system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[Ender's Game] Could Ender have pulled off his stunts if he knew he were fighting real battles?

Let's say that the school makes Ender fully aware that he is controlling real people and forces before he goes from fighting in a simulator to fighting real battles.  
Would he still have been able to fight as well as he did knowing people were dying under his command, and would he have been able going so far as to sacrifice all his forces to fire the planet cracker at the Bugger homeworld?

Bonus: Would it change if they tried to keep it secret as normal, but Ender learned he was about to be deceived into fighting real battles instead?
gpt
Possible but unlikely. Given that what proved he could do it at all also turned out to show exactly his weakness. In the beginning of the book when his monitor was removed, we see him interact with a bully for the first time. He literally has no intention whatsoever of killing the bully. His thought process is actually something along the lines of going far enough to make sure the bully can't and or won't bully him again. And sure, you can't bully anyone if you're dead, but Ender does realize the magnitude of what he's done later on in the other books. He mourns the people he got killed and those new truths definitely effect the decisions he makes at the time. 

This is something the adults from the training program, and both his sister and brother are well aware of. He's great at making decisions until he has to do so with the knowledge that he may be responsible for the deaths of people under him. It's that exact thing that makes him the one and that exact weakness that makes everyone hide the deaths he's caused from him. 

We see this each time he has a real physical altercation in the first book. In later books we are shown examples of how his need to protect not just himself but others leads him in making decisions.