Boutet, Manuel <br/><br/>
Innovation by Use and Boundary-Object 

 -  2010.<br/>							 
<br/><br/> 77 
<br/><br/> During five years of ethnography of the browser game “Mountyhall, the land of the trolls”, we observed the participants try out interfaces, different from the official one. Such changes affect the most played games of game industry, online and offline, as well as non-profit games - an area rarely explored by Game Studies. We show that these “user innovations” don’t come from the “intelligence of the crowd” but from the commitment of their free time by participants who are also professionals. The interface is then a boundary object that allows coordination. Unlike professional worlds studied by Star and Griesemer, the “players” do not know initially their respective capacities. Also, the boundary object plays the new role of a point of friction. Be interested by the object, which depends on how actors find their way, guides the first movements by which they prove their skills with each other.