I found myself stuck on the beauty chapter this week. Perhaps it’s because September 15, 2016, is neither the time nor the place to talk about play and memes in politics.
When Sicart first began to describe the notion of beauty, I couldn’t get out of my head the image of my father sitting with me in the living room, watching Derek Jeter deliver play after play. My father would shove a fist full of popcorn in his mouth, clap, and bellow tremendously, “BEAUTIFUL.” I didn’t really understand what about the plays were beautiful, besides perhaps “the beauty of winning,” as Sicart puts it (63). But there is a lot of joy to be found in performing an action inside the constraints of a context, and performing it well. I found this out the first time I wrote my own saxophone solo. I feel it now when I play a particularly good match on Pokemon Showdown.
But I love where Sicart goes next: relational and dialogical aesthetic. There is so much beauty to be found in playing with others. There is so much to love about relating to others inside of a context of play. When I look back on it, many of my favorite gaming moments have happened when I was playing with others.
Actually, I do want to talk about memes. And Pokemon. In February of 2014, one ingenious man set up a Twitch stream. He wrote a script that would take commands from the chat of his channel and convert them to input for an emulator running Pokemon Red Version. If you typed ‘Start’ in the chat, the script would see that, and press ‘Start’ in the emulator. This seems simple, until you realize that the stream reached an average viewership of 80,000 at any given time. Imagine it. 80,000 people all playing the same game of Pokemon. Simultaneously. Together.
We had to play it together. We never would have beaten it otherwise (but we did beat it. It took us a few weeks, but we did it). I learned so much about a game that I thought I’d known everything about. I learned how to dupe the game’s faulty AI. I relearned how terrible the graphics from 1996 were.
But the biggest thing I learned was how ready and willing 80,000+ people were to enter into a community for the sole purpose of achieving this relatively pointless goal. Subreddits popped up. Fanart started surfacing. An entire backstory, complete with religious overtones (and even a church choir) made its way to the forefront, as players quickly began to search for an explanation as to why the player character kept checking in on his Helix fossil (“Some asshole keeps typing “Start+A” just wasn’t interesting enough).
I’ve never seen another phenomenon like it. But the point is, it’s the most beautiful form of play I’ve ever seen in my entire life, satisfying most of the different types of beauty Sicart mentions. We experienced the “beauty of winning,” many times, perhaps the most iconic of which was the capture of Zapdos, a Pokemon that is found only once, and will not reappear if you defeat it in battle. We experienced dialogical aesthetic in the way that old fans began to explain to newer fans how the game worked. Analyses were run on which buttons, statistically, would get us to the end faster if spammed. Plans were drawn up. An entire community was built, and it existed solely in the context of this one instance of this one Pokemon game. Most Pokemon communities nowadays are built on the entire franchise, but not this one.
The game itself subverted the expectations of gaming and streaming, much like Desert Bus did the expectations of what a game should be. Twitch Plays Pokemon pushed the limits of exactly how many players could have their fingers on the controls of a single-player game at once, and how exactly a Twitch channel can be used to foster play and interaction.
Thanks to Sicart I’ve finally found a word to describe the phenomenon that was Twitch Plays Pokemon. It’s ‘beautiful.’