"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.
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."
By:
James Malazita
Imprint: MIT Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions:
Height: 229mm,
Width: 152mm,
Weight: 369g
ISBN: 9780262548243
ISBN 10: 0262548240
Pages: 248
Publication Date: 02 July 2024
Audience:
General/trade
,
ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
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
James 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.
