Truth, Rationality, and Affect in Unreal’s Physically Based Rendering

• In Event: Games, Virtual Technologies, and STS - I

Abstract

This talk will use a Critical Platform Studies approach to analyze the Unreal Engine, an industry standard game development software suite. Critical Platform Studies examines how politics and knowledge are negotiated through virtual and material digital systems.
I will argue that Unreal Engine’s Physically Based Rendering (PBR) techniques highlight the blending of cybernetic, rational-based computing and affective and emotional experiences. I will also demonstrate how PBR is being constructed as a technique both for creating “unreal” experiences grounded in reality, and also as a way of reverse-engineering truth claims from archival video—in this case, of the US Moon Landing. PBR and the Unreal Engine each complicate the analytic divide of rational/affective, objective/subjective, and masculine/feminine vision while also serving as a narrative for a collective imagination of the role visual effects play in the construction of truth.

Author

• James Malazita, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute