Are You Being Played?—Video Games as a Lens for Artificial Intelligence Ethics and Data Politics

As digital technologies increasingly permeate everyday life, concerns about privacy, surveillance, and algorithmic control have become central to contemporary society. Fictional narratives, particularly in science fiction games, reflect and simulate these concerns, depicting privacy as both a vulnerable right and a commodified asset. This paper examines how video games incorporate surveillance not only through narrative and aesthetics but also through artificial intelligence (AI)-driven systems that track, model, and adapt to player behavior as part of the act of play. Drawing on Foucault’s disciplinary power, Deleuze’s control societies, and Zuboff’s surveillance capitalism, we analyze how games such as Little Nightmares , The Sims , and Cobra Club stage surveillance as atmospheric discipline, everyday normalization, and networked consent. We extend Bogost’s notion of procedural rhetoric with Galloway’s concept of the allegorithm to show how games make ethical arguments through code as well as story. We argue that such games function as laboratories for AI ethics, foregrounding issues of consent, transparency, and autonomy, and propose a procedural ethics of transparency for understanding how play both rehearses and resists algorithmic governance.