Emergence in video game production: Video game engines as technical individuals

Abstract

This article is interested in the creative practices in video game production. More specifically, the research focuses on the ways in which the use of game engines – a toolkit that offers a set of functionalities to automatize the handling of a range of processes (graphics, sound, game physics, networks, artificial Intelligence) – make possible or impossible certain forms of emergences in video games production. The manipulation of objects in these game engines is done according to a certain programming paradigm. Two main programming paradigms currently govern the internal design of game engines: object-oriented/inheritance-based deep-class hierarchical design and component-based data-driven design. We will describe how different programming paradigms lend themselves to certain affordances to explore the ways in which game workers can interface with game engines. We will use the framework developed by Gilbert Simondon on the artisanal and industrial stage or mode of production. This will enable a better understanding of the technogenesis of different kinds of game engines and the ways in which they can be conceptualized as technical individuals enduring through their associated milieus. This way of describing game engines emphasizes non-anthropocentric forms of creativity and specific modalities of emergent techno-human processes that are too often underestimated in various accounts of cultural production processes.