A Russian defense firm recently revealed plans to manufacture an unmanned tank. Deputy PM Dmitry Rogozin reacted to the news by saying that World of Tanks players would be more useful than tank operators in the wars of the future. Is this the real life?
In another case of war blending with videogames, Apache: Air Assault was recently mistaken for Russian air strikes by a news anchor.
“We need no tankers now, we need World of Tanks players,” Rogozin wrote on Twitter.
Теперь нам нужны не танкисты, а игроки из worldoftanks.ru ) https://t.co/X8aNnHNAbi
— Dmitry Rogozin (@Rogozin) October 12, 2015
This follows comments from Rogozin earlier this year that very soon armies would be manned with “bespectacled nerds” who would destroy the “handsome athletes who fight on a lower technological level.”
That comment conjures images of StarCraft players unleashing a virtual force on a bunch of jocks, for some reason. Brains are weird.
While World of Tanks is great and everything, I’m not sure you’d want your average gamer controlling a death machine in a world with real consequences. They can’t even see a crimson-tinged barrel without shooting it to see if it blows up. And don’t even get me started on what would happen if a helpless animal strolled into their optics.
One thing is for sure, though: I bet the guy who says that stuff about war never changing at the beginning of Fallout feels silly now, eh?