DIGM Colloquium Presents

Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts & Design

Seeing Like a Soldier: the Coproduction of the Unreal Engine and the State through America’s Army

ExCITe Center

This talk follows Epic Games and Unreal’s early history, and how the early design of the engine was shaped both by competitors in the games industry, but also through interactions with the US Military. From early on, Epic framed Unreal as a democratizing force for game development, while also working to produce Unreal as a flexible toolset for Army simulation, training, and recruitment. The computational dimensions of the engine were only a part of this toolset, Epic and the Army also envisioned Unreal as the connective tissue between the US Government and the interactive entertainment industry at large. In so doing, Unreal was part of the production of computation and engineering as masculinized, militaristic culture—not physically strong and reckless like the hypermasculine “Rambo” films would have potential Army recruits believe, but rather militarist masculinity as “reasoned” and “analytic.” This history provides a lens both into the development of the games industry and also into how technological systems are used to shape and recruit young men into actors for state power, a practice that continues through the deployment of AI as a recruitment tool for DOGE by Elon Musk. Speakers Bio:<a href="https://faculty.rpi.edu/james-malazita" title="https://faculty.rpi.edu/james-malazita" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Dr. Jim Malazita</a> is an Associate Professor of Science &amp; Technology Studies and Game Design at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, USA. Jim serves on the Executive Board of the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) and is the incoming Director of RPI’s Critical Game Design Ph.D. program. His first book, Enacting Platforms: Feminist Technoscience and the Unreal Engine, uses feminist and Black theories of science and technology to examine game engine platforms, histories of game development, and the coproduction of race, cinema, and computer graphics, and is available Open Access from the MIT Press. He studies the overlapping roles of technology, power, culture, and infrastructure in contemporary digital media, and his research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the RedHat Foundation, and the Strong Museum of Play. Jim’s writing has been featured in venues such as Design Issues, Debates in the Digital Humanities, Digital Creativity, and Game Studies.

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DIGM Colloquium Presents

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