Drone Piloting Similarities to a First Person Shooter Game
The recent emergence of drone warfare, as mentioned by Chloë, has led to the participation of increasing numbers of members of the armed forces in an entirely different type of aerial warfare. They do not need to fly in a physical plane as they can sit in an office and operate this special type of aircraft remotely via satellite. Drone warfare makes aerial battles have some frightening similarities to a video game. While the pilot is flying the drone, “the setting looks like a simulator, but somewhere out there a real drone is hovering over the Nevada desert, waiting for the trainee’s instructions” (Hagerman 39). The fact that they are remotely controlling the drones rather than flying aircrafts themselves makes it easier for the pilots to sleep at night. All of the destruction and loss of life occurs on a video screen, so when they are controlling the drone it feels similar to attacking a nameless enemy in a first person shooter (FPS) video game. In fact, there are some kill streaks in Call of Duty, a popular FPS video game, which I talk about in my article on genres, where the user does exactly that. If they kill enough people without dying they get the option to launch a drone strike on their enemies where they control a small aircraft with black and white screened laptop-like device to fire at their enemies on the ground. With these types of similarities it is no wonder that to many pilots when they kill with a drone they do not feel the real world consequences, even though for the rest of the world they are abundant.
Skip to 1:17 for the drone pilot.
Hagerman, Eric. "Point. Click. Kill." Popular Science [New York City] Sept. 2009: n. pag. Print.