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      Voodoo software and boundary objects in game development: How developers collaborate and conflict with game engines and art tools

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          Abstract

          This article describes how game developers successfully ‘pull off’ game development, collaborating in the absence of consensus and working with recalcitrant and wilful technologies, shedding light on the games we play and those that make them, but also how we can be forced to work together by the platforms we choose to use. The concept of ‘boundary objects’ is exported from Science and Technology Studies (STS) to highlight the vital coordinating role of game development software. Rather than a mutely obedient tool, game software such as Unity 3D is depicted by developers as exhibiting magical, even agential, properties. It becomes ‘voodoo software’. This software acts as a boundary object, aligning game developers at points of technical breakdown. Voodoo software is tidied away in later accounts of game development, emphasizing how ethnographies of software development provide an anchor from which to investigate cultural production and co-creative practice.

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          Most cited references15

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          The politics of ‘platforms’

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            Object Lessons: Workplace Artifacts as Representations of Occupational Jurisdiction

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              The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                New Media Soc
                New Media Soc
                NMS
                spnms
                New Media & Society
                SAGE Publications (Sage UK: London, England )
                1461-4448
                1461-7315
                30 June 2017
                July 2018
                : 20
                : 7
                : 2315-2332
                Affiliations
                [1-1461444817715020]University of Waterloo, Canada
                Author notes
                [*]Jennifer R Whitson, Department of Sociology and Legal Studies, University of Waterloo, PAS Building, 200 University Avenue West, Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1, Canada. Email: jwhitson@ 123456uwaterloo.ca
                Article
                10.1177_1461444817715020
                10.1177/1461444817715020
                6256721
                649173b3-3540-4830-b681-8aa7563048f7
                © The Author(s) 2017

                This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License ( http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page ( https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).

                History
                Funding
                Funded by: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, FundRef https://doi.org/10.13039/501100000155;
                Award ID: 756-2012-0209
                Categories
                Articles

                boundary objects,collaboration,ethnography,game developers,game development,platform studies,software studies,studio studies,voodoo software

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