James Malazita, "Enacting Platforms: Feminist Technoscience and the Unreal Engine" (MIT Press, 2024)

Jan 12, 2025

James Malazita, Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies and Game Design at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, delves into the cultural intersections of the Unreal game engine through feminist, race, and queer theories. He critiques the platform studies framework, exploring its sociocultural limits and the complex relationship between technology and identity. Malazita highlights issues of racial representation in game design and advocates for a more inclusive critical approach, urging scholars to examine gaming's broader social implications.

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INSIGHT

Malazita's Background and RPI's Game Design Program

James Malazita is an associate professor at RPI, researching game engines and sociocultural intersections in game development.
RPI offers degrees in game design and critical game design, combining critical theory with practical design.

INSIGHT

Critical Game Design at RPI

RPI's critical game design program blends humanities, arts, and technical disciplines.
The program emphasizes the recursive relationship between critical analysis and game production, enriching both.

INSIGHT

Unreal Engine and Intersections of Power

Game engines like Unreal Engine reflect and perpetuate power dynamics related to race, gender, and other social categories.
"White photorealism" in games, influenced by cinematic traditions, often privileges white representation and aesthetics.

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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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