On a display screen someplace close to the entrance, a drone operator scrolls via a catalog that appears uncannily like an e-commerce website. As a substitute of headphones or cellphone chargers, the tiles show first-person-view drones, digital warfare kits, and evacuation robots. The unit has simply uploaded verified strike movies into Ukraine’s DELTA situational-awareness system. A number of hours later, “ePoints” seem of their account and may be redeemed on Brave1 Market, a authorities platform already dubbed an “Amazon for warfare,” the place frontline models choose tools utilizing fight factors relatively than bank cards. The identical structure now allocates larger level values to evacuating wounded comrades than to killing enemies, in order that casualty evacuation and seize are rewarded extra generously than destruction.
This scene condenses a number of trajectories which can be normally handled individually. For twenty years, militaries and media have accustomed audiences to distant interfaces, streaming strike footage and “militainment.” Ukraine is the primary main warfare by which these logics converge in a scientific manner within the conduct of hostilities. Gamification right here will not be a metaphor however a set of concrete architectures that allocate consideration, rewards, and tools in a dwell theater of warfare.
Ukraine’s experiment with gamified warfare is greatest learn as a brand new configuration of labor, violence, and digital platforms that reorganizes who participates in warfare, how killing is recorded, and the way navy labor is valued. As soon as battlefield motion is translated into scores, dashboards, and leaderboards, it allocates consideration, routes assets, and decides whose dangers are price taking. Quite than asking solely whether or not such programs are “good” or “dangerous,” it’s extra productive to strategy them as websites the place new types of subjectivity and accountability are being produced for drone operators on the entrance, coders in co-working areas, and officers and donors watching the numbers from afar. As soon as these programs are embedded, they’ll harden into an working mannequin that shapes how commanders image the struggle and the way exterior supporters learn what is going on on the bottom. Factors and dashboards begin to affect which models obtain scarce tools and which techniques flow into via the pressure, whereas different types of labor and threat grow to be tougher to see and to reward. In that setting, choices about what the sport counts, the way it weighs completely different actions, and who can change the foundations grow to be strategic selections in their very own proper.
From Militainment to Operational Gamification
Gamification is often outlined as the usage of sport components in non-game contexts. In business settings, it wraps mundane actions in suggestions and rewards to maintain customers engaged. Factors and progress bars will not be impartial ornaments. They render habits legible to a platform after which return it to the consumer in stylized kind. In safety and protection, this logic remained at a distance from fight operations. It animated recruitment video games, coaching simulators, and an increasing ecosystem of war-themed leisure, whereas the choice to make use of pressure nonetheless lay inside typical chains of command.
Ukraine’s warfare with Russia marks a shift from that first technology of “militainment” to one thing nearer to operational gamification. A big layer of wartime participation now passes via interfaces that appear and feel like video games and which can be explicitly designed to make participation simpler, extra satisfying, and extra trackable. The sample is seen first within the civilian and cyber area.
Browser-based initiatives akin to Play for Ukraine, a reworked model of the puzzle sport 2048, invite gamers to slip tiles on a well-known grid whereas the underlying code directs site visitors in direction of distributed denial-of-service assaults on Russian web sites. Crucial evaluation of the sport describes it as “wargaming as resistance pleasure” that transforms particular person enjoyment right into a modest however symbolically highly effective contribution to cyber resistance. The IT Military of Ukraine, crowdsourced by the Ministry of Digital Transformation at first of the invasion, organizes volunteers via open-task lists and time-boxed “operations” and has been described as probably the most outstanding instance of crowd-sourced cyber operations up to now. Participation right here will not be remunerated in cash however in missions accomplished, standing inside on-line communities, and the affective satisfaction of “raids” that appear and feel like cooperative gameplay.
The identical sample extends into Ukraine’s state digital infrastructure. The Diia app, initially constructed as an e-government portal, now authenticates customers for bots akin to eVorog, which permit residents to report the motion of Russian troops and tools. These experiences are validated and handed into DELTA, a situational-awareness platform that integrates a number of sources of reconnaissance into a typical operational image and that has been showcased as a mannequin for networked warfare. What seems to customers because the acquainted satisfaction of sending a geolocated report from a smartphone is, on this configuration, step one in a course of that will finish in artillery fireplace or a drone strike on the icon that was simply positioned on the map.
These examples matter as a result of they present that gamification will not be a beauty layer on prime of warfare. It scripts participation, distributes company, and generates information. Net-based interfaces akin to Vezha and Ochi hyperlink intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance feeds to frontline models in close to actual time, whereas many Ukrainian formations coordinate motion and fireplace via Discord and different business platforms borrowed from gaming cultures. Civilian volunteers, distant coders, and app customers will not be merely amplifying conventional navy motion from the sidelines. They’re being enrolled right into a hybrid discipline by which the boundaries between play, political solidarity, and direct participation in hostilities are more and more troublesome to parse.
