Breaking The Stack: Understanding Videogame Animation through Tool-Assisted Speedruns

Abstract

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.

Animating for Interactivity: The Walk Cycles of Prince of Persia (1989) and Ninja Gaiden (1988)

“…These scholars offer a general, and brief, nod to the relationship between animation and interactivity, but this article picks up where they leave off by interrogating a specific form (the walk cycle) in two exemplary video games. While some scholarship (Greenberg, 2021; Schmalzer, 2021) uses animation to metaphorically understand players’ gameplay as effectively ‘animating’ the game, it has not focused on the actual animation of video games, that is, how a string of still images composes a moving image. By focusing on the walk cycle, this article argues for a different approach to studying interactive animation – as a site of conflicts and negotiations.…”