The Unity Game Engine and the Circuits of Cultural Software

by Benjamin Nicoll, Brendan Keogh

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

132 pages, Hardcover

Published October 22, 2019

Reviews

[Sam Crisp · Rating 5 out of 5]

I use the Unity game engine every day at my job. I’ve been using it for over 5 years since learning it at university. Just about every game developer I know uses it or has used it. It’s so ubiquitous that it’s easy to ignore the occasional ideological argument about whether Unity is good or bad because somehow you’ve found yourself entrenched in a set of habits and processes of production and all you care about is hitting your next game development milestone so you can pay your rent. But of course there’s a project of political economy that played a role in creating this whole situation. No one was using Unity 10 years ago. “You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies,” as we all know from the movie poster for The Social Network or whatever. What Ben and Brendan’s book does is offer a critical description of where Unity came from, what it does, and what people think of it. This kind of description is deceptively difficult to do well and Ben and Brendan do a good job here.

The main thing this book does is read against Unity Technology’s own narrative that its software “democratises game development” whatever that means. Ostensibly, Unity allows more access to game development: It’s free software, it has generous licensing agreements to commercialise creations made with it, and it’s easy to use in the sense that one doesn’t require a thorough background in computer programming to make games in it and make money from those games. Unity decentres the programmer from game development. This can be seen as opening a walled garden to those who weren’t welcomed or who didn’t have the privilege to make games before.

But despite benefiting from grassroots movements that emerged around the use of Unity, the software’s rise to platform dominance was spurred from top-down motivations. With austerity, dissolution of welfare states across the globe, and a lack of stable employment or government support, people became attracted to the model of self-entrepreneurship that indie game development encourages. This was especially the case in Australia, where the global financial crisis of 2008 knocked out a whole industry of large studios financed by international publishers. Unity saw an opportunity to fill this gap. The plan? Take the burden of risk off institutions and large companies and put it all onto individuals. Tap into a global network of computer labourers by providing them the access to make games and allow existing loci of powers to benefit from whatever rises to the top. These workers often don’t have the benefits of traditional employment but their precarity is sugar coated as being more “meaningful” or “flexible” types of work.

A true democratisation of game development might reduce the power of large publishers and digital storefronts on commercial game development or provide welfare to disenfranchised game makers. It might combat the reasons that people were excluded from game development in the first place, something that a trade union might be more suited to do. Instead of rebalancing power, Unity provides an escape route.

Games that are being made in Unity are seen as more diverse, inclusive, innovative, and personal. This aesthetic innovation is a double edged sword because creators are now having to market their own diversity, innovations and personal stories. These artists are still excluded from institutional support as they always were, but now the fruits of their labour can be subsumed into the same structural fold. These games become the tile grout used by Apple Arcade or the Epic Store to continue to chase profits and establish market dominance.

This story isn’t particularly unique. Ben and Brendan draw their critique from the well of scholarship on “cultural software” and “platform studies” where similar stories are articulated through software like Photoshop. What’s interesting about Unity as a case study in this book is how these patterns create a set of contradictions around itself when they intersect with games culture at large.

One of these interesting contradictions that the book goes into is the derogatory label of a “Unity game” which indicates a game with a very specific amateurish and homogeneous look and feel. Unity developers often must wade upstream against convenient practices and workflows to avoid this label. This goes against the merits of Unity as an engine which situates itself as being so generalised as to be able to make anything and having no fixed identity in genre, scope, or technical or aesthetic qualities. By comparison, similar terms for other accessible game engines like “Bitsy game” or “Twine game” haven’t inherited a derogatory meaning. In fact they are celebrated for their shared qualities and for embracing the limitations of their engines. “Unity game” is a really interesting term. It’s right up there with “realism” as a loaded aesthetic descriptor which, although can be broken down into a set of qualities, is self-contradictory and always in service of a greater project of cultural/political economy. Only a gamer word can be this perverse.

Another of the most interesting takeaways of the book to me is the putting of the word “enrolment” or “recruitment” to that funny phenomenon of how people end up using Unity. It’s not a choice, it just ends up happening. And the relationship someone has with Unity does not seem like that of a user, or even a consumer, but as a vague constituent in an ecology of practices, literacies, and even tastes. Unity has ended up in this spot where people see it as a default and they self-govern their use of it. This happens in a diffuse way through the use of online forums and communities but also through its foothold as an educational tool in universities.

Ben and Brendan’s book isn’t an attack on Unity, at least I didn’t read it as one. The book’s method is built on hundreds of interviews that the authors conducted with game developers and all they set out to do is make sense of what people are saying about Unity. The book’s framing is in showing how the contradictions which arise around Unity are the same contradictions around the idea of democracy itself, with nods to Ranciere and Laclau. Ultimately these contradictions are things we have to live and work with rather than try to resolve.

[Jason Li · Rating 5 out of 5]

All I could think afterwards was “what business *did* Unity have in calling itself a democratic engine?”