![]() While on the surface such a choice might seem a simple articulation of the core design principles for any one given project, the directions in which virtual reality systems are guided and the impacts these choices will have on societal acceptance of VR as a principal component of our technological futures should not be ignored. ![]() As such, designers and developers of interactive virtual (here defined as including mixed and augmented) reality systems are faced with a fundamental choice: to create experiences that are inherently collaborative or competitive. Across each of these disciplines the roles of ”player” and ”audience” member vary significantly, as do the rules, affordances and experiential goals put forth by the systems themselves. The histories of virtual reality systems draw heavily from foundational work in telepresence and robotics, cinema and gaming. We offer these crossings between text and context, history and future Ahmed, 2008, memory and fiction as a speculative fabulation for future Games pedagogies. We share not only our research on this topic, but also invite you into our own intimate experiences of play-making, foregrounding this as knowledge-making too. Instead we untangle and re-tangle in a new way, drawing on the work of Feminist New Materialists (Ahmed, 2008 Alaimo, 2016 Alaimo and Hekman, 2008 Barad, 2011 Bennett, 2010 Braidotti, 2013 Coole and Frost, 2010 Dolphijn and Tuin, 2012 Grosz, 1994 Kirby, 1997) to develop imaginative new models for a more just and joyful future Games pedagogy. Acting ‘in a fix’ is something we no longer wish to do. Our fixes are diluted until they become performative gestures, absolving others of the need to act, but changing little else. Often, our fixes only serve to a fix ourselves, further cementing us as outsiders. And, given this lack of sustainability, our labor is not effective in the ways we intend. ![]() While our labor is often assumed, it is not fully valued, evidenced by the ways in which it is chronically under-resourced. This tasking comes to us in the form of both assumptions and requests about our providing particular types of education to others, both faculty and students, as fixes to Game-troubles: teaching the gender module sitting on an LGBTQ+ committee advising a particular student who is also outside the more comfortable purview of Games and so forth. As inside–outsiders, given our status as queer women in the male-dominated Games field, both with interdisciplinary art-tech-humanities backgrounds as opposed to STEM, we are the ones commonly tasked with ‘fixing’ these troubles. As faculty members in a Game Development program we are aware of the troubles. Outlining the structuring force of game engines from game development and entertainment media to architecture, engineering, construction, and manufacturing, I speculate on the implications of engines for game workers and game studies. This commentary discusses the automaticity of game engines as platform tools for designing and simulating interactive 3D worlds within and beyond games. Game studies has investigated engines such as Unreal and Unity as platform tools that consolidate power through asymmetries of interconnectivity and interoperability. Platform studies has analyzed automated decision-making through the politics of classification. The automation of programming and artistic functions is increasingly baked into game engines that work with other software applications in 3D production ecosystems, which are laying the foundations for what is being pitched by platform companies as the future metaverse. The production of videogames routinely uses automated techniques to generate content, rig animations, map light, and script behaviors.
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