No abstract

Machine vision technologies are increasingly ubiquitous in society and have become part of everyday life. However, the rapid adoption has led to ethical concerns relating to privacy, bias and accuracy. This paper presents the methodology and some preliminary results from a digital humanities project that is mapping and categorising references to and uses of machine vision in digital art, narratives and games in order to find patterns that may help us understand the broader cultural understandings of machine vision in society. Understanding the cultural significance and valence of machine vision is crucial for developers of machine vision technologies, so that new technologies are designed to meet general needs and ethical concerns, and ultimately contribute to a better, more just society.

As the increasingly ubiquitous field of surveillance has transformed how we interact with each other and the world around us, surveillance interactions with virtual others in virtual worlds have gone largely unnoticed. This article examines representations of digital games’ diegetic surveillance cameras and their relation to the player character and player. Building on a dataset of forty-one titles and in-depth analyses of two 2020 digital games that present embodied surveillance camera perspectives, Final Fantasy VII Remake (Square Enix 2020) and Watch Dogs: Legion (Ubisoft Toronto 2020), I demonstrate that the camera is crucial in how we organize, understand, and maneuver the fictional environment and its inhabitants. These digital games reveal how both surveillance power fantasies and their critique can coexist within a space of play. Moreover, digital games often present a perspective that blurs the boundaries between the physical and the technically mediated through a flattening of the player’s “camera” screen and in-game surveillance cameras. Embodied surveillance cameras in digital games make the camera metaphor explicit as an aesthetic, narrative, and mechanical preoccupation. We think and play with and through cameras, drawing attention to and problematizing the partial perspectives with which worlds are viewed. I propose the term cyborg vision to account for this simultaneously human and nonhuman vision that’s both pluralistic and situated and argue that, through cyborg vision, digital games offer an embodied experience of surveillance that’s going to be increasingly relevant in the future.

Hologrammer er markører for futuristiske verdener. Digitale spill lar oss oppleve verdener der hologrammer er plassert som aktører med funksjoner utover å vaere atmosfaeriske objekter. Denne artikkelen redegjør for en bred kulturell forståelse av hva et hologram er, og bruker denne til å kartlegge 24 digitale spills holografiske representasjoner. Oversikten etterfølges av en naerlesning av hologrammer i videospillet Horizon Zero Dawn (Guerrilla Games, 2017). Disse hologrammene gir tilgang til glemt kunnskap og plasserer spillere og spillerkarakterer i aktivt observerte posisjoner mens fortiden spilles av i navigerbare mellomsekvenser. Jeg argumenterer for at hologrammenes estetiske, narrativt og mekaniske funksjoner utfordrer binaere konseptualiseringer av tilstedevaerelse og handlingsrom. Dette skjer mellom spillerkarakter og hologram diegetisk i spillverdenen og speiles i møtet mellom spiller og spill. Spillhologrammer medierer, tematisk og formelt mellom menneskelige og ikke-menneskelige aktører, noe som hjelper oss å se hvordan maskiner og mennesker knyttes sammen gjennom handling i komplekse posthumanistiske assemblasjer.

This article explores how video games that valorize techno-masculine imaginaries of superhuman domination also present humans as depending on computational and non-human agencies to succeed. Through close readings of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (Infinity Ward 2007) and Cyberpunk 2077 (CD Projekt Red 2020), I illustrate the close connection between machine vision and militarized visions of domination and agency. The analyses show how beyond-human vision enhances player characters and players, complicating the human-machine relationship in the process. Video games can build on and feed into anthropocentric and masculinist narratives. This article demonstrates how even when the technology appears to support these fantasies of human control, there are moments when it takes over or otherwise disrupts the god-like interventions of the human. By analyzing failures, glitches, and the consistent machine participation in the assemblage, I unpack explicit cases of machine agency as part of a broader assemblage, revealing a more complex power dynamics than those that are initially presented to the player. In doing so, this article demonstrates how the superhuman machine vision was never exclusively human to begin with. Understanding vision and agency as shared with machines both enables and complicates fantasies of dominance in video games.