Once again, Rafael Fajardo surpasses my ability to articulate:
“My friend and colleague Bill Depper has told me he continues to play soccer and hockey for the flow experience. He means it in two senses. Both in the sense of pursuing a state of optimal performance, as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi proposes; and, in the sense of an organic and dynamically emergent gameplay experience shared among a group of players. One could argue, I realize as I write this, that both senses are manifestations of the same experience. I haven’t heard many talk about the former sense as a shared experience. Instead I’ve only heard it spoken of as a deeply subjective experience. Perhaps the shared manifestation can be described by the same sense of collective flow.
I posed to Bill - who also has coached for his children’s soccer teams - the question of how to teach the latter dynamic flow. Soccer has developed a set of vocabulary terms that are necessary, but that I find insufficient to the task of developing this collective sense of spatial and temporal awareness. ‘Move to the open space’, ‘follow your pass’, ’square pass’, ‘wall pass’, ‘through pass’, are all descriptors that - combined with appropriate actions - should help build this embodied knowledge. Children who play in the streets of latin america figure it out (perhaps I idealize here). The knowledge I seek here is an aesthetic one. The brazilians have called it ‘Joga bonito’, or beautiful play. How can I share with kids the idea of beautiful play.”
Having played hockey for most of my life (and soccer for a number of years), I can attest to this sense of aesthetic flow and emergence. As a goaltender it was my job to assess the other team in relation to the puck - to evaluate plays in real-time, determine the possible outcomes and decide which ones were most likely in order to quickly react when they happen.
Play seems to materialize out of nowhere, things come together and break apart. Passes, shots, dekes, saves and checks all have optimal states that are considered “beautiful.” There are beautiful goals and ugly goals. Every so often a play combines many beautiful elements to produce a moment of beauty that is greater than the sum of its parts - more than the beautiful save that lead to the beautiful pass that lead to the beautiful one-time shot and goal. This moment of strong emergence provokes the human spirit into wonder and amazement. It is the kind of harnessed serendipity that the game is set up to produce.
Perhaps all aesthetic systems share the concept of “joga bonito”?
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