The Engine, the Garden, and the Oracle: Game Engines as Speculative Probes

Game engine technologies are increasingly used within contemporary artistic practices as testing grounds for speculative possibility. This paper considers the ways in which artists engage in creating worlds with these algorithmic tools, proposing a re-thinking of their software infrastructures as socio-material configurations that entangle both human and technical agencies. Conjuring three spectral metaphors in its analysis of the emergent practice of ‘worlding’, this work situates techno-artistic acts of negotiation with game engines as practices of countercultural computation, rooted in mechanisms of care, slow labour and affect. In the tradition of feminist STS and software studies, the game engine is considered from an alternative viewpoint to that of mainstream computer science, approached instead as a fertile space where the algorithmic, the speculative and the generative become entangled and activate a politics for thinking-otherwise. Prioritising an organic perspective on virtual world design over a technical one, this text traces an alternate politics of worldbuilding with immersive software that breaks away from the industrial complex of game production.