 Marcel Duchamp, an artist, once said, Not all artists are chess players, but all chess players are artists. What kind of artists are they though? Are they like the painter, the musician, or is another pretentious chess quote reveals like an art form where composition and performance take place simultaneously? Under this view, games allow us to express ourselves as both authors and exponents of a creed, a creed instantiated by the rules of the game itself. But beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as they say. Who is evaluating the work of art that players present? Even in as narrow a sub-domain of play as chess, we see there are beautiful games, beautiful moves. In fact, there is beauty in the rules of chess itself. Moreover, chess can be used as a canvas to host other forms of beauty, allowing us to tell stories of triumph, obsession, and betrayal. This is why there is confusion abound in our understanding of what beauty even means in the context of games. Beauty has a philosophical field. It's called aesthetics. Beauty is created through communities of practice, documented by artistic schools in different medias. But what is the quality of beauty we might consider exclusive to games? First, a cliche and a massive spoiler for the end of Shadow of the Colossus. You have been warned. See, Shadow of the Colossus is beautiful. It's beautiful because it creates a foreboding sense of scale, as elegant design that makes us feel disempowered and, you know, looks beautiful. But its most beautiful moment happens at the end, as a conclusion of our tragic quest to save our beloved and turn into a beast ourselves. As our new demonic facade is dispelled, we try agonizingly to reach towards our goal only to be confronted with futility, witnessing our tragic impotence firsthand. Our beloved awakens after this, denied our reunion, but is reunited with our horse companion through the game, who we thought to be dead. There is beauty that is communicated using other mediums, beauty that only interactivity affords, but beauty has an aesthetic property here, the game's most beautiful moment is not some discreet element, but an emergent property of a sequence of signs, symbols, mediums and forms. It is our appraisal, both as observers and participants of this, that make this scene beautiful. There seems to be as many theories of what makes something beautiful as there are people to pose the question, but functionally we can think of what utility it serves in our relationship to reality. Evolutionary arguments will say we have an affinity for symmetry and proportion, because it indicates health, that we like landscapes that are indicative of survival environments, that the golden ratio is revealing some property of structure and form itself. Those more culturally inclined might say that beauty varies and is subjective, it changes from culture to culture, is embedded in the meanings of the traditions of different people. Of course we can't resolve this divide, nor say something as banal as that it is clearly a mixture of both, but we can speculate, pontificate about this question in relationship to games. I can tally up moments where I personally feel beauty. There are beautiful moments in games like eco, where you must protect a princess with empathy in an isolated castle. There are also beautiful instances of design, like how meticulously choreographed journey is as an experience, to mirror the structure of the hero's journey. There is also beautiful plays in the game as seemingly vulgar as a fighting game. Moment 37 is beautiful, because it was a feat of execution under high pressure, that distilled both performance and expression, but it required the tapestry of Street Fighter III Third Strike's parry system to express, frame tight reactions to a sequence of hits countered with a sliver of life remaining. To really understand what games contribute to our pursuit of beauty, perhaps it requires what Bertrand Russell explains as beautiful in math. Math, rightly viewed, possesses truth and beauty, a beauty cold and austere like that of great sculpture, a stern perfection. I suspect that if I asked people for an example of a beautiful game, they would list a game with beautiful visuals or a beautiful story, or beautiful music. But as I asserted, beauty is in the amalgamation of these things to create an impression in us. Mechanics are abstract, but they are also interacted with. It is how they are used to create a form of play that makes something beautiful. Perhaps we can say that the mechanic itself was beautiful. Is the jump in a game beautiful? It can be. It is versatile, can be combined with many genres. We can jump and shoot, jump to overcome obstacles, jump into an attack in a fighting game. But the jump isn't beautiful because of this intrinsically. It only becomes beautiful because of what it means in the context of the game. In Street Fighter, the jump in allows you to get over projectiles and start pressure. And this is beautiful because it is integrated into a system where there is positional play and rock-paper-scissor dynamics that allows counterplay. You can anti-air a jump in, there is risk. But if you read a whiff or horizontal attack, you can punish your opponent. In Celeste, the jump is beautiful because it is a move that in itself has risk but is required to reach your rewards. It is versatile, allowing you to jump and then dash in any direction. But it is also integrated into a game that challenges us incrementally, right at the edge of our competence. The beauty of the jump isn't in the jump itself, but in what it allows us to do, perform and reveal about human patterns of thought. There is risk and reward, non-nash equilibrium dynamics that create depth. There is a series of obstacles that escalate like the escalating patterns of a beautiful song. Just like the jump, the rules of chess enable this expression. They create a canvas for people to express themselves. It is as if we have been given a sheet of music that is both scripted but allows room for improvisation. The old distinction in man-play and games between Lutus and Paidea play and games can help us here. We both adhere to rules and play with them. This is how the chess player is like the musician. It is the possibility space of games where we play, that beauty in games seems to take place. A place where rules are so contrived to allow us to experience beauty. Some rules don't enable this, others do. The job of the critic might be to deconstruct which do and which don't and the designer to refine this collective craft. These properties of games can then