Video Gaming Geeks Save Israel - Ricochet.com

Play video games, defend your country.

At least, that's the way it works in Israel. The "Iron Dome" of anti-missile defense that protects the country is operated by experts. In video games. From Wired:

While many of the boys in Idan Yahya?s high school class were buffing up and preparing themselves for selection into elite combat units, this gawky teenager was spending ?a lot of time? playing?Warcraft?? the real-time strategy computer game where opposing players command virtual armies in a battle to dominate the fictional world of Azeroth.

Four years later, the high school jocks who sweated it out in pre-military academies so they could make the cut into the Israel Defense Force?s Special Operations units are now crawling through the sand dunes on the outskirts of the Gaza Strip and watching while Idan knocks rockets out of the sky hundreds of meters above their heads. Idan Yahya, 22, an Iron Dome ?gunner? in the Active Air Defense Wing 167, currently holds the record for the number of rockets intercepted: eight.

Missile defense in Israel, drones in the US: it seems like all of that time spent playing video games might actually pay off in a real way. ?If warfare becomes more and more technology-based, maybe what we're looking at is an Army of Geeks.

Source: http://ricochet.com/main-feed/Video-Gaming-Geeks-Save-Israel

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