New Book: Enacting Platforms

I am excited to announce that my new (and first!) book, Enacting Platforms: Feminist Technoscience and the Unreal Engine, is coming out with MIT Press on July 2, 2024. Part of MIT’s “Platform Studies” Series, the book provides 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. Thanks to MIT, the book will also be available Open Access!

The book centers theories from feminist technoscience studies to analyze the enactment of game engines alongside broader structures of race, gender, and agency. The book may be useful for anyone interested in a critical analysis of both the Unreal Engine and game studies, and for those interested in how power comes to produce and be produced by game engines and game developers. 

Chapter List below:

Enacting Platforms: Feminist Technoscience and the Unreal Engine

Chapter List:

• Seeing Like a Soldier: The Coproduction of Engine and State through America’s ArmyArc I: Queering Orientation and Agency
• Orienting Z: Interfaces and Coordinate Space as Unreal’s Bodily Proxies
• Elizabeth and Threads of Kismet: Agency as Queer and Affective Entanglement in BioShock Infinite Arc II: White Photorealism
• Epistemic Prestige in Unreal’s Physically Based Rendering
• The Raced Histories of MetaHuman Creator’s Skin, Shine, and Melanin
• Resource Materialities, Fortnite, and the Metaverse

Jim Malazita
Associate Professor, Science & Technology Studies
Associate Director, Games & Simulation Arts & Sciences
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
malazj@rpi.edu