James Malazita, "Enacting Platforms: Feminist Technoscience and the Unreal Engine" (MIT Press, 2024)
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Today, we have an exciting guest with us, James Malasita, the author of An Acting Platform's Feminist Technoscience and the Unreal Engine. This book is published by MIT Press.

Welcome to the show. Great. Thank you so much for having me. I'd like to start our conversation by asking you to tell our listeners a bit about yourself. Yeah. So I am an associate professor of science and technology studies and of game design at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, or RPI, in Troy, New York, in the USA. And I'm a professor of science and technology studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute,

So my research interests are science and technology studies, and as we'll talk about a bit today, game engines and game technology, but also the broader cultural and sociological intersections that produce games as such and produce the technologies that we use to develop them. Yeah.

At RPI, we offer degrees in both undergraduate game design, but also in critical game design, which is inspired by taking critical approaches in game studies and synthesizing them with design and technical approaches. All right. May I just, out of sheer interest, may I ask, why did you call it critical game design and not just game studies? Because that's something, it really comes up a lot. And I wonder whether this is also being part of the

let's say challenge, no problem, but it really is a problem in the establishment of the field in total? Yeah. So I would say two reasons. The first is that our games program is situated in the middle of humanities departments, arts departments, and technical departments. And so it's

I'm using heavy scare quotes there. Just game studies doesn't really capture the breadth of the type of activities that we do. But more than that, it was a political commitment among all of the faculty as we were starting to come together and think about what it would mean to combine our skill sets, not just to teach industry-facing undergrad programs, but really think about what games research can look like at a school like RPI.

And we decided collectively that it was really important to both highlight the importance of critical theory and critical social scientific inquiry and, you know, what we would generally think of as game studies, but with a practice-based approach as well. Not only because I think as many people who are listening to this probably know, but

the academic jobs market is really tough. And so we feel that it would be a disservice to just train PhD students, you know, only for traditional academic jobs. So we wanted to consciously broaden that. But more than that, you know, as I think we'll talk about in a bit, having a hybrid focus on both studying the medium and also producing it, we think...

allows us to have some insights into how games work and actually produce different types of criticisms about games when you're always invested in producing as well as critiquing. So we really wanted this recursive pattern of both critical scholarship and design together. All right. Well, thanks very much. That's very insightful. Yeah.

Now, circling back to your book, you explore how the Unreal game engine is both a product and producer of broader intersections of power using feminist race and queer theories.

Could you elaborate on how these intersections manifest within the technology of the Unreal Engine and perhaps share an example of how these dynamics influence the development or use of this very platform? Yeah, absolutely. So for listeners who might not know, game engines are collections of software that are used to streamline the development of digital games.

So traditionally, if we go back to the late 80s, early 90s, it was common that large and mid-sized studios would have their own in-house tool sets for developing their games. This is where the Unreal game engine comes from. It was Epic, at the time, Epic Mega Games. They're now just Epic Games' internal engine for developing their Unreal games.

But over time, partially as studios saw how much money there was in licensing out their game engines, and also partially as a result of just the increasing economic need for studios to be able to build a game once and publish it to PC and consoles and mobile, which takes a lot of really nuanced computational calculations,

it's become more normal for game engine companies themselves to actually be separate from game publishers and for game publishers to license third-party tools rather than have their own in-house engines. So the Unreal Engine is kind of this funny, and what made it interesting to me, is this funny both sociological and historical object of, on the one hand, it's one of the few games

game engines from this kind of high point of engine development in the early 1990s that we think of with like id software and doom, um, that still exists and is widely used. Um, and so in, in this way, it's, it's kind of like a living archeology of video game development, right? It's, it's constantly updated and constantly tweaked, but still bears these legacies of being like a 1990s first person shooter, a bit of software, um,

Um,

And also, Epic Games themselves is kind of in an interesting position that I don't think many other companies share, where like Unity, which is their other major kind of competitor in the game engine licensing space, a huge amount of their income comes from licensing out their engine to other companies. But Epic Games is also a game publisher and game development company, right? So right now, most widely known for their...

massively popular game, Fortnite. But of course, back in the day, games like Gears of War and Unreal Tournament as well. And Epic is also, you know, interesting in that unlike Unity and unlike many other game development companies, they're still privately owned. So Tim Sweeney, who was the original founder of

of Epic Games has never made the company public, which means the types of creative and authorial and business decisions that Epic makes aren't subject to all of the same types of pressures that a company like Unity, which is publicly owned and therefore at the end of the day, responsible to quarterly profits and shareholders is, right? And so there's kind of a really interesting structure about Epic Games themselves.

