You’ve read Ender’s Game, right? The Orson Scott Card novel tells the story of Ender, a young man with a talent for tactical gaming who’s hand-picked and later trained to fly remote spacecraft from a video game like interface. Only after he win his final simulation does he lear it was all for real, and all the kills he’d racked up were actual kills. For those who haven’t yet read it, I’m sorry I ruined it, but I have a point to make: That day from the scifi novel might be here sooner than we think.
Boeing linked up a real life, deadly F-15 fighter to an online multiplayer air war simulator. What the other “targets” did were relayed to the fighter’s targeting computer, and the pilot responded, trying to blow the virtual enemies out of the real sky.
Basically, this bridges the gap in wargaming between simulators and physical forces. But it’s scare, is it not, to think about the fact that it might have indeed been a fighter jock shooting down your MiG, comrade?
Real F-15 joins massively multiplayer virtual war [The Register]