Hard Fought Materiality in Games Development: On the Dynamics of Entanglement and Disentanglement

As Information Systems development (ISD) is subject to conditions of ever greater change and uncertainty, there has been a growing dissatisfaction amongst researchers with conven- tional theories that assume stable entities and relational boundaries within that process (G irard and Stark 2003; Kellogg et al. 2006). To address the dynamic and emergent aspects of ISD, writers have critiqued existing theories predicated on stability, and have offered new conceptualizations more attuned to emergence and change. For example, studies of ISD in highly pressurised settings have suggested that the knowledge boundaries between different specialist groups are more ‘fuzzy’ and dyn amic than previously asserted, and that the forms of collaboration involved are less dependent on the exchange of stable objects and represent a- tions across boundaries than on dynamic and unpredictable interactions which ‘transcend’ such boundaries ( Majchrzak, More, & Faraj, 2011 ). In another study of knowledge integr a- tion, Majchrzak et al. (2011) found that members of cross-functional teams integrated their diverse forms of expertise by ‘cocreating a scaffold’ (p. 9) , i.e. an evolving ‘visual or verbal representation that encompasses many fragmentary contributions. As opposed to the concrete and stable boundary objects highlighted in previous studies, the scaffold ‘kept changing and was never interpreted in the same way by team members’ (p. 14).