I'm curious if such a system could encourage soldiers to follow the laws of war. e.g. If soldiers were penalized for collateral damage, would they be more likely to act proportionally? In games players are penalized for negative actions such as team-killing. The article mentions captives give 10x more points than kills, which if effective is surely a positive for all parties involved.

Yes, sorta. But metrics-gamed warfare is older than Pong*.

More importantly - it sounds like they are very aware of how metrics-gamed warfare can go wrong, and are doing a decent-ish job of administering the game. Unlike, say, McNamara**.

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pong

**https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_body_count_controv...