Uncovering Machine Vision in Videogames

This study maps how machine vision technologies, including night vision overlays, facial recognition, surveillance cameras, and drones, are represented within videogame virtual environments. Drawing on theories of videogames as assemblages of multiple agents and on posthuman interrelated agency, it treats these technologies as active agents rather than neutral backdrops. The aim is to begin analyzing distributed agency between human and nonhuman actors in play, situating machine vision as a largely overlooked presence behind the playful surface of games.

The historical trajectory traced here begins in the 1980s with Hacker, in which a camera-equipped unmanned ground vehicle is essential to saving the world. Older titles frequently framed play through surveillance cameras, a constraint that suited the limitations of full motion video games such as Night Trap. Contemporary titles tend to integrate several machine vision systems at once, as in Death Stranding, which combines holograms, biometrics, and a terrain-scanning device, and Observation, where the player embodies a space station's artificial intelligence with access to cameras, drones, and webcams equipped with object recognition.

The study's corpus comprises 47 titles featuring at least one of sixteen technology types, including motion tracking, augmented and virtual reality, biometrics, body scanners, and emotion recognition. Analysis addresses the visual design of machine vision, the contexts in which it appears, the positioning of player and non-player characters relative to it, and the actions agents perform in relation to one another.

Preliminary findings suggest that videogames typically portray machine vision as an objective lens that reveals an unmediated truth, rarely prompting players to doubt its reliability. When machine vision serves the player, it generally appears as a helpful tool, but when characters become its object, the tone turns negative. These patterns largely reinforce a view of the human as autonomous and distinct from its environment, an either/or relationship with technology. Only a small number of works, notably Observation, challenge this framing by depicting human and nonhuman actors as inextricably entangled within complex assemblages.