Playing at War

Clive Thompson remarks on video games and war:

Predator drone strikes, they're highly virtualized situations, right? I mean, you have someone sitting on American soil or in a nearby country, you know, piloting a drone able to shoot and kill. And so, everything is done through an interface in the same way that everything on a video game is done through an interface.

It’s going to be a constant question for us as a society and for the military whether or not, as they become more game-like, that creates an effect that makes it easier to kill people in a way that you might not want to make it easier to kill people.

I've written about this before, though more from the robotics angle.

It disturbs me as a game to think that the skills and mindset I have developed over years playing games makes me a candidate for piloting drones like the predator. After reading what it takes to be a predator pilot, I'm fairly confident I could do a decent job of it. I'm also fairly confident that the better gamers out there, the vast group of players that are so much better than me, would do an amazing job of it. That scares me. A whole generation of kids and adults have unknowingly been trained to operate killing machines. Even developers who have no relationship with the military have unknowingly been providing this training.

My only hope is that that the distance that drones create between killing and the soldier is not enough to turn gamers into killers. I've often questioned the supposed link between gaming and violence because I don't buy that the average gamer cannot tell the difference between the game and reality. But, drones operate on a system like a game and create a virtual reality that is much like that of an actual game. And though operate drones carries consequences, those consequences are far away in another part of the world. That's a lot of distance and it makes killing easier. However, unlike a lot of games, drone pilots will always have a choice about pulling the trigger. As games where killing is not the objective have shown us, many gamers will choose not to kill even virtual people.