Hmm..

I actually had to think about this one for a good long while. Sorry for the late response on this. 

But I really have no concrete answer. 

But… I kinda lean to the last thought. Like “play” disguised as war training…

cause least we forget:

A lot of irken tech is designed and emulated as videogame controllers a lot of the time.

And I think Zim has trouble defining the difference between “videogames” for recreation and “videogames” for “war training”

To him, these are the same. 

The main reason why irken tech is designed this way is because Johnen Vasquez and the IZ staff are huge gamer nerds and this was like gaming in the early 2000′s. It just made sense to design a lot of the tech this way to appear more “alien” to a casual viewer and probably to kids who didn’t have a lot of access to videogames (at this time I only owned a Gameboy Advance SP I think and a few other portable consoles. I didn’t know what a Powerglove or virtual reality was… So things like Zim’s gloves and motion controllers would be unfamiliar to me if I saw IZ as a kid back then)

And that design aspect does carry over into ETF.

So easy a child could do it. 

So like from a writer’s perspective, Yeah the IZ crew is a bunch of huge gamer nerds and designed all their technology based on Virtual reality videogame technology of the time….

But in a meta-narrative sense… 

It’s almost like irken tech was designed as playtime and made simple on purpose…

Like all Irken toys and videogames are made as training simulations

Smeets are just plugged into holo-visors constantly downloading virtual reality “games” and observing propaganda information for ten years.

So in conclusion: