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On a screen somewhere near the front, a drone operator scrolls through a catalog that looks uncannily like an e-commerce site. Instead of headphones or phone chargers, the tiles display first-person-view drones, electronic warfare kits, and evacuation robots. The unit has just uploaded verified strike videos into Ukraine’s DELTA situational-awareness system. A few hours later, “ePoints” appear in their account and can be redeemed on Brave1 Market, a government platform already dubbed an “Amazon for war,” where frontline units select equipment using combat points rather than credit cards. The same architecture now allocates higher point values to evacuating wounded comrades than to killing enemies, so that casualty evacuation and capture are rewarded more generously than destruction.

This scene condenses several trajectories that are usually treated separately. For two decades, militaries and media have accustomed audiences to remote interfaces, streaming strike footage and “militainment.” Ukraine is the first major war in which these logics converge in a systematic way in the conduct of hostilities. Gamification here is not a metaphor but a set of concrete architectures that allocate attention, rewards, and equipment in a live theater of war.

Ukraine’s experiment with gamified war is best read as a new configuration of labor, violence, and digital platforms that reorganizes who participates in war, how killing is recorded, and how military labor is valued. Once battlefield action is translated into scores, dashboards, and leaderboards, it allocates attention, routes resources, and decides whose risks are worth taking. Rather than asking only whether such systems are “good” or “bad,” it is more productive to approach them as sites where new forms of subjectivity and accountability are being produced for drone operators at the front, coders in co-working spaces, and officials and donors watching the numbers from afar. Once these systems are embedded, they can harden into an operating model that shapes how commanders picture the fight and how outside supporters read what is happening on the ground. Points and dashboards start to influence which units receive scarce equipment and which tactics circulate through the force, while other forms of labor and risk become harder to see and to reward. In that setting, decisions about what the game counts, how it weighs different actions, and who can change the rules become strategic choices in their own right.

From Militainment to Operational Gamification

Gamification is commonly defined as the use of game elements in non-game contexts. In commercial settings, it wraps mundane activities in feedback and rewards to keep users engaged. Points and progress bars are not neutral ornaments. They render behavior legible to a platform and then return it to the user in stylized form. In security and defense, this logic remained at a distance from combat operations. It animated recruitment games, training simulators, and an expanding ecosystem of war-themed entertainment, while the decision to use force still lay within conventional chains of command.

Ukraine’s war with Russia marks a shift from that first generation of “militainment” to something closer to operational gamification. A significant layer of wartime participation now passes through interfaces that look and feel like games and that are explicitly designed to make participation easier, more satisfying, and more trackable. The pattern is visible first in the civilian and cyber domain.

Browser-based projects such as Play for Ukraine, a reworked version of the puzzle game 2048, invite players to slide tiles on a familiar grid while the underlying code directs traffic towards distributed denial-of-service attacks on Russian websites. Critical analysis of the game describes it as “wargaming as resistance pleasure” that transforms individual enjoyment into a modest but symbolically powerful contribution to cyber resistance. The IT Army of Ukraine, crowdsourced by the Ministry of Digital Transformation at the start of the invasion, organizes volunteers through open-task lists and time-boxed “operations” and has been described as the most prominent example of crowd-sourced cyber operations to date. Participation here is not remunerated in money but in missions completed, status within online communities, and the affective satisfaction of “raids” that look and feel like cooperative gameplay.

The same pattern extends into Ukraine’s state digital infrastructure. The Diia app, initially built as an e-government portal, now authenticates users for bots such as eVorog, which allow citizens to report the movement of Russian troops and equipment. Those reports are validated and passed into DELTA, a situational-awareness platform that integrates multiple sources of reconnaissance into a common operational picture and that has been showcased as a model for networked war. What appears to users as the familiar satisfaction of sending a geolocated report from a smartphone is, in this configuration, the first step in a process that may end in artillery fire or a drone strike on the icon that was just placed on the map.

These examples matter because they show that gamification is not a cosmetic layer on top of war. It scripts participation, distributes agency, and generates data. Web-based interfaces such as Vezha and Ochi link intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance feeds to frontline units in near real time, while many Ukrainian formations coordinate movement and fire through Discord and other commercial platforms borrowed from gaming cultures. Civilian volunteers, remote coders, and app users are not merely amplifying traditional military action from the sidelines. They are being enrolled into a hybrid field in which the boundaries between play, political solidarity, and direct participation in hostilities are increasingly difficult to parse.

