2025/11/14 by Do Own Kim · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Digital Games and Media #Ethics and Social Impacts of AI #Posthumanist Ethics and Activism
paper · doi:10.1080/10714421.2025.2586865
openalex publication_date 2025/11/14 · openalex created_date 2025/11/15 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/14
This article argues for critical posthumanist approaches to human-machine communication (HMC) and positions video game non-player, non-playing, or non-playable characters (NPCs) as a productive connective topic to facilitate this. Despite their historical presence as mundane, popular artificial intelligence (AI) and rich implications on the political notion of the nonhuman, insights from NPC research, especially qualitative and critical, have been largely missing in HMC discourses. To close this gap, this article aims to investigate and provide a guiding mapping of NPC literature. First, it critically contextualizes existing approaches to NPCs across disciplines to examine why and how NPCs can aid critical posthumanist research on AI contexts. Second, building on this, it conducted a scoping review of 22 grounded qualitative, critical theoretical works on emergent narratives on NPCs. The review suggested a budding interest in the topic and many promising research potentials. Specific recommendations are made. Drawing on the results, I argue that NPCs can help us interrogate the inhuman(e) in other-than-human.