There are probably very few people in the world who have obtained a PhD in Economics and also obtained a world record in a video game. In my case, that game was World of Warcraft and the record included a number of rank 1 logs that placed me as the second highest ranked mage in the world during 2019 Classic. I am thus in the unfortunate position to care about topics which have next to no overlap or synergy between them.
Yet recently an article caught my attention from both sides. The Economist reported on latest developments in the war in Ukraine, where drone pilots are getting resources allocated via a scoreboard. Points are getting scored by destroying enemy materiel and personnel and the most successful pilots can purchase new drones directly with their points. This is both genius and terrifying.
One of the first things I played were old school shooters like UT99 and Quake 3 Arena. The scoreboard was a powerful motivator back then when it tracked meaningless frags but a scoreboard that reflects someone’s successful commitment to defending their country seems like the mother of all motivators. The system also aligns everyone’s incentives and allocates scarce resources efficiently, which is why it will probably get rolled out elsewhere in the future. That’s the genus part of it. My suggestion would be to skip the terrifying side and to go all in here.
Currently we have drone pilots fighting other drone pilots while competing on scoreboards for more drones. How about we fast forward, skip the fighting in the real world and play StarCraft instead? The next step in the evolution of war is going to be autonomous robots fighting other autonomous robots and that’s pretty much the same thing. So why not do it in the virtual world?
Because South Korea would achieve world domination, obviously. Still, food for thought.
