment, writing and crafting workshops, a costume contest and a parade. (And these don’t count casual or pop-up games conducted everywhere in sight.) Last year alone, the event brought in $77 million for Indianapolis hotels, restaurants and other local businesses.

In short, if you’re part of the gaming community, Gen Con is the place to be to be around your people. That community intersects with numerous others: age, geography, identity, even career paths and life experiences – including military service. And some attendees are trying to open a wider space for the veteran culture on behalf of the veteran community that is already there.

Vic Mitchell is a Florida Navy veteran who has been attending Gen Con for almost 20 years. He works for the VA hospital in Orlando, where he runs the Re.V.E.A.L program at the mental health clinic. Re.V.E.A.L uses tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) such as “Dungeons & Dragons” (D&D) to “bring veterans together and create an interactive social experience that allows them to explore their imagination, but also learn some skills and tools to help with various mental health issues” such as PTSD. Last year he joined American Legion Post 400 in Orlando because “I wanted to join an organization that helps vets and wants to see their mental health and stability increase. I have noticed the Legion has been making an active effort lately to do that.”

Mitchell put his personal and professional experience to use at Gen Con for the third time this year by holding a series of educational panels on gaming and mental health; the first focused on veterans’ mental health. It was conducted in the basement of Lucas Oil Stadium, the NFL stadium across the street from the Indiana Convention Center that the convention has expanded into in the last few years. The field, home of the Indianapolis Colts, is almost entirely covered with hard flooring that holds tables, chairs and storage space.

Mitchell has been gaming since he was 5 – arcade games, then Atari, and TTRPGs since he was 8. Kicking off the panel, he described being a D&D fan during the “Satanic Panic” in North Carolina in the 1980s “You practically needed a secret handshake, or you would have been drug out in the street,” he said. adding that gaming also helped him work on his dyslexia and ADD. “As I got older, playing helped me to relax, but more importantly find friends and acquaintances.”

In the Navy, Mitchell was a corpsman/medic mostly attached to the Marine Corps. While he had many positive experiences, the ending was less so: he was medically retired on short notice, and suddenly found himself without the community he had been part of for so long. “When you leave the military,” he said, “you lose a lot.”

He developed PTSD that manifested in social anxiety, as he said it does for many veterans, especially around people they don’t know. To overcome it, he returned to the activities he had loved all his life. And knowing how well they worked for him made him eager to use them to reach out to his fellow veterans. He said his hospital program was informal for the first few months before its final approval, due to skepticism as to whether playing games could actually help.

But it did.

One success story Michell touted was “a veteran who when they started gaming was very unfocused, had very little self-control and had a hard time connecting and building a social circle. They have over the almost two years of playing D&D become very interactive, social, focused on improving their life situation, and maintained a continual commitment to the players and group.”

As facilitator of the Re.V.E.A.L program, Mitchell gets to be the gamemaster (GM), a role he loves, and one that requires 4-D thinking and, most of all, improvisation. Ideally, gaming is an environment with no judging, where players can be themselves while also learning to get along with other players being themselves. Mitchell explained to the panel audience – a few of whom were veterans, a few of whom work with them, many of whom are or would like to be gamemasters – some typical personality quirks of the veteran community, among them bluntness: “It’s when we stop talking and stop using dark humor that you need to worry.”

He also explained some potential issues. In addition to social anxiety and bluntness, they may be dealing with PTSD that can manifest through sound and visuals, anger management – “80% of the time it’s random,” he said –  and physical or mental disabilities. He offered a few tips to make a gaming environment a little more helpful to veterans:

1. Learn about your players and fellow gamers: what are their backgrounds (like military service)?
2. Create worlds with varied aspects (such as combat plus stealth plus politics).
3. Be open to different outcomes even while you’re playing.
4. Observe, listen, and follow your players’ needs (some people don’t like loud noises or shocks).
5. Consider a “vet-intense experience” for a campaign; Mitchell gave the example of a campaign he ran where all the players were drafted in their world for a sudden threat and went through basic and advanced training.

And some things to avoid, including forcing elements that obviously aren’t wanted, third-rail agendas such as politics or religion, singling players out during game play, and not being prepared for veteran stubbornness. 

“Gaming is for anybody, but not everybody,” Mitchell said toward the end of his panel. The veteran has to be ready to “unf--- themselves” – but when they get there, it can be both a useful distraction and a tool for growth.

“Gaming, either online or paper-and-pencil, or even board or card, can bring a veteran a sense of connection they may otherwise feel they do not have,” he explained. “If you can find something you enjoy playing, and find that niche of players and veterans, then you have that connection, and it grows from there. Gaming isn't a door, it's a warehouse of doors, and all you have to do is find that same initiative you used to join the service … to pick a door.”

After his panels, Mitchell planned to spend the rest of the weekend in his other Gen Con role: as the “Costume Corpsman” (costumed himself), stationed by the photo area to help attendees with missing or broken parts to their creation. Cosplay is another avenue he uses to engage with the community around him.

This year, Gen Con’s Exhibit Hall featured hundreds of vendors spread through multiple halls of the convention center, selling games, merchandise, costumes, art, books and much more. At many booths, attendees could try the games then and there. The aisles were crowded and sometimes lightly hazardous – Google “board game backpack” for an example – but everyone was friendly. The MIT Press was selling books on gaming and related topics; collective booths from India and Japan offered the latest games from those countries; some booths specialized in paint for miniatures, and more in dice of every size, shape and color. Even Bicycle, founded in 1885 and famous for its playing cards, had a booth.

According to its website, Academy Games specializes in “historical board games, ranging from family games to tactical training games, that impart social and historical learning for gaming enthusiasts, schools, museums, universities and military personnel.” Kari Eickert, who was running demonstration games at the company’s booth, said their games are popular with students at war colleges; her husband Uwe, Academy’s founder/owner, was never in the military but has specialized in strategy for decades.

In 2024, the Indiana Department of Veterans Affairs (IDVA) staffed a table on Community Row to reach out to veterans as part of the Indiana Governor’s Challenge seeking to prevent suicide in the military-connected community. The table was back for 2025, offering veterans ribbons with their service-branch names, and organizer Carlye Gibson – veteran suicide prevention director at the Indiana Department of Health – went further, registering as a GM to hold a room and conduct a three-hour Servicemember Community Game Gathering on Thursday evening. There were snacks, games available to play, and resources from the IDVA.

Soon after its opening, half the room was playing the social deduction game “Are You a Werewolf?”, where villagers have to determine who is before they are eaten. Gibson also conducted sessions on Saturday at a nearby hotel. Sylvia Maixner with the Indiana National Guard, who was helping facilitate the game, explained the choice: It goes quickly, can have as few or many people as desired, is easy to learn, develops instant rapport and, echoing Vic Mitchell’s panel, works well with “cheeky vet humor.”

View related video on YouTube here.