Unity Game Engine and the Circuits of Cultural Software

Videogames were once made with a vast range of tools and technologies, but in recent years a smallnumber of commercially available 'game engines' have reached an unprecedented level ofdominance in the global videogame industry. In particular, the Unity game engine haspenetrated all scales of videogame development, from the large studio to the hobbyistbedroom, such that over half of all new videogames are reportedly being made with Unity. Thisbook provides an urgently needed critical analysis of Unity as 'cultural software' that facilitatesparticular production workflows, design methodologies, and software literacies. Building onlong-standing methods in media and cultural studies, and drawing on interviews with a rangeof videogame developers, Benjamin Nicoll and Brendan Keogh argue that Unity deploys adiscourse of democratization to draw users into its 'circuits of cultural software'. For scholars ofmedia production, software culture, and platform studies, this book provides a framework andlanguage to better articulate the increasingly dominant role of software tools in culturalproduction. For videogame developers, educators, and students, it provides critical andhistorical grounding for a tool that is widely used yet rarely analysed from a cultural angle.