Game Engine Culture(s)

Game engines are no longer only tools for making games. They have become cultural infrastructures. They organise workflows, shape visual conventions, structure creative labour, circulate assets, support simulations, and increasingly influence how images, worlds, interfaces, and behaviours are produced across many areas of contemporary media. Its chapters examine engines as production environments, as platforms, as pedagogical instruments, as sites of artistic intervention, and as software architectures that carry assumptions about space, agency, realism, history, bodies, and control. The book moves from broader theoretical questions to close studies of particular engines, tools, artworks, games, educational contexts, and development practices. It includes work on asset stores and the platformisation of historical imagination; self-playing games and live simulations; engine art and machinima; glitch, modding, and code; the representation of place and identity; RPG Maker, Minecraft, Unreal, Unity, RAGE, and other production environments; and the ways artists use engines to test, reroute, or expose the systems that ordinarily remain behind the image. Game Engine Culture(s) investigates game engines as complex objects that must be approached from several positions: technical, aesthetic, institutional, political, pedagogical, and artistic. In fact, game engines do not belong to one discipline, and they cannot be understood from one angle alone.