Timoni West is a web designer in San Francisco.
This is her blog.

More on delight, the fleeting feeling

Related to this post on the magic of the iPad, here’s more on delight from Raph Koster’s A Theory of Fun in Game Design. Emphasis mine:

Aesthetic appreciation is the most interesting form of enjoyment. Science fiction writers call it “sensawunda.” It’s awe, it’s mystery, it’s harmony. I call it delight. Aesthetic appreciation, like fun, is about patterns. The difference is that aesthetics is about recognizing patterns, not learning new ones.

Delight strikes when we recognize patterns but are surprised by them. It’s the moment at the end of Planet of the Apes when we see the Statue of Liberty. It’s the thrill at the end of the mystery novel when everything falls into place. It’s looking at the Mona Lisa and seeing that smile hovering at the edge of known expressions and matching it to our hypothesis of what she’s thinking. It’s seeing a beautiful landscape and thinking all is right in the world.

Why does a beautiful landscape make us feel that way? Because it meets our expectations, and exceeds them. We find things beautiful when they are very close to our idealized image of what they should be but with an additional surprising wrinkle. A perfectly closed off plot, with just a couple of loose threads. A picture of a farmhouse, but the paint is peeling. Music that comes back to the tonic note and then drops a whole step further to end on an unresolved minor seventh. It sends us chasing off after new patterns.

Beauty is found in the tension between our expectation and the reality. It is only found in settings of extreme order. Nature is full of extremely ordered things. The flowerbed bursting its boundaries is expressing the order of growth, the order of how living things stretch beyond their boundaries, even as it is in tension with the order of the well-manicured walkway.

Delight, unfortunately, doesn’t last. It’s like the smile from a beautiful stranger in a stairwell - it’s fleeting. It cannot be otherwise - recognition is not an extended process.

You can regain delight by staying away from the object that caused it previously, then returning. You’ll get that recognition again. But it’s not quite what I would call fun. It’s something else - our brains rewarding us for having learned well. It is the epilogue to the story. The story itself is the fun of learning.

This is good to keep in mind the next time you read an article berating you for not continually taking pleasure in the “magic” of some device or another. Your brain simply isn’t equipped to be continually delighted by one thing over and over again.

A person may delight you, for example, all of your life, but they will delight you with new and interesting things, or by doing one thing rarely.

—Timoni