Points, Drones, and the Architecture of Reward

Drones render these dynamics even more visible. First-person-view drones have become emblematic of the Ukraine war, both as instruments of destruction and as aesthetic objects in a constant stream of footage on Telegram and X. They are also central to the Army 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 same core description. Units upload video evidence of successful strikes into DELTA. After verification, they receive points that can be spent on Brave1 Market, a government platform linking frontline units to Ukrainian defense start-ups and manufacturers. A destroyed tank is worth more points than an enemy soldier. Capturing an enemy alive now yields more points than killing him. Evacuating wounded comrades in an uncrewed ground vehicle is rewarded more generously than hitting an infantry position.

In effect, the program condenses three functions that are often treated separately. First, it generates battlefield data, since every claim must be supported by a video that can be archived, analyzed, and cross-checked. Second, it reorganizes procurement, since it allows small units to channel verified needs to a marketplace that can respond more quickly than a central bureaucracy. Finally, it regulates recognition, since units compare their tally of points and appear on informal leader boards that circulate on social media. Gamification here is not decoration. It is the principle that links proof of violence, internal legitimacy, and access to material resources.

Official rhetoric  surrounding the program stresses that it is a motivational system rather than a game, designed to get new technology to the battlefield quickly and with less bureaucracy, and increasingly to reward missions that save lives and reduce risk to personnel, such as using unmanned ground vehicles to deliver ammunition and evacuate the wounded. That insistence already acknowledges an unease that many observers feel when confronted with a system in which human lives and pieces of equipment are assigned point values and displayed on a digital scorecard. Yet framing this as a matter of “efficiency” alone does not exhaust what is at stake. Once operational success is quantified, and attached to an interface, it becomes difficult to disentangle tactical judgement from score-chasing: Is grinding down enemy assets counted as success in itself, or only when it advances specific operational effects, and what kinds of behavior does the points system really reward?

Critical social science has long described a version of this dilemma through Goodhart’s law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Transposed into a gamified battlespace, this suggests that any points-based reward system risks generating unintended effects. Units may privilege point-rich targets even when they are tactically marginal or already being serviced by other teams. Drone pilots may accept riskier missions and stack multiple platforms against the same target in pursuit of incremental gains on the leaderboard, burning scarce munitions on duplicate kills. In that sense, a metric designed to capture effectiveness can generate operational inefficiencies as score-chasing behavior pulls resources away from less-visible but necessary tasks, a dynamic analysts have already linked to Goodhart’s law in the Ukrainian “Army of Drones” program.

Civilians as Players, Law as Interface

These architectures also pose questions for international humanitarian law. Legal frameworks still hinge on a distinction between combatants and civilians and on the idea that civilians are protected “unless and for such time as they take a direct part in hostilities.” Crowd-sourced distributed denial of service campaigns, authenticated reporting apps, and points-based drone rewards complicate this picture in several ways.

Play for Ukraine illustrates the problem in miniature. At one level, the experience is indistinguishable from solving a casual puzzle game. At another level, the game generates a stream of requests that contribute to disabling Russian websites, some of which may be linked to government or infrastructure. Commentators have already asked whether this exposes players to countermeasures or legal claims. The more interesting question is how it reshapes their own sense of what they are doing.

A similar ambiguity surrounds the IT Army of Ukraine. Analytical reports describe it as a hybrid formation that sits between hacktivist culture and state direction, with tasks issued through Telegram channels and a mix of official encouragement and plausible deniability. Volunteers are told that they can “fight” without leaving home and that their keyboard is a weapon. In such a setting, the difference between legitimate digital protest, criminal intrusion, and acts that qualify as direct participation in hostilities is not easily communicated, especially when participation is framed through the language of play.

The Diia-eVorog-DELTA chain raises a different set of questions. Government communications explicitly encourage citizens to submit information and highlight the number of reports received. Such reporting is integrated with other feeds to generate enhanced situational awareness. From a critical perspective, what matters is not only whether this infrastructure satisfies formal legal tests, but how it configures the relationship between seeing, reporting, and striking. When civilians are invited to tag enemy movements on a map, they are positioned as sensors in a distributed targeting apparatus. The interface does not display the downstream consequences of that click. It presents an apparently clean act of witnessing, without the messy temporality through which reports are investigated, weighed, and possibly ignored.

