Game Engines Beyond the Player: Live Simulations as Radical Inaction

This chapter investigates how contemporary artists use video game engines to create ‘live simulations’ — autonomous, digital worlds that unfold in real-time without player input. By appropriating elements from traditional video games while deliberately excluding direct player control, live simulations profoundly reconfigure the conventional relationship between player and game. This deliberate exclusion of player agency, which I term ‘radical inaction’, invites viewers to observe rather than intervene in self-governing computational ecologies. In this way, radical inaction serves as a stance that is both aesthetic and subversive, challenging player-centric and instrumental paradigms within mainstream game culture.