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This article explores the relationship between everyday life and play, focusing on the mundane play practices of speedrunning. Employing autoethnographic techniques, the author analyzes her own experiences speedrunning and transitioning as case studies, drawing out the temporalities and affective dimensions of both, as well as the ways media practices and subjectivity become intertwined. To be specific, the article examines the experience of living in the impasse, which is brought on by temporal engagements, such as the reset and the grind, with videogames. Living in the impasse is characterized by prolonged waiting periods inherent to both trans life and videogame play and gives rise to negative affects like boredom, frustration, and pain. Ultimately, the author argues that these negative affects become enfolded into identity and serve as trans tools of survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the ways videogames become animated by looking at gaming practices that subvert traditional notions of play: specifically tool-assisted speedruns (TAS). A TAS is a playthrough of a videogame that is preprogrammed by a human so that the inputs can be automatically played back in full without a human operator. This practice requires an intimate knowledge of the inner workings of gaming systems, often to the point of productively breaking the games through glitches and exploits. These extreme practices give a unique insight into the ways animation occurs within videogames and reveals games to be animated in a variety of ways that are often not primarily directed towards the visual nor humans. This article outlines four of these modes of animation separating them into multi-tiered 'layers of animation': sensory output, game states, code, material, and operator. TASs help to demonstrate these layers are actually discrete forms of animation that do not necessarily impact one another from becoming individually animated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]