In each of these cases, gamification operates as a translator between complex legal and ethical questions and simple, rewarding user journeys. Law appears less as an external constraint and more as a set of design choices that shape what actions are possible within the system. To put it differently, legal and ethical considerations migrate into the interface. They are present insofar as the system requires authentication through Diia, filters out obviously unlawful targets, and channels reports to trained analysts. They are absent insofar as they do not register on the screen of the volunteer, who sees themself as playing a role in a collective drama of defense and resistance.

Reading Gamified War Critically

A critical war studies approach as developed by scholars like Tarak Barkawi and Shane Brighton, starts from how wars are organized, experienced, and justified — asking who benefits and who bears the risks of new ways of fighting, and whose labor and vulnerability are made visible or expendable — rather than assuming that gamification is either inherently corrupting or emancipatory. Instead, it treats gamified architectures as sites where broader dynamics of militarization, platform capitalism, and subject formation condense into visible form.

Gamified war foregrounds the extent to which contemporary conflict is organized through platforms. Ukraine’s digital resistance infrastructures sit at the intersection of state ministries, private technology companies, volunteer communities, and international donors. Open-source technologies, domestic start-ups, and foreign platforms such as Starlink and major social media services all play a role in keeping these systems running. Audrey Kurth Cronin has argued in these pages that open-source technology and public-private innovation are central to Ukraine’s strategic resilience. Gamification adds an additional layer, in which platform logics of engagement and retention migrate into the conduct of hostilities.

At the same time, these architectures invite a reconsideration of military labor and responsibility. In the conventional understanding of war, combatants and non-combatants are clearly separated, and labor that is recognized as “military” is performed in uniform within a formal hierarchy. In Ukraine’s case, a significant share of useful labor is performed by coders, system administrators, and volunteers who work from apartments and co-working spaces, and whose reward is symbolic rather than contractual. Even within the armed forces, the points-based drone economy overlays traditional hierarchies with a parallel economy of status in which the most visible labor is that which is easiest to quantify.

For observers outside Ukraine, it is tempting to treat the Army of Drones Bonus or Play for Ukraine as creative responses to an extraordinary situation that will not outlast this war. Yet reports already indicate that allied militaries and defense establishments are studying Ukraine’s experience closely, including its gamified procurement systems and its crowdsourced cyber formations. The normative language around these schemes is still cautious: Officials talk about an “innovation ecosystem” and “agile acquisition.” On the surface, this sounds like a simple attempt to get more out of limited crews, drones, and shells. In practice, tying rewards to a points table forces the system to decide what it is really trying to maximize. Is success any destroyed equipment, or only strikes that change a frontline or break up an attack? It also fixes who counts as “performing”: units that produce impressive tallies; those holding exposed positions; or those doing slower work such as reconnaissance, repair, and resupply. As units adapt to what the system can see and reward, they risk organizing around the game rather than around operational priorities. When the rules and metrics change, that specialization can suddenly sit out of step with what war demands.

Conclusion

Gamification in Ukraine is less a curiosity than a diagnostic window into how contemporary wars are organized and fought. The points that flow from DELTA to Brave1, the tiles that slide in Play for Ukraine, and the mission lists that scroll past on IT Army channels are not trivial embellishments. They are mechanisms through which participation is invited, violence is rendered countable, and life and death are folded into the familiar rhythms of digital interaction.

These architectures mobilize civilians and volunteers through playful interfaces, organize drone operations through a points-based marketplace, and reconfigure legal and ethical responsibility through platform design. In Ukraine, this experiment is unfolding under the pressure of a dense web of external suppliers, conditions that both enable and limit what these systems can do in practice. For outsiders tempted to imitate the model, the uncomfortable question is whether a similar architecture would steer behavior toward their own operational priorities once points, dashboards, and leaderboards begin to stand in for judgment.

For commanders, planners, and donors, the practical task is to test whether the behaviors rewarded by points schemes genuinely serve operational aims, and to keep sight of the labor and risk that the metrics struggle to see. Any change to how points are assigned or redeemed should be treated as a strategic decision and debated, not left to quiet tweaks in the code. To understand the future that is emerging here, it is not enough to count drones or lines of code. It is necessary to study the interfaces, metrics, and incentives through which war is being gamified and, in the process, subtly reorganized.

Hadi Al-Majdalani is a graduate student in critical security studies at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. His research focuses on the strategic use of digital and sensory, non-ocular technologies in contemporary warfare, and how they reshape the organization of violence and everyday life in protracted conflicts.

Image: ArmyInform