Synopsis
Game Engine Culture(s) examines game engines as cultural infrastructures rather than neutral production tools. Across studies of Unity, Unreal, RAGE, RPG Maker, Minecraft, asset stores, higher education, live simulations, glitch, modding, and contemporary art, the volume traces how engines shape workflows, aesthetics, labour, memory, agency, and imagination. Its contributors show how these systems enable creativity while imposing defaults, constraints, and platform logics that organise what can be made, seen, taught, and contested. Bringing together game studies, media theory, softwar e studies, and art criticism, the book offers a critical account of the engine as a central apparatus of contemporary visual culture.
About the Authors
Matteo Bittanti is Associate Professor at IULM University (Milan, Italy), where he is Programme Manager of the Master of Arts in Game Design and a member of the Board of the PhD programme in Visual and Media Studies. His research spans media studies, game studies, digital humanities, visual studies, and cultural studies, with particular emphasis on videogame technologies as cultural infrastructures. Across scholarship, curatorial work, and artistic research, he examines how engines, pipelines, and modifiable systems shape aesthetic norms, authorial positions, and the politics of digital representation. He has developed projects and teaching that connect engine analysis to contemporary art and critical making, with a sustained interest in how proprietary toolchains encode assumptions about bodies, space, violence, and the legibility of worlds.
Paolo Ruffino is Senior Lecturer in Digital Curation and Computational Creativity in the Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London, where he also serves as Postgraduate Research Lead. His work addresses videogames as cultural, political, and technological forms, with interests spanning independent production, labour politics, and nonhuman or posthuman play. Ruffino is the author of "Future Gaming: Creative Interventions in Video Game Culture" (Goldsmiths Press, 2018) and editor of "Independent Videogames: Cultures, Networks, Techniques and Politics" (Routledge, 2021). His research connects engine infrastructures to questions of mediation and organisation: how tools, platforms, and communities condition what can be made, circulated, and recognised as play.
Valentino Catricalà is a scholar and curator specialising in contemporary art, media art, and the relationship between art and technology. He is Curator of Modal Gallery at the School of Digital Arts (SODA) and Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, where he also sits on the board of the German ZKM (Centre for Art and Media) in Karlsruhe. He founded and served as artistic director of the Rome Media Art Festival at MAXXI Museum, and currently directs the Art Section of Maker Faire - The European Edition. Catricalà has curated exhibitions at major institutions including the Hermitage (St. Petersburg), New York Media Center, Palazzo delle Esposizioni (Rome), and collaborated with institutions such as Prada Foundation and Marian Goodman Gallery. He holds a PhD from Roma Tre University and is the author of several books including "Media Art: Prospettive delle arti verso il XXI secolo" (2016), "Art and Technology in the Third Millennium" (2020), and "The Artist as Inventor" (2021).
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