So, how I come to analyze Unreal through feminist race and queer theories is primarily in two ways. The first is from feminist technoscience coming from science and technology studies, using a broader lens than only examining kind of how gender works.

comes to be enacted or comes to have a role in game development and in representation, but thinking about how we can use the theories of feminist scholars, particularly those who are thinking about

material production, how scientific production happens to analyze things like game technologies. And one of the major theories that comes out of feminist technoscience studies is the idea of enactment or that the media that we use, the technology that we use isn't preempted

pre-existing with hard constraints and affordances that allow that, you know, controls or shapes our, our world. Um, but rather that we're always kind of situationally enmeshed, um, with, with technology, right? So what counts as a software device, what counts as a game engine is actually multiple and variable, right?

Right. So as we tell stories about game engines, as scholars, as analysts, as historians, we are in ways shaping what the boundaries of those engines are and in some other ways contributing both rhetorically and materially back to them. The other way that these theories help is more specific analyses of how things like race, gender, queerness, power come to be manifested with and through these engines.

So in the book, one of the larger examples that I spend two chapters analyzing is a phenomenon in specifically the Unreal Engine, but can be applied more broadly to game development as well, that I call white photorealism, which is a

analysis of how what counts as photorealistic graphics in games and game engines are especially now widely marketed kind of based off how good they look, right? Like, and especially to game players, like you want to use X engine because it just looks the best or it can do particle effects the best and how...

That type of photorealism, you know, one from a longer media and art historical legacy dating all the way back to photography, we know that what is photoreal is not the same thing as what is real, right? And so, you know, terms like photorealism pick up on those longer debates and longer histories. But also that what counts as looking either real or photoreal is as much about who is determining what counts as photoreal than photorealism.

as much as it is about any sort of mimetic quality of the image or of the video itself. And so in the book, I use white photorealism to trace a legacy from photography and then through industrial light and magic, most prominently associated with George Lucas and Dennis Murin in the U.S. with Hollywood film production like Star Wars, that the 1980s, and this is borrowing heavily from Julie Ternock's work,

uh, the 1980s and 1990s established this kind of scientific, fantastical visual regime about what is supposed to look right on film. And games borrows heavily from cinematic traditions, especially cinematic visual and narrative traditions. And not only do we have kind of the, the representational and mimetic qualities of does this look good or not? Uh,

But what looks right becomes justified through almost pseudoscientific language. So like how we represent what looks photoreal is in a way representing some like unlocking of the secret of light and physics and optics.

And so not only do we have this kind of longer legacy of largely white directors and white directors of photography in cinema shaping what visual regimes of games are later, but we also see this in very specific examples of racial representation as well.

So in the kind of last chapter of the book, I trace, for example, how skin is rendered in games. And in the Unreal Engine, particularly through its MetaHuman Creator Project, which is kind of Epic's attempt at developing like a mass-produced non-player character style, like we have a basic body that can be modified and tweaked.

And what's interesting about the MetaHuman project is non-white skin just doesn't look this good. It doesn't shine as well. The translucency quality, as soon as you start adding melanin or changing different characteristics, just doesn't quite look as dynamic or...

or visually appealing as white skin. And this actually calls back to a longer history, especially in cinema, of valuing white physical representation over non-white physical representation, right? Or treating...

non-white bodies as derivative or other. So it's very common, for example, to see, especially in the United States in 1990 sitcoms like Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, The Cosby Show, these really harshly overblown lighting setups where all of the black actors just look really flat and gray. And I kind of trace in the book that

how this cinematic visual isn't just a result of animators following and copying cinematic techniques, so that's certainly a part of it, but the assumptions about what skin is and how it looks and how it's calculated are also built in at kind of deeper, more granular levels into skin rendering algorithms themselves

that devalue actually melanin. So they treat melanin as essentially a...

like a brownness quality rather than a chemical that has very particular interactions with light and electricity. And so this is just one example of where in order to understand how race, for example, not only exists within the Unreal Engine, but also how the Unreal Engine contributes to our understandings of race,

You need to take an intersectional feminist approach that understands and can kind of unpack what are these various visual regimes that are playing into what counts as real, what counts as ground truth.

but then also how are things like science and physics being used to provide a veneer of objectivity, uh, to what is ultimately a, a visual and, uh, subjective stylistic choice, right? And so using these types of, of, uh, critical theories, uh,

to unpack and kind of unwind this naturalization of race and whiteness as objected and as universal that are packaged in with something as seemingly neutral as skin rendering. Yeah.

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Now you do also offer a forward-looking critique of the platform studies framework itself. What limitations did you identify in the existing platform studies approach and how does your work aim to expand or challenge these boundaries? Yeah, so, uh,

The platform studies model, and one of the reasons I'm so engaged in this is the book is published through the platform studies series at MIT. Special thank you to Ian Bogost and Nick Monfort for helping shepherd this book through. And now that I've said that, here's a little critique of Ian Bogost and Nick Monfort. Yeah.

So one of the conceits of the platform studies framework is this layers model, right? And it's interesting, both Bogost and Montfort very carefully talk about platform studies not as a method, but as a way of helping to refocus game studies scholarly investigation away from what they view as kind of an over-reliance on...

on narrative and literary, uh, scholarship and tropes and more towards, you know, kind of the technological foundations of, uh, digital game production. Despite that, the layers model, which essentially insists that, uh, there are multiple layers of game production, starting from the base of hardware, which is layered on top with software, which is layered on top with user interfaces, which is layered on top with narrative, uh,

essentially acts as an operational method that implicitly, if not explicitly, claims that each layer is indebted to the layer beneath it. So you can't have the game narrative that you want without kind of reducing it or...

explaining it via the underlying software that exists and the software that exists to make the game can't be explained without the underlying hardware that exists. And so while I don't actually think this was Nick and Ian's intention, there can be an implication here that what is at each

at each kind of lower level is somehow more real. And what is at each higher level can almost be reduced to what is at the lower level, which also just reintroduces, again, long political histories of kind of this masculinist approach with women

technology and the media apparatus as somehow being more important or more central to any type of media production over something like a narratological approach, right? Which has often been dismissed sometimes explicitly, especially in game studies. And we don't need to bring that whole debate up, but often been explicit to somehow softer or more feminine or less important. One of the interesting things about STS, which I don't think has been

as used by game study scholars as it potentially could be, is this refusal of the distinction between the technological and the social or the technological and the narratological, right? That everything is always sociotechnical and that there is no such thing really as a material system with affordances and constraints that then has ripple effects, right?

but rather that there are socio-material relations and situations, right? And that every material and technical element can be understood as a production of the social, and every social element can also be understood through productions of the material. And so one of the major interventions beyond just a tracing of the Unreal Engine that I hope the book provides is

is actually a critique of the platform studies kind of implicit method to break down and do away with this layers ontology, right? And this idea that there is no such thing as the Unreal Engine. Like a different scholar than me actually could have written an equally valid and totally different book about Unreal that frames and situates and casts the Unreal software package developer community

extended economic system actually is an incredibly different looking thing than I do. And both of those are not only scholarly useful, but also ontologically relevant, right? Like they actually each shape what these underlying systems and software platforms are. So beyond kind of the arcane, you

theoretical model. I also hope that this intervention allows or provides an opening for scholars, especially scholars of color and women scholars who have correctly felt alienated from platform studies approaches because of this over fascination with a reduction to the technical aspects

to actually begin doing more platform studies work in a way that integrates the really important insights from intersectional feminist studies and queer studies in a way that doesn't have to reject the technical or the material as something...

that's being used essentially to bully or weaponize or Bogus even calls it bracket out the social from the technical, but actually see how these technologies are always queer and these technologies are always raced. And I'm hoping can reinvigorate some of the platform studies literature. Yeah. Dear listeners, by the way, right now there is no release date for Gaze of War yet.

