This article illustrates a gap between popular narratives of game development in design texts and the reality of day-to-day development, drawing from an ethnographic account of intern developers to highlight the potential contributions of studio studies to Game Studies. It describes three takeaways. The first is that the difficulty developers have in articulating their work to others has implications for how we learn, teach, and talk about development, including how we share knowledge across domains. The second is that, at least for newer developers, negotiation with technology rather than mastery characterizes daily work, and the third is that problems frequently arise in articulating and aligning the normally black-boxed work of individual developers. Resolution of these issues commonly depends on “soft” social skills; yet external pressures on developers mean they tidy up and professionalize accounts of their daily practice, thus both social conflict and soft skills have a tendency to disappear.
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