In their essay, “Digital Seriality: On the Serial Aesthetics and Practice of Digital Games,” Shane Denson and Andreas Jahn-Sudmann characterize the diachronic sequencing of serial interfaces and synchronic consumption of videogames as “digital seriality.” This essay explores digital seriality through the history and practice of tool-assisted speedrunning, a form of metagaming that stages an intervention at the level of serial interfacing and subsequently disrupts the collective serialization of videogames as a mass medium. As such, the serial operations of videogames structure, enclose, and ultimately alienate the technical processes of play from the conscious knowledge of the player. Beyond the serial repetition that characterizes industrial forms of mechanical reproduction like newspapers, comics, novels, and films, in the case of videogames the microtemporal speed of serial interfaces and massive scale of serial distribution operate both below and above the horizon of conscious experience. Although play is irreducible, games repeat.
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