Transition Games: Speedrunning Gender

Transition Games is a dissertation about the act of and community around speedrunning video games and how that can be related to gender. Schmalzer examines various aspects of both transgender and online speedrunning communities and uses her own experiences to further inform the work. The first paragraph of the abstract is below. Transition Games argues that playing with the rules of videogames can give frameworks to think about the make-up of other systems of rules, such as the rules of gender. Through play we may find we don’t have to play in the ways videogames’ (technologically and socially) programmed rules tell us to. The practice of speedrunning, or completing goals within videogames as fast as possible, becomes a glitch in the rules of videogames that reveals standard orientations towards constructed rules, while also becoming a trans practice of discovery hinting at other methods of self-determination that also resituate our embodied experiences of temporality.