Consider the Spectre gunship mission in Call of Duty 4. You're shooting from within the safety of an AC-130 gunship, listening to radio chatter about a situation unfolding on the ground below. It's a sobering commentary on modern warfare: remote, brutal, and efficient. And although the sound and visuals might be described as modest - here are no garish colors or fancy 5.1 subwoofer busting blasts - this is one of the most vivid interactive presentations of the face of war in the era of CNN and YouTube. It's like a videogame within a videogame.

I was reminded of this mission and its implications in an interview on Fresh Air with author P.W. Singer, who was promoting his new book, Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century. Singer spoke briefly about the intersection between videogaming and the drone technology increasingly used by the military.

The military figured out that there were two advantages [to designing remote weapons systems as if they were videogames]. For example, the hand-held controllers that most of the ground robotics systems use, they're modeled after the Xbox or the Playstation. And the reason was two-fold. One, they figured out, "okay, these game companies have spent millions of dollars designing systems that are perfectly suited for where your fingers should go, and the like, and if they did all the research, why don't we piggyback on that?"

The second is they figured out, "hold it, the videogame companies have already trained up our forces for us. We're getting kids coming in who have spent the last several years working with these videogame controllers, why not free-ride off that as well?"

One of the people we interviewed [for the book] was a nineteen-year-old high school drop-out. He's an Army specialist. He's actually, by some consideration, the best drone pilot in the entire force and it's in part because of videogames.

He goes on to discuss the ripple effect of this.

This is not a story that people in the Air Force like to hear. It's spooking out a lot of people. For example, F-15 pilots who spent years and years training, going to college, they're officers, and when they hear..."hold it, this nineteen-year-old videogamer's not just better at these systems than me, but is actually out there doing more fighting than me, what's going on here?"

It's a fascinating interview as well when Singer discusses the psychological elements of remote warfare, and the effects of readily available combat footage, or "warporn".

(Thanks dingus!)