Fake Looking World, But With Actual Death

After reading this article in Slate, I felt an awful chill run though my body.

A brief summary: Raytheon, a military contractor, believed the current technology utilized in unmanned aerial vehicles like the Predator drone needed improvement. The machines were cumbersome to control, and pilots can only see what the UAV's camera can see.

Raytheon hired game developers to create a "Universal Control System," which debuted in Britain last week. From the Will Saletan piece:

The most important upgrade is visual. Multiple wide-screen monitors wrap around the pilot, producing a 120-degree field of vision. They integrate actual video from the drone with an interactive digital replica of the surrounding buildings and terrain. By digitizing the picture, UCS can lay information over it, displaying your available weapons and the location of nearby troops.

In other words, the Universal Control System creates a something that looks alarming similar to a videogame on the fly using real world data. It's like Tom Clancy Air War HAWX, but with real bombs and real death.

Look, it's one thing for the Army to distribute America's Army as a recruitment tool. If you're gullible enough to join the armed services because a couple really kickass Capture the Flag multiplayer sessions made you realize how fun and easy war can be, don't let me stop you. We need brave soldiers like that as far away from me as possible.

Making real war more like videogames, though? Modern combat is already top heavy with depersonalizing technological innovations, but at least someone has to look though a real television monitor at real objects before inputing the commands necessary to obliterate them. A videogame interface is exponentially abstracted from that abstraction; the reason "it's only a game," has been used to defend all sorts of morally repugnant behavior present in the medium is that it really is only is a game. It's not real and it can't hurt you physically or turn you into a murderous psychopath. There are consequences to gaming, both positive and negative, but until now they've been banal negative consequences -- 31 year old virgins with fourteen level 70 WOW characters, dudes flunking out of college because Xenosaga came out and needed to be played to completion finals week (true story: happened to a dorm-mate of mine), that kind of thing.

Of course, this being a mainstream media piece, the dangers of digital entertainment are exploited; Saletan makes it sound like the next generation of American soldiers, weaned on Playstion, are so disengaged from reality that murdering someone via this Universal Control System, to our brave men and women in armed services, will feel just like unlocking an Xbox achievement. Well, he doesn't say that. He compares the experience to setting high scores in arcades -- unaware that high scores and arcades have been dead for at least 8 years now, in the US.

However, this fact remains: war should not be a game. It should not look like a game or reward your achievements like a game. Taking a human life is serious business and it should be treated as such. It'd be nice if our political leaders knew this; perhaps funding to abuse the possibilities of the gaming medium will dry up when the era of the Military-Industrial Complex finally comes to an end.

Not every military application of videogaming is a grotesque misappropriation of technology, however. Have a look at a recent New Yorker article by Sue Halpern on a new PTSD treatment that incorporates a modified version of Full Spectrum Warrior. Here's a video.