Game Engine Speculation

The 2021 ‘Metaverse moment’ cast the game engine as a speculative technology, operating as imaginary and infrastructure. As infrastructure, engines like Unreal amass 3D asset libraries as building blocks for modular and flexible assembly into real-time environments. More than its asset or content marketplaces, what makes an engine a platform is its stable base for moving parts — finite elements enabling the illusion of scalable abundance — providing stable architectures and combinatorial variation for composite, additive, and synthetic techniques of worldbuilding.

How does compositing through photogrammetry, constructing through additive modelling, and synthesizing through generative tools frame assets as a speculative unit for worldbuilding? The human work of compositing, constructing, and synthesizing a component as an asset is framed as the potentiation of proprietary infrastructure –– (libraries, rigs, rendering) at the core of engine technology –– that are perfectly formed in their latent state.

Here, speculation addresses risk in cultural production not just through data-based extrapolation that is routine to engines’ physics-based modelling. Speculation is not just predictive but anticipatory: just as the ultimate goal of algorithmic border control is not security but securability, the goal of engine culture is not ultimately assembly, but its capacity. This talk explores how the labor of assembly, when framed through game engine speculation is subsumed not as production but potential—where value lies in the experimental exercise of future capabilities.

About the speaker

Aleena Chia is a lecturer in Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. She researches digital game making cultures and wellness practices to understand how media technologies automate work and optimize life—shaping inequalities in cultural production. She is coauthor of Technopharmacology (Meson/University of Minnesota Press, 2022) and co-editor of Reckoning with Social Media (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022). She has co-edited journal special issues on ‘Digital Play after Humanism’ in Convergence (2022), ‘Time Machines’ in MAST (2025), and ‘Videogame Theory,’ forthcoming in Media Theory.