How Ukraine Gamified Drone Warfare

Ukrainian soldiers carry a Vampire drone after a training flight on Feb. 8, 2025. Ukrainian soldiers carry a Vampire drone after a training flight on Feb. 8, 2025. One afternoon this spring, Mykhailo Fedorov, a minister in the wartime government of Ukraine, turned up the volume on his laptop and played a video to illustrate his latest innovation. Its purpose, he explained, was to make the experience of combat feel more like a video game to Ukrainian troops--or as he put it, "to gamify" the war. The clip showed a series of aerial strikes, each filmed from the vantage of a combat drone. One of them, apparently flying by night, had used its thermal-imaging camera to detect an enemy soldier in what looked like a field or forest.