Factors, Drones, and the Structure of Reward
Drones render these dynamics much more seen. First-person-view drones have grow to be emblematic of the Ukraine warfare, each as devices of destruction and as aesthetic objects in a continuing stream of footage on Telegram and X. They’re additionally central to the Military of Drones Bonus program, a points-based reward system launched in 2025 by the Ministry of Digital Transformation. Journalistic and official accounts converge on the identical core description. Items add video proof of profitable strikes into DELTA. After verification, they obtain factors that may be spent on Brave1 Market, a authorities platform linking frontline models to Ukrainian protection start-ups and producers. A destroyed tank is price extra factors than an enemy soldier. Capturing an enemy alive now yields extra factors than killing him. Evacuating wounded comrades in an uncrewed floor car is rewarded extra generously than hitting an infantry place.
In impact, this system condenses three features which can be typically handled individually. First, it generates battlefield information, since each declare should be supported by a video that may be archived, analyzed, and cross-checked. Second, it reorganizes procurement, because it permits small models to channel verified must a market that may reply extra rapidly than a central forms. Lastly, it regulates recognition, since models evaluate their tally of factors and seem on casual chief boards that flow into on social media. Gamification right here will not be ornament. It’s the precept that hyperlinks proof of violence, inside legitimacy, and entry to materials assets.
Official rhetoric surrounding this system stresses that it’s a motivational system relatively than a sport, designed to get new expertise to the battlefield rapidly and with much less forms, and more and more to reward missions that save lives and cut back threat to personnel, akin to utilizing unmanned floor automobiles to ship ammunition and evacuate the wounded. That insistence already acknowledges an unease that many observers really feel when confronted with a system by which human lives and items of apparatus are assigned level values and displayed on a digital scorecard. But framing this as a matter of “effectivity” alone doesn’t exhaust what’s at stake. As soon as operational success is quantified, and connected to an interface, it turns into troublesome to disentangle tactical judgement from score-chasing: Is grinding down enemy belongings counted as success in itself, or solely when it advances particular operational results, and what sorts of habits does the factors system actually reward?
Crucial social science has lengthy described a model of this dilemma via Goodhart’s legislation: when a measure turns into a goal, it ceases to be a great measure. Transposed right into a gamified battlespace, this means that any points-based reward system dangers producing unintended results. Items could privilege point-rich targets even when they’re tactically marginal or already being serviced by different groups. Drone pilots could settle for riskier missions and stack a number of platforms in opposition to the identical goal in pursuit of incremental good points on the leaderboard, burning scarce munitions on duplicate kills. In that sense, a metric designed to seize effectiveness can generate operational inefficiencies as score-chasing habits pulls assets away from less-visible however needed duties, a dynamic analysts have already linked to Goodhart’s legislation within the Ukrainian “Military of Drones” program.
Civilians as Gamers, Legislation as Interface
These architectures additionally pose questions for worldwide humanitarian legislation. Authorized frameworks nonetheless hinge on a distinction between combatants and civilians and on the concept that civilians are protected “except and for such time as they take a direct half in hostilities.” Crowd-sourced distributed denial of service campaigns, authenticated reporting apps, and points-based drone rewards complicate this image in a number of methods.
Play for Ukraine illustrates the issue in miniature. At one degree, the expertise is indistinguishable from fixing an off-the-cuff puzzle sport. At one other degree, the sport generates a stream of requests that contribute to disabling Russian web sites, a few of which can be linked to authorities or infrastructure. Commentators have already requested whether or not this exposes gamers to countermeasures or authorized claims. The extra fascinating query is the way it reshapes their very own sense of what they’re doing.
The same ambiguity surrounds the IT Military of Ukraine. Analytical experiences describe it as a hybrid formation that sits between hacktivist tradition and state route, with duties issued via Telegram channels and a mixture of official encouragement and believable deniability. Volunteers are advised that they’ll “struggle” with out leaving dwelling and that their keyboard is a weapon. In such a setting, the distinction between reliable digital protest, prison intrusion, and acts that qualify as direct participation in hostilities will not be simply communicated, particularly when participation is framed via the language of play.
The Diia-eVorog-DELTA chain raises a special set of questions. Authorities communications explicitly encourage residents to submit data and spotlight the variety of experiences obtained. Such reporting is built-in with different feeds to generate enhanced situational consciousness. From a important perspective, what issues will not be solely whether or not this infrastructure satisfies formal authorized checks, however the way it configures the connection between seeing, reporting, and placing. When civilians are invited to tag enemy actions on a map, they’re positioned as sensors in a distributed focusing on equipment. The interface doesn’t show the downstream penalties of that click on. It presents an apparently clear act of witnessing, with out the messy temporality via which experiences are investigated, weighed, and presumably ignored.
