Can an AI play a video game? This workshop uses that deceptively simple question to explore one of the deepest paradoxes AI poses to liberal arts education: the difference between knowing about an experience and living it. Drawing on a Francophone video game course taught at UMass Amherst featuring Valiant Hearts, Life is Strange True Colors, and Under the Waves, this session demonstrates how AI tools become most pedagogically powerful not when they succeed, but when they fail. Participants will experience firsthand how ChatGPT, Gemini, Mistral AI, and Copilot generate fluent yet experientially hollow analyses of games they have never played and how students, as actual players, are uniquely positioned to identify, contest, and surpass those analyses. This "player vs. machine" dynamic transforms AI from a threat to academic integrity into a catalyst for embodied critical thinking, intercultural analysis, and genuine French language engagement.