be subject to scrutiny, but we often end up imposing value onto it. Chess and Go are often said to be beautiful because they're elegance but generate a practically infinite possibility space. They have low complexity and infinite depth. This is an aesthetic value though, in line with an almost algorithmic definition of beauty rooted in the idea of efficiency and elegance. The same way a mathematical theorem is beautiful because it has no fluff. E equals MC squared. The same way prose is elegant when it says more than the words it uses says individually. This is a compositional beauty, but paradoxically, it is expressed by designer, the player, as well as the game itself. The artistry is collaborative. Games aren't just designed. They evolve. Who invented chess? Was it Mr. Chess? Or was it a series of rules refined and regulated for thousands of years? Chess evolved as much as it was designed. It's beauty forced by a process of artificial selection. The selection funnel being our interest. Our desire to play it for some aesthetic reason. Perhaps to understand the beautiful, we need to contrast it with the profane. What makes a game ugly? There are games that are visually ugly. There are games that are poorly designed and create an ugly impression in our minds. Then, of course, there are games that have ugly subject matter, crass and crude, pieces of media that have no aesthetic merit. Nothing to tell us. In fact, they might distort, propagandize. So there are games that are mechanically beautiful, enabling performance and composition like chess. There are games that create beautiful moments, using the language of interactivity to craft beauty as an emergent by-product. But perhaps it is in the intersection of these two things we can get a true sense of beauty in games. How do we reconcile this, though? A game is an artificial set of constraints that allow us to learn with just the right amount of friction, emotional valence and structure to get us to an experience. It is grounded, embodied, participatory. Storytelling might also serve a similar function, as some argue. It allows us to plan and speculate, ruminate, create hypotheticals that allow us to experiment with our ideals and try to construct virtue. To reveal patterns of reality that are not just for survival, but also give us meaning. What if our experience of beauty in games happens when an experience is crafted in such a way that it is properly attuned to our inherent capacity to learn itself? The process that enables the pursuit of these things in the first place. Play is both fake and real. We do it, but it is not essential. It is inessentially essential, or essentially inessential. We are living in an imagined world, but also imagining what worlds we wish to live in. Games create ideals, utopias of rules, that reveal elements of our participatory reality. But simply, the beauty in mechanics and the beauty in stories are one and the same. There are a way of gauging when something reveals patterns of reality that are both deeply personal and universal. It is hard to see this beauty, the same way it is hard to see the beauty in a math equation. Games are beautiful when they have depth, both mechanical and thematic. But this depth, perhaps, is one and the same. It is cognitive and emotional engagement. I have a sense that certain games are beautiful, but these are more obvious. What of less obvious cases? God Hand is beautiful, in my opinion, but not in any obvious way, which perhaps confused some critics. It is crass and vulgar and crude, but its mechanics? Beautiful. It's a system where you must manage multiple enemies but with a camera that fixates on one. You have three different kinds of evades, a duck, a sidestep and a back dash. Each with different uses. You have an assortment of customizable combos that allows creative expression. The challenge is perfectly calibrated to create a sense of dramatic escalation. The game's depth and beauty comes from prioritizing enemies, reading patterns, spatial navigation, reflexes, expression, creativity. Its narrative, despite its camp charm, is non-existent. But that hardly matters. Then there are games that seem beautiful but have exactly nothing to say. The art of video games is not the art of other mediums. It is like that of great sculpture, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, but sublimely pure. Visual and compositional aesthetics are a double-edged sword. They both amplify beauty and can distract us from it. Somehow we need to recognize the unique contribution of games to our understanding of beauty, but also see games as part of a continuous tradition that uses multiple mediums in our pursuit of such an ideal. The Tetris effect lives on the border between these conceptions of beauty. Its system is beautiful without its aesthetics, but its aesthetics reveal why the system was beautiful to begin with. Tetris is beautiful because it is elegant, with little complexity. Clear lines with tetronomos. Tetris requires you both plan ahead, but also improvise as tiles come in a pseudo-random order. They drop in bundles of 7, meaning consequent pieces will be different, but then a new pool of 7 pieces appears. This means there is both planning and improvisation. It enables expression of many types. Tetris has openings like chests, funnily enough, but also strategies of dealing with bizarre shapes. How about the T-spin, where you use a T-spin to spin it into a double or triple line clear to amplify your points? It's creating a score out of our aesthetic of efficiency. You are rewarded for using less to gain more. A mathematical beauty. A beauty cold and austere perhaps. Except it isn't cold and austere, at least it isn't in the Tetris effect. It happens with dynamic music that resonates every time you move a piece, pulsating harmonies and vibrating particles dancing to the patterns of play. It clarifies beauty in games as much as it obfuscates it. A chess master or a chess master actually sees when they play their games. Moves like symphonies, like paintings, like dance and rhythm and expression. It is simply foregrounded using a language of beauty most of us more readily comprehend. Tetris in the Tetris effect is framed with conventional beauty, but embedded in a web of broader meanings. It is a hero's journey across cultures, across space and time, from our birth to our death. But it is simultaneously abstract in our heads. It is math and music, separate categories tonally distinct but really one in the same thing. A universal category explored using the language of games, but also in conjunction with others.