Introduction

Game engines have become ambient infrastructure for contemporary digital production. Once treated as specialist software for building videogames, they now underpin work in art galleries, university classrooms, film studios, architectural visualisation, military simulation, platform economies, and even cars.1 They travel, too, as ideas: distilled into buzzwords such as real-time rendering and proceduralism (often sold under the banner of immersion), translated into professional imperatives around optimisation and modular pipelines, and absorbed into aesthetic norms that prize photoreal polish, responsiveness, and the slippery demand for ‘feel’.2