ABSTRACT
Game engines have tremendous prescriptive power in a machine-readable experience economy. They offer new ways of organizing the visual field and present us with new perspectives on our environment. This chapter explores the influence of game engines on both fictional space and lived space. Game engines are increasingly at the center of diverse forms of media spectacle—film, television, theme parks—and are part of the fabric of industrial entertainment, fueling the build of highly detailed fictional environments; and engine-based tools have bound together game design, urban planning and geographic information systems in the integrated workflows of architectural visualization. These media and media-adjacent applications have produced new ways of imaging and imagining the city. This chapter is focused on the evolving landscape of the technological imaginary; it surveys projects by city builders and worldbuilders, Universal Studios theme parks, Esri’s geographic information systems and NASA’s space exploration games, and asks whether this ability to transform space, to subject it to the algorithmic manipulation of a game-like system, can ultimately undo the otherwise durable quality of place.
