BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

Deadly Toys: How Weaponized Xbox Controllers Inspired New Art Exhibition

Following
This article is more than 2 years old.

Shooter Box, running September 1–24, is an exhibition curated by Rachel Berger of the California College of the Arts (CCA). The centerpiece of the show is Berger’s own Bullet I, an Xbox controller cast in lead and copper, a commentary on what she sees as the cynical use of Xbox controllers in weapon systems.

“The military has deliberately blurred the line between toys and weapons,” Berger told Forbes.

Bullet I is part of a long tradition of sculpted versions of everyday objects placed in galleries to make people look at them differently. Berger, design professor and Chair of CCA’s Graphic Design Program, is concerned to see childhood games becoming military hardware.

“I believe the Xbox controller’s seeming innocence is the key to its danger,” says Berger.

The controllers made the headlines a few years back when the U.S. navy started using them to operate the photonics mast – the modern version of a periscope – in their Virginia-class submarines. Previously, a custom-built controller was used, but this was clunky and not intuitive, and came with a price tag of $38,000. The game controllers proved to be far easier to use, and cheaper to replace.

These Xbox controllers may even be used to aim and fire the high-energy laser weapons which the Navy is now integrating into the Virginia-class photonics masts.

The same controller is being used in developing other unmanned systems such as the U.S. Army's Robotic Wingman vehicle.

Berger argues that while there may be benefits to using this hardware, there is a less obvious downside.

“The Xbox controller is certainly much cheaper and much better designed than anything the military could come up with, but I believe the use of it is ‘expensive’ in terms of the consequences of blurring the line between toys and weapons,” says Berger.

Her point is underscored by design history.

“Early consoles offered a range of specialized input devices besides the classic controller: light guns, steering wheels, and flight-sticks, even fishing rods and maracas,” says Berger. “Xbox and PlayStation, today’s leading consoles, have converged on a similar all-in-one controller, with a complex combination of thumbsticks, d-pads, buttons, bumpers, and triggers.”

The modern Xbox controller is, then, a complex piece of kit, but one which many people are adept as using after years of Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty.

“Proponents of the military’s use of Xbox controllers favor terms like instinctive and intuitive to describe soldiers’ speedy adoption of the hardware,” says Berger. “But it's not like the controller’s 16-button, dual analogue console gamepad is easy to master. It's that, having spent hundreds of hours playing with the controller as children, the soldiers have already mastered it. They find the controller to be intuitive because of its familiarity, not its simplicity.”

Berger notes that the military use the Xbox 360 controller rather than the more recent Xbox One, apparently because the older design is more familiar among those who are now handling military hardware. Some 27 million were sold and many are still in use.

Other items on show at the Shooter Box exhibition include another Berger Xbox controller, Bullet III, and a display showing America’s Army, a video game developed as a recruiting aid and distributed as a free Xbox download — and a memorial to U.S. service members killed in Iraq created using America’s Army messaging system. There’s also a video of CNN coverage of Desert Storm, quickly nicknamed the Video Game War. Other items include a lead mold for toy soldiers dating from WW1 and the casts and other items used to create Bullet I.

But why should the military use of convenient commercial hardware provoke such a strong reaction? Perhaps because it may have more to do with culture wars than military operations.

“Ultimately, I believe the military’s reasons for repurposing the controllers are a smoke screen,” says Berger.

Berger suggests that the training and ergonomics aspects are less important than what the controller stands for.

“By virtue of its status as a designed object, the Xbox controller is inscribed with far more consequential meanings and values than the military acknowledges. In a chilling echo of the simulator that turns out to be real in Orson Scott Card’s science fiction novel Ender’s Game, the military is repurposing a beloved object from the childhood of the gamer generation for the American war machine.”

Shooter Box runs to September 24. Details can be found here.

Follow me on TwitterCheck out my website or some of my other work here