On 6 November at 4pm, we are joined by Aleena Chia from Goldsmiths. Staff and students are invited to join us.

The 2021 ‘metaverse moment’ marks a project where global media industries push toward persistent, real-time networked 3D environments. Beyond the bubble inflated by Facebook’s botched rebranding to Meta, the metaverse moment marks a longer-term infrastructure project for media companies and their clients to more seamlessly share data and consolidate media assets across online and physical platforms, to more expansively and immersively sell products, ideas, and services. The metaverse goes beyond social networking and gaming applications such as Meta’sHorizon Worlds or Epic’s Fortnight to encompass infrastructural efforts to reproduce and control digital and physical equivalents of objects, systems, and bodies through real-time 3D rendering technologies. Real-time 3D is a framework for producing and operating interactive data-integrated visualisations dominated by game engine companies such as Epic Games and Unity Technologies. I analyse game engine technology at this nexus of 3D worldbuilding and logistical twinning by contending that the prosaic metaverse’s base unit for commensuration is not content or data, but assets.

This talk shifts the financial focus on the metaverse from the exuberance of speculation to the mundanity of assetization - turning things into assets - by examining the Unreal Engine’s reality capture production framework. Photogrammetry is a ‘reality capture’ technique positioned by game engines as enabling scalable worldbuilding that automates human labours of 3D modelling and animation rigging. Tracing the legacies of racial classification and extractivism in biometric and environmental capture, I show how the ‘layers model’ of game engines leverages infrastructure assets to devalue the work of creators, by framing the development of pipeline assets as intrinsicallyinefficient. Assets are valued not primarily for their tradability in marketplaces or usability in pipelines, but for their embedding within tools as infrastructure. Assets are made to keep – this components-first approach consolidates value for platforms not by building, but by disaggregating worlds and dissolving labour into their constituent components for speculative forms of reassembly. Platform studies has emphasised the power of data infrastructures to monetise and govern interactions through the algorithmic shaping and selection of content. As media platforms shift from probabilistic decision-making to probabilistic media generation, scholars of cultural production need to readjust their analytical focus from monetisation to assetization, from content to components.

Aleena Chia is a lecturer in Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. She researches video game production cultures and digital wellness practices to understand how technologies of automation and ideologies of self-optimisation impact inequalities in cultural production. She is co-author of Technopharmacology (Meson/University of Minnesota Press, 2022, with Joshua Neves, Susanna Paasonen, and Ravi Sundaram) co-editor of Reckoning with Social Media (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022, with Ana Jorge and Tero Karppi). Her work has been published in Media Theory, Television and New Media, Internet Policy Review, Critical Studies in Media Communication, among others.