In every of those circumstances, gamification operates as a translator between complicated authorized and moral questions and easy, rewarding consumer journeys. Legislation seems much less as an exterior constraint and extra as a set of design selections that form what actions are potential inside the system. To place it otherwise, authorized and moral issues migrate into the interface. They’re current insofar because the system requires authentication via Diia, filters out clearly illegal targets, and channels experiences to educated analysts. They’re absent insofar as they don’t register on the display screen of the volunteer, who sees themself as enjoying a job in a collective drama of protection and resistance.
Studying Gamified Struggle Critically
A important warfare research strategy as developed by students like Tarak Barkawi and Shane Brighton, begins from how wars are organized, skilled, and justified — asking who advantages and who bears the dangers of recent methods of preventing, and whose labor and vulnerability are made seen or expendable — relatively than assuming that gamification is both inherently corrupting or emancipatory. As a substitute, it treats gamified architectures as websites the place broader dynamics of militarization, platform capitalism, and topic formation condense into seen kind.
Gamified warfare foregrounds the extent to which up to date battle is organized via platforms. Ukraine’s digital resistance infrastructures sit on the intersection of state ministries, personal expertise firms, volunteer communities, and worldwide donors. Open-source applied sciences, home start-ups, and overseas platforms akin to Starlink and main social media companies all play a job in maintaining these programs operating. Audrey Kurth Cronin has argued in these pages that open-source expertise and public-private innovation are central to Ukraine’s strategic resilience. Gamification provides a further layer, by which platform logics of engagement and retention migrate into the conduct of hostilities.
On the identical time, these architectures invite a reconsideration of navy labor and duty. Within the typical understanding of warfare, combatants and non-combatants are clearly separated, and labor that’s acknowledged as “navy” is carried out in uniform inside a proper hierarchy. In Ukraine’s case, a big share of helpful labor is carried out by coders, system directors, and volunteers who work from residences and co-working areas, and whose reward is symbolic relatively than contractual. Even inside the armed forces, the points-based drone financial system overlays conventional hierarchies with a parallel financial system of standing by which probably the most seen labor is that which is best to quantify.
For observers exterior Ukraine, it’s tempting to deal with the Military of Drones Bonus or Play for Ukraine as artistic responses to a rare scenario that won’t outlast this warfare. But experiences already point out that allied militaries and protection institutions are finding out Ukraine’s expertise carefully, together with its gamified procurement programs and its crowdsourced cyber formations. The normative language round these schemes continues to be cautious: Officers speak about an “innovation ecosystem” and “agile acquisition.” On the floor, this seems like a easy try and get extra out of restricted crews, drones, and shells. In observe, tying rewards to a factors desk forces the system to resolve what it’s actually attempting to maximise. Is success any destroyed tools, or solely strikes that change a frontline or break up an assault? It additionally fixes who counts as “performing”: models that produce spectacular tallies; these holding uncovered positions; or these doing slower work akin to reconnaissance, restore, and resupply. As models adapt to what the system can see and reward, they threat organizing across the sport relatively than round operational priorities. When the foundations and metrics change, that specialization can out of the blue sit out of step with what warfare calls for.
Conclusion
Gamification in Ukraine is much less a curiosity than a diagnostic window into how up to date wars are organized and fought. The factors that stream from DELTA to Brave1, the tiles that slide in Play for Ukraine, and the mission lists that scroll previous on IT Military channels will not be trivial gildings. They’re mechanisms via which participation is invited, violence is rendered countable, and life and dying are folded into the acquainted rhythms of digital interplay.
These architectures mobilize civilians and volunteers via playful interfaces, set up drone operations via a points-based market, and reconfigure authorized and moral duty via platform design. In Ukraine, this experiment is unfolding underneath the stress of a dense internet of exterior suppliers, circumstances that each allow and restrict what these programs can do in observe. For outsiders tempted to mimic the mannequin, the uncomfortable query is whether or not the same structure would steer habits towards their very own operational priorities as soon as factors, dashboards, and leaderboards start to face in for judgment.
For commanders, planners, and donors, the sensible activity is to check whether or not the behaviors rewarded by factors schemes genuinely serve operational goals, and to maintain sight of the labor and threat that the metrics battle to see. Any change to how factors are assigned or redeemed must be handled as a strategic choice and debated, not left to quiet tweaks within the code. To know the long run that’s rising right here, it isn’t sufficient to depend drones or strains of code. It’s needed to review the interfaces, metrics, and incentives via which warfare is being gamified and, within the course of, subtly reorganized.
Hadi Al-Majdalani is a graduate scholar in important safety research on the Doha Institute for Graduate Research. His analysis focuses on the strategic use of digital and sensory, non-ocular applied sciences in up to date warfare, and the way they reshape the group of violence and on a regular basis life in protracted conflicts.
Picture: ArmyInform
