Call of Duty 2

Human, All Too Non-Human: Coop AI and the Conversation of Action

Bart Simon's paper examines how cooperative artificial intelligence in contemporary digital games, particularly Activision's Call of Duty 2, reshapes the relationship between players and machines compared with the competitive human-versus-computer framing established by chess and the 1997 Deep Blue–Kasparov match.

• Simon argues that single-player games often preserve a "humanist remains" by hiding machine labor behind an illusion of individual human mastery, whereas cooperative AI foregrounds a "conversation of actions" in which players must continually track and adapt to non-human comrades.
• The paper frames cooperative AI as a move toward critical posthumanism, drawing on Haraway, Latour, Hayles, and Baudrillard, and uses Mori's uncanny valley to describe the unsettling yet productive tension it creates.
• Simon contends that cooperative AI opens exploratory space that competitive, Turing-style AI (exemplified by chess and the 1997 Deep Blue–Kasparov match) has largely closed off.