Recap // Research Talk: Game Engine Speculation

On November 6, 2025, KMDI welcomed Dr. Aleena Chia (Goldsmiths, University of London) for a research talk that opened a wide lens on one of the most influential technologies shaping contemporary digital culture: the game engine. In Game Engine Speculation, Chia invited us to rethink not only how engines like Unreal are used, but the kinds of futures they quietly build through their workflows, infrastructures, and creative assumptions. 

Drawing from her extensive research on game production cultures and the politics of automation, Chia examined the rapidly expanding universe of ready-made digital assets—3D models, textures, animations—that now circulate through game engines. These assets, she noted, are far more than convenient artistic resources. They are cultural materials that shape how worlds are imagined, assembled, and valued. When artists piece together environments using libraries of pre-existing elements, they work within systems that encourage certain aesthetics, workflows, and forms of creativity over others. 

Chia mapped how this shift transforms creative labour. Techniques like photogrammetry, procedural content generation, and AI-assisted design promise efficiency and scale, but they also redistribute who gets to create, who tunes the system, and whose work is considered “creative” at all. As she argues in her work on procedural generation, these systems often automate the most time-intensive aspects of production while leaving artists with what she calls the “last mile” of digital labour—the meticulous tuning, fixing, and conditioning that keeps automated tools functional. That labour is essential, yet frequently undervalued.  

By reframing game engines as infrastructures, Chia encouraged the audience to see them not simply as technical tools, but as platforms whose assumptions travel far beyond games. Engines increasingly underpin film production, architectural visualization, product design, and emerging visions of the so-called “metaverse.” Their workflows, she explained, encode templates for how creativity should unfold, how time should be managed, and which contributions count as innovation. These choices influence both cultural production and the future of work across industries.  

Speculation became a guiding thread in Chia’s talk—not as prediction, but as a mode of imagining and managing possibility. Game engines, with their vast libraries and real-time rendering capacities, orient creators toward futures of endless generation. Yet they also narrow imagination through their defaults, their physics, their aesthetics, and the systems of labour they institutionalize. Chia asked us to consider: What kinds of worlds become possible when engines encourage anticipation, scale, and efficiency? And what forms of imagination are lost? 

Her talk offered a timely reminder that behind every digital world lies an ecology of decisions—technical, creative, and political. Understanding how those decisions take shape is essential as game engines become foundational to how we build, visualize, and interact across digital spaces. 

This talk was organized with support from Jackman Humanities Institute.