In a world increasingly controlled by Big Tech and optimization, through Emergent Essaying I advocate for more empathetic digital modes of connection and understanding, valuing the concepts of ‘glitch’ and ‘glitching’, reader/player control and intervention, and the opportunities for nuanced expression afforded by the intertwining of digital environment and language. I combine game design techniques with the approaches to hybrid/digital work adopted by indie writers to inform my own practice as a cross-form, cross-genre writer, as reflected both in this paper, and via a link to a digital-born, creative iteration of this work which enacts Emergent Essaying.

Expanding upon creative theorists Lisa Robertson and Anne Carson’s approach to the verb ‘essaying’ as an act of trying, in this digital, hybrid writing context I conceive of Emergent Essaying as an act of playful reimagining from both writer/designer and reader/player, in which the essay is more narrative based, enacting a conversation between ideas rather than focusing on argument. Emergent Essaying utilizes gameplay techniques within an active digital-born form of essaying, to invite more open, playful, collaborative and changeable modes of thinking, encouraging ambivalence, multiplicity, and fluidity over fixed, finished thinking. Emergent Gameplay is ‘a game design term that refers to video game mechanics that change according to the player’s actions’. Within our current post-internet landscape of Web 2.0, in which we exist as intermedial beings increasingly engaging with cross-media forms, I propose Emergent Essaying as a connective term, merging the milieu of game design with hybrid creative writing approaches. To theorize a posthumanistic theory of the practice, this article takes as its focus the speedrunning community of the video game Super Mario Odyssey and suggests that speedrunning may ultimately be considered a mode of (post)human performance art. Rather, (post)humans and technologies interact in a transformational manner through intra-active assemblages, broadening the condition of embodiment. However, within the field of game studies, the literature published on speedrunning to date is almost unilaterally anthropocentric, and focuses on the transgressive nature of the practice, ignoring the intricacies of its technological fundament. By choosing to speedrun, players actively impose a discrete temporal limit on the inhuman algorithms of video games, and so attempt to conquer and thereby curtail their technological novelty. Speedrunning is a form of (post)human expression that is manifested not only through the programming of a video game, but also through players’ approach to gameplay.

I argue that this progressive ethos, coupled with the performative nature of modern speedrunning, lends a distinctly artistic character to the practice. Over time, speedrunning communities work collaboratively to optimize, reconfigure, and improve upon the quickest possible completion times of video game titles.

Speedrunners game launch options