Ender’s Wargames: Drones, Data and the Simulation of War as Weapon and Tactic

Abstract

The rising acceptance of game theory, in combination with increasingly complex and sophisticated computer simulators, has drastically changed the modern war machine. Although such a shift was popularly reflected in WarGames and the publication of Orson Scott Card’s novel Ender’s Game, simulated war was largely kept from the public eye. However, as Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio have theorized, beginning with the first Gulf War, warfare has pushed the depiction of real-life war into the realm of unreal model and constantly mediated simulation, transforming the landscape and its combatants into distanced sets of data points. Stealth, Eye in the Sky and Good Kill echo much of Ender’s Game’s critique of a “data-driven” simulated war via their representations of distanced drone strikes. In contrast to the previous three chapters, this chapter explores what it means to have filmic representations of military use that are completely abstracted from soldier-to-soldier combat; instead, the conflicts are rendered as computer-modeled battles wherein the “soldiers” are in fact continents away from their weapons’ actions and consequences. Acknowledging Manuel De Landa’s work alongside the shifting genre of the war movie and the simulated roots of cinema itself, such a dangerous shift is reflected most clearly in the movie version of Ender’s Game, wherein the simulation itself becomes the war, which then reveals the traumas caused, on both civilians and soldiers alike, by a distanced military overdependent on technologies, specifically the Internet.