A little yes, but mostly no. I flew F/A-18s for the Navy for a decade including working as an instructor. There are probably 3 key areas you need to succeed as a military pilot (especially in fighters): stick and rudder skills, multi-tasking, and fear control.

1. Stick and rudder skills. You need to be able to make the plane do what you want, whether it’s landing on a carrier, dog fighting, flying formation, dropping dumb bombs, air-to-air tanking, or any number of other things. This is more like race car driving than video games, with a significantly higher level of hand eye coordination and spacial awareness.

2. Multi-tasking. Modern aviation, especially military platforms, have a ton of things going on. You need to fly the plane (stick and rudder), talk on the radios, operate weapon systems, and do a ton of other stuff. In the F/A-18 you had essentially 4 displays that could all contain information.[1] You could perform hundreds of different tasks without ever taking your hands of the controls (stick and throttle). Here are some good graphics on the controls. [2, 3] You even have a screen selector and mouse cursor so essential you are operating multiple computers without text input. You need to keep a constant scan going, inside and out, while processing information on all the different displays and the radios.

3. Fear control. Operating a fighter jet is like doing something at 50% brain capacity. Something easy on the ground becomes tough in-flight. When you are junior or new to the task or stressed because of a mistake, 50% can quickly drop to 10%. This is often called a “helmet fire”. Sometimes people just freeze and can’t function.

Being an elite video gamer would only really help with number 2: multi-tasking. Stick and rudder skills and fear control are more important in the beginning. You can make it a long way in training on these, but eventually multi-tasking becomes a key component. We would see kids who aced flight school with great stick and rudder skills but then would run into a ton of problems when learning the F/A-18 due to insufficient multi-tasking skills required in advanced air-to-air and air-to-ground scenarios. If you can nail all three of these things, you will likely be a good military pilot.

Physical is also a factor, but not that big of a deal. If you are in decent shape you can handle it. The primary limiting physical factor will be stress. Initially, the stress will be draining where a single flight can wreck you for the day. But as you become more comfortable, this becomes less of a factor so I didn’t include it as one of the 3 main requirements. I knew plenty of overweight pilots in average shape. But if you can’t handle the 3 main requirements, you won’t be successful no matter how good an athlete you are.

Should probably also mention work ethic and study skills since these play a huge roll. The training is long and intense and never really stops. Earning your wings is just the start. You constantly need to learn new missions and new systems. Got your wings, nice, but what about section lead, division lead, strike lead. How do you run a strike group (a dozen plus planes of different types) off a carrier into a foreign country in the first days of a war? Although this is more of pilot leadership than just being a pilot, it is related, since the less you understand what is happening, the less effective you will be even if just a wingman. I imagine elite video gamers are probably pretty strong here though.

[1] http://www.mudspike.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/2015-10-3...

[2] http://i295.photobucket.com/albums/mm137/Lightndattic/F-18th...

[3] http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v699/xu-an/control_f-14d_f...