James Malazita's "An Acting Platform's Feminist Technoscience and the Unreal Engine" offers a critical analysis of the Unreal Engine, exploring its role in shaping and being shaped by power dynamics. The book uses feminist, race, and queer theories to examine how the engine's design and use reflect broader societal issues. Malazita investigates the engine's entanglement with various industries, including the military, and its impact on cultural representations. The author challenges traditional platform studies approaches, proposing a more nuanced understanding of the complex interplay between technology, culture, and power. The book's insights contribute to a deeper understanding of the sociotechnical dimensions of game development and its broader cultural implications.
Adrienne Massanari's "Gaming Democracy" explores the complex relationship between gaming culture, technology, and political ideologies. The book examines how gaming platforms and communities are utilized and influenced by various political actors and movements. Massanari analyzes the role of game technologies in shaping political discourse and participation, highlighting both positive and negative aspects. The book delves into the ways in which gaming culture can be manipulated for political purposes, and how it can also serve as a space for resistance and social change. "Gaming Democracy" provides valuable insights into the evolving landscape of digital politics and the impact of gaming on democratic processes.
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: Feminist Technoscience and the Unreal Engine (MIT Press, 2024) 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.
Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, department lead for Games at Swiss culture magazine Titel kulturmagazin, editor of “DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.
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New Books in Critical Theory