Description
Generative AI has increasingly been used to develop non-playable videogame characters (NPCs) that more realistically enhance the affective and aesthetic affordances in videogames. This article analyses how such AI systems reproduce modes of colonial body regulation. Drawing on Joshua Whitehead’s (Oji-Cree) cyberpunk poetry collection full-metal indigiqueer, I reflect on the ‘digital dysphoria’ engendered by the behavioural responses and emotional simulation that AI-driven NPCs perpetuate. Central to this analysis is Whitehead’s characterisation of ZOA, the “NDN-machina” that provides the theoretical grounding for understanding Indigenous presence as inherently disruptive to colonial computational arrangements. Whitehead’s recurring motifs of technological haunting articulate ways of theorising Indigenous presence that transcend western distinctions between human/machine, suggesting possibilities for designing AI systems around Indigenous understandings of agency distributed across human, non-human, and AI/technological artefacts. This article contributes to Indigenous futurisms, queer of colour critique, and critical AI studies by suggesting ways of critiquing those AI systems that dilute the material conditions of embodiment and treat it as visual or representational. Exploring the possibilities of a framework of speculative embodiment, this article illustrates how Indigenous and queer epistemologies offer transformative alternatives to extractive colonial logics particularly in contexts where digital ‘bodies’ become sites of both colonial violence and resistance. In so doing, this analysis proffers Indigenous poetics as an epistemological intervention into AI applications such as NPCs in videogames, that move beyond algorithmic simulation to facilitate alternative pathways of becoming.
