Enacting Platforms

An analysis of the game engine Unreal through feminist, race, and queer theories of technology and media, as well as a critique of the platform studies framework itself.

In this first scholarly book on the Unreal game engine, James Malazita explores one of the major contemporary game development platforms through feminist, race, and queer theories of technology and media, revealing how Unreal produces, and is produced by, broader intersections of power. Enacting Platforms takes a novel critical platform studies approach, raising deeper questions: what are the material and cultural limits of platforms themselves? What is the relationship between the analyst and the platform of study, and how does that relationship in part determine what “counts” as the platform itself? Malazita also offers a forward-looking critique of the platform studies framework itself.

The Unreal platform serves as a kind of technical and political archive of the games industry, highlighting how the techniques and concerns of games have shifted and accreted over the past 30 years. Today, Unreal is also used in contexts far beyond games, including in public communication, biomedical research, civil engineering, and military simulation and training. The author’s depth of technical analysis, combined with new archival findings, contributes to discussions of topics rarely covered in games studies (such as the politics of graphical rendering algorithms), as well as new readings of previously “closed” case studies (such as the engine’s entanglement with the US military and American masculinity in America’s Army). Culture, Malazita writes, is not “built into” software but emerges through human practices with code.Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1
Seeing Like a Soldier: The Co-Production of Engine and State through America’s Army  
Arc I: Queering Orientation and Agency
Chapter 2
Orienting Z: Interfaces and Coordinate Space as Unreal’s Bodily Proxies  
Chapter 3
Elizabeth and Threads of Kismet:
Agency as Queer and Affective Entanglement in BioShock Infinite           
Arc II: White Photorealism
Chapter 4
Epistemic Prestige in Unreal’s Physically Based Rendering
Chapter 5
The Raced Histories of MetaHuman Creator’s Skin, Shine, and Melanin  
Conclusion
Resource Materialities, Fortnite, and the Metaverse           
Bibliography
Endnotes“Enacting Platforms serves as an essential bridge between the various strands surrounding platform studies. Malazita not only recognizes the multitude of novel modes of cultural production enabled by these frameworks but also deftly navigates their technical, cultural, and practical implications in a subfield where these components are often regarded separately.”
—International Journal of Communication“Game engines are influential cultural artifacts, and by examining the Unreal Engine through an intersectional feminist lens, Malazita offers a groundbreaking perspective on the relationships between technology, gender, and race in digital culture.”
—Tom Apperley, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Excellence in Game Culture Studies, Tampere University
 
“A delightfully detailed, readable, and thoughtful exploration of the Unreal game engine. Malazita walks us through the strata of this platform/engine to better understand how it has shaped and been shaped by broad socio-technical-political forces.”
—Casey O’Donnell, Associate Professor, Department of Media and Information, Michigan State University; author of Developer’s Dilemma
 
“Malazita’s account of the Unreal Engine has something for everyone—drama, history, politics, and technology—all wrapped in prose that is simultaneously exciting, rigorous, and accessible. This is platform studies at its best.”
—Amanda Phillips, Associate Professor of English, Georgetown University; author of Gamer TroubleJames Malazita is Assistant Professor of Science and Technology Studies and Associate Director of the Games and Simulation Arts and Sciences Program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.