How Ukraine Gamified Drone Warfare

One afternoon this spring, Mykhailo Fedorov, a minister in the wartime government of Ukraine, turned up the volume on his laptop and played a video to illustrate his latest innovation. Its purpose, he explained, was to make the experience of combat feel more like a video game to Ukrainian troops—or as he put it, “to gamify” the war.

The clip showed a series of aerial strikes, each filmed from the vantage of a combat drone. One of them, apparently flying by night, had used its thermal-imaging camera to detect an enemy soldier in what looked like a field or forest. It was difficult to tell, because the background was dark and the figure in the frame resembled a white blob more than a human being. The Russian soldier seemed to freeze in place as the drone hovered. Then it dropped its explosi