Emergency day, I think that's the latest iteration. It's a shame. But anyways, Jim, your analysis touches also on the Unreal Engine's use in various fields from games to military simulations. In your opinion, how does the engine's entanglement with industries like the military and civil engineering reflect broader cultural and political implications? Yeah, so the book begins with a tracing of

and Unreal's relationship with the U.S. military. And it's very common in histories of technology and often important in histories of technology that so many of these computational systems that we study start out as machines

militarily funded, you know, technologies, right? So we can think of when we study the internet, right? There's always going back to DARPAnet and the early investments of the US government among other national governments in setting up the different systems that would eventually become the World Wide Web or with computation itself, right? And its ties to World War II and those needs.

So Unreal is kind of an interesting figure in that it doesn't have at least a readily apparent origin in military. It starts the commercial platform for developing a competitor to Doom and Quake in the early 90s.

But what in some ways consolidates the Unreal Engine away from being just a set of tools that are owned by Epic Mega Games that are kind of licensed out ad hoc to other game development companies and into a singular bit of assemblage of software that we can call the Unreal Engine is...

is its first contract with the U S government, uh, which was used, uh, where they partnered with the U S government to develop America's army, which is a widely known, especially in the United States, um, and explicit, uh,

American or U.S. military recruitment and propaganda tool. Right. To the point where the U.S. military developers explicitly call it a propaganda tool. It's a propaganda with a purpose. Right. Which was all about recruiting. At the time, they called them Gen Y. Now we call them millennials, millennials into the U.S. government or the U.S. Army. Right.

And so the America's Army Project, or at the time was known as the Army Game Project, was really interested in Unreal and using it as their platform for developing America's Army, not only for its technical capacities, although those were important too, right? They wanted something that could develop a first-person shooter rapidly, which is what America's Army was and what Unreal was good at. And they wanted something that...

They were very obsessed with a coolness factor, right? So they wanted to seem cool and hip because most, at least in the US, most governmentally developed media has a reputation of being kind of boring, right? And they wanted to avoid that.

But Unreal was also important to them because of the broader social entanglements that Epic and Unreal brought with it, right? So it was important to the US military to have access to commercial game developers and not just rely on internal technologists. So Unreal was seen as both...

something that game developers knew. And also at the time, so this would have been 2000 to 2001, um, Unreal was still prohibitively expensive to license for most game developers. It was about a $500,000 license in 2000s money. Um, and so, uh, it was actually a useful, uh,

recruitment tool, uh, developer recruitment tool for the U S army, because they said, if you want to work for the U S army, you can play around with this really hot new game engine. Um, and third, it was useful because it gave them an in into the popular game kind of press. And so it's, it's notable, for example, that, uh, America's armies, you know, kind of first, uh,

large announcement and a press release did not occur at a U.S. military-funded site, but occurred at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3, in L.A., right? So it was explicitly being marketed and pitched alongside entertainment.

video games. And so not only was Unreal useful to the US military for again, this kind of assemblage of technical and sociological reasons,

But the U.S. military was useful to Unreal and Epic, one, because they paid a ton of money, right? And so that's always useful as a cash infusion. But two, because when you're dealing with government contractors, it's really important to begin to be able to very clearly talk about what your software does and what it doesn't do and have a very clear sellable package that can get through U.S. government auditors.

And so we first start seeing Unreal Engine be called the Unreal Engine in the licensing agreements and documents with America's Army. Before then, it's things like the Unreal Warfare level editor or the Karma physics engine or other kind of pieces that Epic Games would use, but it becomes consolidated as a

single product through the license with the US military. The other interesting thing for me from a scholarly perspective is the case of America's Army also shows us how platforms are not this one unified thing, right? They're fractional. They're

related to one another, but also diffracted from one another. So the version that the America's Army development team would use of Unreal Engine

from a game that never actually got published called Unreal Warfare that would eventually later turn completely revamped but turn into Gears of War. And so America's Army was built on an engine developed for a game that never actually came out. And as Epic owns its own game publishing arm, the version of Unreal that Epic would eventually begin working on for Gears of War began

began diverging from the version of the engine that the US military had access to, which created all sorts of licensing problems, all sorts of updating problems, but also shows how at any given moment in time, if we want to, as scholars, investigate a platform like the Unreal Engine, there is no single thing called the Unreal Engine.

