Creative-Rational Tensions in Game Development

A Danish Case Study on Team Collaboration

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss an ethnographic field study conducted with a single 8-person development team operating within an established indie game company located in Copenhagen, Denmark, to explore how members of a development team – in this case mainly programmers and designers – coordinate their design ideas and development processes. In a view that accepts “the heterogeneity of production logics within the games industry” (Kerr 2017, 76), our study of a single company in Denmark contributes new insights on organized and managed team creativity by adding to this pool of varying forms of development. The paper inquires and develops a perspective to analyse collaborative game-making within a studio workplace. We explore two formats of game development team meetings, Sprint Reviews and Sprint Retrospectives, to understand the ways in which teams work together to balance ‘creative-rational tensions’ (Tschang 2007) between given expectations and deadlines as well as personal expressive interests.