Game Engines, Contemporary Art, and the Speculative Drift away from Platform Logics

Game engines have become influential infrastructures in contemporary digital artistic practice. Moving beyond their origins in entertainment, they now shape how digital environments are assembled and experienced across a variety of contexts. Highly optimised for efficiency and seamless interactivity, they encode implicit norms about realism, agency, and user behaviour, producing design logics that influence how virtual space is rendered, how digital time unfolds, and what forms of interaction are legible. As they enter experimental art-making contexts, these design protocols of modularity and control shape creative possibility, raising urgent questions about how artists might inhabit, reroute, or resist them.