When visiting my Michael Kors fashion assistant friend in New York, I spent a couple hours in his apartment with a group of friends. The topics at the time: the struggle of finding housing, how the Ducks were doing (they were mostly Oregon graduates), and some lighthearted gossip. At one point, my friend trimmed the edges of an insole to fit a pair of tabis he had just secured from a sample sale. They were too big, he explained. I’m not sure how common this type of thing is, but judging by everyone else’s surprise at the sudden shoe surgery, I’d wager not very. “Fashion Assistant at Michael Kors” sounds like the type of job someone only gets with a discerning eye – the kind that sees potential in a shoe that most of us would simply pass over as a size too big.
Tabis — Japanese design of shoe with a toe separator
Later, we celebrated our respective new careers that happened to land in our interests (I had started working at Niantic on Pokemon Go around the same time he got his job). What was intriguing was that neither of us could pinpoint what put us a cut above the applicant pool. The interviews went smoothly in a sterile way; no ‘knock their socks off’ moments for either of us. I proposed that maybe our interviewers saw something in us, a potential or promise that was invisible to our eyes. Like a pair of too-big tabis. The theory was vague and inconclusive, but it sounded satisfying enough.
Another of my college friends grew up in Beijing. We speak in English, but anytime she’d run into a word or concept she couldn’t find a satisfying stand-in for, she’d teach me a Chinese word and do her best to convey its meaning. One of these phrases was 审美 — shen mei. It refers to a discerning taste, a vision of quality or beauty that remains invisible to anyone without. It’s like a sixth sense built through hours of study, practice, and instinct.
Shen (审) means ‘examine’ and Mei (美) means ‘beautiful.’ I interpret their combination here as a form of divinely inspired beauty held entirely in the eye of the beholder or similarly discerning observers. A mysterious, alchemical sophistication present in wine tasters or vocal judges. My friend introduced this word to describe an artist classmate’s impeccable understanding of color theory. Many of our classmates at USC crafted visually impressive pieces, filled with detail and vibrancy — but her work could make a simple sketch look beautiful with choice colors that perfectly complemented each other. Good sense? Taste? No… a mere English word wouldn’t cut it here. I can’t help but think about shen mei often, and it’s become one of my favorite borrowed words. Do I have shen mei? If I do… then in what, exactly? It’s hard to tell what’s visible to me but invisible to others. I’d like to think I have a certain instinct with game feel: the tactile nature of real-time games. The way the animation, sound, and movement all come together to give a game a special immersion that melts the fourth wall and spirits you away. Think of drifting in MarioKart and how your physical body leans with the motion, as if that might help you make the turn.
Thanks to my jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none skill set in game development (and a little bit of instinctual shen mei), I have a knack for producing highly game-feeley projects. Among classmates and colleagues, I’ve become known for this. Whether it’s a jump attack or a special effect, people who playtest my games say “It has the Sheehan bounce to it!” This has given me a strong sense of artistic identity, one closely knit to video games. I have met much better artists, much better programmers, much better everything really… but few of them could deliver that game feel quite like I could.
I love movies, music, writing — and I hope to acquire a workmanlike expertise in each field — but my strongest shen mei will always be in the immersive feel of video games. I can press a button in a new release and tell you that the response needs to be fifteen frames shorter, the way a cook could tell a dish needs an extra pinch of salt. It’s exciting to cross paths with friends whose shen mei are in completely different fields, whether that be fashion, architectural design, or photography. Observing their ability to see things that I can’t is inspiring in a way I can’t quite explain.
There’s a new piece of Gen-Z slang I like: “for the love of the game.” It’s usually used to humorously poke fun at individuals who perform a certain activity purely for its own sake without any ulterior motive. For example, most people dress nicely to appear clean and attractive or portray elements of their personality and interests. I can attest that’s about as far as it goes for me. However, for my fashion assistant friend, it’s deeper than that. You can tell that he truly loves fashion for the love of the game. In much the way that Gen-Z usually does, slang tends to touch upon ancient philosophical truths with the casual goofiness of a grade-school sleepover.
Many of my orbital interests serve an underlying interest in games. I’d like to learn photography to frame better shots while programming the cameras in my games. I’d like to learn music and sound design to better score the important moments in my games. It’s only games themselves that, no pun intended, I love for the love of the game. With that perspective, it becomes clear to me why I hear perfectly clear sounding music when my sound designer friend raises his eyebrow and observes, “The mix isn’t great on this.” I can ask him what he means, and I learn. Maybe in the future, I’d be able to make the same observation. But he can hunt these nuggets of discernment down in the way a bloodhound can track prey for miles. It’s a means to an end for me; it’s the love of the game for him. The shen mei must come naturally after that.
Inscryption: a 2021 indie game that went viral for pairing card roguelike with experimental metafiction.
You’d think I might say that shen mei only comes from loving a craft so deeply, and yet I’m not so sure. I think that’s the most common path to achieving shen mei, and most of the people I know who have it are deeply embedded into their craft, but it isn’t a hard rule. The next day, I was in Chicago visiting another friend, a barista who also runs an online sticker business on the side. She’s highly economical with her hobbies — music, games, art, fashion — and I can’t help but admire (and envy) her high degree of shen mei with everything she takes a passing interest in. I watched her play an hour of Inscryption and her keen eye picked up on so many details I had assumed only someone in the business of game development would notice. “You can tell this game is well-made,” she mentioned. I can, I thought. I’m impressed and overjoyed you can, too. My habit would be to intellectualize this somehow — find a working theory that transposes the intricacies of coffee-making to game design — but nothing ever is so simply capturable. Many avenues can exist to reach shen mei, even if loving the game is my personal favorite.
It’s poetic that I was introduced to the concept of shen mei by a friend who couldn’t find an English word to describe what she meant in our conversation. As English becomes the globally default language, there’s a certain amount of shen mei in discovering the cracks where its linguistic possibilities fall short.
I try to end my blogs with some kind of takeaway, but I find myself unable to. Whoever you are, reading this — there is beauty in your world that I can’t describe because I can’t see them the same way you do. There are takeaways out there that can’t be written down, in English or any other language. Ghosts of our ideological and artistic pasts, yearning for an observer to understand them. I hope you can see them and cherish your own shen mei, whatever it is that calls to you. Whatever it is that you love purely for the love of the game.
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