Drones keep getting wilder — but not enough for gamers
Mar 9, 2017, 6:38 AM
I’ve had this great movie idea for a while. We open on a 13-year-old video game prodigy playing one of those simulations where you fly over the battlefield and shoot terrorists. And his reflexes are amazing.
As he’s innocently playing, we cut to a military situation room where a general is tapped into the kid’s screen watching him play. And then we hear the general say, ominously, “Kid’s got talent. Patch him in live.”
And what the kid doesn’t know – spoiler alert – is that from that moment on he’s looking at a real battlefield, and hitting real terrorists.
Completely fiction, of course, and yet — since we know the government can tap into anything — technically possible.
What got me thinking about it again was the latest report from CBS’s Holly Williams on the fight in Mosul. It looks like a toy plane, but the $1.5 million RQ-7Bv2 drone allows the military to call in airstrikes targeting ISIS positions.
She met Sgt. Joe Pinchott who guides the drone from a video screen.
“You can see what people are wearing?” Williams asked.
“Enough to make out whether they’re American or not,” Pinchott replied.
Many of these pilots were gamers as civilians. In fact, Sgt. Pinchott was a little critical of the real thing compared to the game.
“It’s much slower paced; graphics aren’t quite as good,” he said. “Sort of like a video game but nobody would buy to play this video game.”
Which ultimately would be the fatal flaw in my plot line. Video gamers would find the actual battlefield way too boring.
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