Insurmountable enemies or easy targets? Military-themed videogame ‘translations’ of weaponized artificial intelligence

Abstract

International relations scholarship has long emphasized that popular culture can impact public understandings and political realities. In this article, we explore these potentials in the context of military-themed videogames and their portrayals of weaponized artificial intelligence (AI). Within paradoxical videogame representations of AI weapons both as ‘insurmountable enemies’ that pose existential threats to humankind in narratives and as ‘easy targets’ that human protagonists routinely overcome in gameplay, we identify distortions of human–machine interaction that contradict real-world scenarios. These distortions revolve around videogames affording players enhanced human agency to dominate AI weapons to offer enjoyable gameplay, contradicting the same weapons being intended to diminish human agency on real-world battlefields. By leveraging the Actor-Network Theory concept of ‘translation’, we explain how these distorted portrayals of AI weapons are produced by entanglements between heterogeneous human and non-human actors that aim to make videogames mass-marketable and profitable. In so doing, we echo game studies research that calls for greater attention to the commercial and ludic dimensions of videogames so that international relations scholarship can better account for pop culture’s bounded abilities to impact public understandings and political realities.