Even during this very particular moment in time, there were at least three almost completely different software packages, developer groups and communities, and social communities around what Unreal was.

to the point where if not for some minor embezzlement from some elements of the US military development teams, and if not for this kind of fractionality of these game engines,

We were on the way to possibly seeing the Unreal Engine become the de facto game engine of the US government. So there's all these interesting licensing agreements about Epic being used by the CIA, by the Department of Energy, by other departments within the Department of Defense, etc.

But the nature of platforms as being, as John Walls calls it, fractionally coherent, so always together while also separate, actually prevented in some ways the Unreal Engine from becoming part of the technological infrastructure of the United States. Yeah. So, Jim, as a final question, I would like to zoom out a bit. And we have already talked a bit about it.

I'd like to ask you about the very fundamental state of digital game research or game studies today. What do you think? Where do we stand here? Yeah. I think most people say this when they reflect on their own field, but we do feel like we're in a bit of a crossroads right now, right? Sebastian Detterding has wrote a piece a few years ago about the Pyrrhic victory of game studies, right? That the academic field emerges from...

essentially games not being considered valuable enough in media studies and literary studies for scholarly attention. And now I think that we've won that argument, right? Games are a major entertainment and narrative and cultural force.

So in a funny way, game scholars no longer have to almost hide within the field of game studies anymore, right? Like you can do games analytic work in media studies and cultural studies in English and language studies. And so while that's great, I think that that victory is,

also risks missing something that's really important in terms of how games are sociologically and technologically shaping the future of the globe, right? And not just in terms of representation and rhetoric, which is, of course, important. But we're seeing now with the rise of the global right wing, right, that so many of these kind of tech activists

either get their start or have heavy hands in game development, game engines, game technologies, right? Or the general rise of speculative investments and speculative capitalism, not only relying upon things like game engines for doing simulations and market calculations, because at the end of the day, game engines are basically just really fast databases, right?

but also are using gamic and ludic rhetoric

to place bets about countries, placing bets about technologies, placing bets about companies. I've been reading Adrian Massanari's book, Gaming Democracy, which just came out this year, right? That does a really great job of tying how both gaming culture, but also gaming technology is being used and is a large contributor of this kind of global rise of the far right.

And so I think this is a call to game study scholars, not only to recognize

reinforce the importance of game studies as a field and not just as a topical subfield of other different approaches, but to also really carefully consider, you know, broader sociological, anthropological and political scientific inquiry into games, right? Because games are becoming a core part of the cultural and technological infrastructure of the world, right? And we're in a better position right now to

to answer and inquire about those types of questions and issues than I think a lot of other fields are. Even in STS, which again, I think is a field that games can learn a lot from,

Games are not seen as kind of serious, right? They're not seen as like something that's necessarily important in a technological study. But I think as we're seeing more and more evidence, games are one of the, and game technologies and gaming companies are one of the central movers in kind of this new rise of global fascism that we're seeing. Yeah. Yeah.

And that's a wrap for today. We were talking about an acting platform, feminist technoscience and the Unreal Engine. James, thank you for being on our show today. Thank you. So, dear listeners, I hope you liked this episode. If you are an author and or an editor in the field of digital game studies yourself and want to talk about your latest publication, please do not hesitate to contact me under rudolf.indest at googlemail.com. Alternatively, please send me a direct message on social media at

You will find me under Rudolf Inderst on LinkedIn and under at Game Studies on Blue Sky. And for God's sake, please leave X. And by the way, if you really want to spread some Ludo research love, you can head over to GameStudiesMerch.de and get your nice and fresh Game Studies hoodie. Thank you so much for today. Keep it playful and goodbye.