- malazj@rpi.edu
- 0000-0003-3206-3682
About
Jim Malazita (Ph.D. Drexel University) is Associate Professor of Games & Experiential Media and the Graduate Program Director of the Critical Game Design programs. He studies the co-production of technological and social elements of games and creative software, with a particular focus on game engines, institutions, gender, and race. His current work examines the role of game companies and game engines in shaping the infrastructural and legal standards of the future web.
From 2024-2026, Dr. Malazita also serves as an elected member on the board of the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA), the premiere international games studies research network.
His book, Enacting Platforms: Feminist Technoscience and the Unreal Engine was released by the MIT Press in July 2024. This first scholarly book on the Unreal game engine explores one of the major contemporary game development platforms through feminist, race, and queer theories of technology and media, revealing how Unreal produces, and is produced by, broader intersections of power. Taking a novel critical platform studies approach, he also raises deeper questions: what are the material and cultural limits of platforms themselves? What is the relationship between the analyst and the platform of study, and how does that relationship in part determine what “counts” as the platform itself? Malazita also offers a forward-looking critique of the platform studies framework itself.
Malazita’s writing has been featured in a wide variety of academic venues, including in Digital Creativity, Design Issues, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Debates in the Digital Humanities, and Feminism in Play. His research and teaching have been supported by the NEH Office of Digital Humanities, the NEH Division of Educational Programs, the Popular Culture Association, The New Jersey Historical Commission, Red Hat Inc., and Rensselaer’s Teaching and Learning Collaboratory.
Ph.D., Communication, Culture, and Media, Drexel University (2014)
BS/MS, Digital Media, Drexel University (2009)
Research
Dr. Malazita uses qualitative, interpretive, and historical methods to examine the relationships between game culture, game technologies, and broader political and institutional movements. His first book on the Unreal Engine explored such cases as the game industry's ties with the military-entertainment complex, the role of agency in game engines and narrative, the material-historical underpinnings of contemporary game development software, and the role that race plays in graphical rendering technologies and culture.
His ongoing project traces the legal, technical, and social strategies used by the games industry to exert more control over tech policy and infrastructure in the United States and globally. He is also working on a project tracing the role of political radicalization in open-source and independent game software development communities.
Teaching
Jim Malazita teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Games. His classes focus on game studies, human centered game design, interpretive methods, and critical media and technology studies.
Fall 25: GSAS Senior Capstone; Games Studies Theory and Praxis
Malazita advises graduate students in Critical Game Design. His prior students have gone on to positions at Yale, NYU, and UT Austin. Malazita best serves as an advisor to graduate students who are interested in interpretive and critical methods in games and technology studies.
Publications
The following is a selection of recent publications in Scopus. Jim Malazita has 17 indexed publications in the subjects of Computer Science, Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences.