Game engines have come to feature in areas well beyond gaming—such as architecture, artificial intelligence, manufacturing, public planning, and film and television production. Accordingly, companies developing, providing, and maintaining game engines—such as Epic Games or Unity Technologies—are set to become influential actors in all social and economic arenas that start to rely on game engines for the provision of software or services. This makes them an important subject to the study of platforms as they provide increasingly crucial building blocks in the digitization of economic, political, and social life. In this article, we present three dimensions demonstrating platform functions of game engines beyond gaming. We rely on the example of two important game engine developers: Epic Games and Unity Technologies. The dimensions are (1) the growing area of extended reality applications, (2) cross-platform and cross-media story- and brand worlds, and (3) the management of user payments, identities, and social graphs. The article shows how companies providing game engines challenge the current balance of power between established platform companies, demonstrating that game engines have emerged as an important new type of platform that demands academic and public attention.

This article proposes to shift the scholarly focus from the conceptually, terminologically, and methodologically fuzzy notion of “immersion” to the concept of “immersivity,” and thus from a discussion of experiences to an analysis of the productive forces that enable such experiences (aesthetic and otherwise). Using case studies from theme parks, film, and immersive theatre to video games and immersive educational spaces, we argue that immersivity is a distinct term that denotes an inherent quality of objects in general and of mediated, delineated, real and virtual spaces in particular. We assume that in all of these examples, spatial qualities and modes interact in particular ways to facilitate immersion. Elucidating these interactions requires discussing examples from different disciplinary contexts. It is precisely through this interdisciplinary approach that we take a first step towards understanding immersivity, as we pinpoint cross-disciplinary congruences wherever possible. The article thus offers the starting point for a transdisciplinary, qualitative, experimental, and analytical model of immersivity. Following a theoretical introduction to the topic of immersion, we will first conceptualize our interdisciplinary understanding of immersion and immersivity and then launch into a transdisciplinary dialogue about examples of immersive spaces.

This chapter argues that the book of Ecclesiastes helps Melville fathom the limits of wisdom philosophy. Ecclesiastes stresses the need to temper the idealism that underpins the perennial search for divine wisdom with the expediencies of daily life in the world. It is a meta-text that reflects critically on the wisdom project. Having found American culture to be fundamentally opposed to wisdom axioms (cf. Chapter 2), Melville, as this chapter shows, begins to push back against some of the skepticism in Solomon’s “despondent philosophy,” while maintaining the fundamental usefulness of its contemplative outlook on life. The works covered here—Redburn, Moby-Dick, Pierre, and the poetry collection Battle-Pieces—all depict individuals caught in the hermeneutical conundrum of applying wisdom teachings to the situations they find themselves in. Melville ultimately winds up embracing the wisdom axiom of moderation through contemplative discernment.

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