Games with drones

In the last post I started to explore some of the reasons why young people’s encounters with drones need some sort of critical and ethical dimension, and I suggested that one route to achieving this might lie through young people programming drones themselves, perhaps using a LOGO-like language (DROGO? UAVOGO?) that lays bare all the capacities of a drone, including those we find uncomfortable. A key part of the process I’m imagining would be for groups to develop their own uses for drones. But what uses? In a chat with Pete Bennett we imagined some of the games that you could make with drones: here are some of my notes on our conversation.

  • Endurance games: how long can your machine stay up? How much ground can it cover? How much data can it collect about the ground beneath? You could do this sort of thing with a helium balloon and a go-pro rather than going the whole hog with an expensive quadcopter. Or for another simple game of skill, perhaps you have to deliver payloads to increasingly difficult places (bowler hats on statues, parrot on a ship’s mast, that kind of thing).

  • Can you trust the information you receive? You could have some kind of strategy game making use of information from drones – but you know there’s a margin of error that means what you see may not be a true reflection of what’s actually on the ground. What decision do you take, knowing your information isn’t accurate but ignorant of how far off it is? What are the consequences of getting it wrong? Who do you have to justify it to?

  • Familiars: would be lovely to tap into other cultural metaphors as a way of reframing the technology. What can you do with a drone familiar? What sort of demands do you make of a daemon? What expectations do you have? What care does it need for its full faculties to be available to you? How upset are you when the other team hack it and persuade it to defect?

  • Speaking of team games: what can you do with a team of drones? A squadron? What if you had an officer drone, that you spoke to, and then they made decisions about deploying subordinate drones? What algorithms do they use? Can you work out what they are and make your command more effective?

  • Virtual slalom/steeplechase: software sets imaginary hurdles or stages at given altitudes and GPS locations, for you to pilot your drone around. You’re focussing on the laptop and making sure your commands are helping the drone hit the targets. The audience are watching a drone ballet around invisible partners.

  • Perhaps this virtual course has powerups that reverse the controls or alter the speed? But this is thinking about them as model aircraft again – hard to resist doing this.

  • Maybe we’re thinking small: what if there was a swarm of drones to interact with? Perhaps they start off neutral and your job is to lure them down and befriend them. Or create a behaviour for them to replicate in the sky. Perhaps you could teach one of them a waggle dance to perform when they can see a parking space, and then after a few hours they all know it. Perhaps each could be a node in a wifi network, and the goal is to bring them all together in sufficient numbers for everyone to be able to check their email.

  • Or perhaps we could build on the tradition of renting technology in public spaces (Borisbikes, speak your weight machines, photobooths): what if there were stations of drones around and you could hire one for a few minutes at a time? Perhaps there’s a game where having a drone would be an advantage: better use your credits wisely, would be shame not to have any drone access when it matters.

  • Turning the tables: perhaps we could just have one enormously visible drone that’s trying to hide from observers on the ground, who are equipped with telescopes, binoculars and so on. Challenge is to keep it in sight for 24 hours: challenge for the operator is to evade them by using the sun, bird flocks, buildings, clouds to blend in. Area is limited so you can’t just fly to France and lie low. What flight patterns are least drone-like? Is it worth risking a landing to hide out on a roof? What if they’re seen coming down?

  • We could step the challenge up with a drone that announces itself (perhaps some kind of Pinky Ponk): can you still play your surveillance game with a loud drone? Perhaps it could be a penalty in a larger game.

There are other more obvious games perhaps, based on a closer simulation of drones’ use in military contexts: chasing down a team of people from above, perhaps, or using drones to deliver random shocks through the day. There’s a case to be made for doing this kind of thing, I think, if it’s going to be a way for players to think about the reality of life under drones, but it would be easy to be simplistic and sanctimonious about making that connection. Getting the right degree of stress in the game would be difficult: not so much that it stops being engaging, not so little that it trivialises peoples’ real experiences. And getting it wrong would result in something offensive and tasteless.

Conversely, the ideas listed above are intended as ways of exploring new possibilities for what drones could do, rather than illustrations of what they do currently: they’re all sources for reframing this harmful technology and creating a new set of behaviours and expectations around the technology. What actually got built, of course, would depend on what a design team of young people made of these sorts of prompts.