Powerful Fun: Embracing PowerPoint Parties

TFD – Dive into the world of PowerPoint parties, where laughter and creativity collide in unforgettable ways. Join the fun today!

Last month, McCall Mirabella invited friends to her 21st birthday celebration and requested just one gift: a PowerPoint presentation.

With more than 1.3 million followers on both TikTok and YouTube, celebrity Mirabella gathered her closest friends and requested that they create a slideshow on anything they could think of. “The sillier, the better” was the only criterion.

Her visitors did not disappoint. While one participant made a funny comparison of the many stages of being high, another evaluated the attractiveness of ten animated characters. Mirabella herself made predictions on the duration of her friends’ survival in the Hunger Games (as well as how violently they would die—apparently a common theme for a PowerPoint party).

PowerPoint presentation nights, which gained immense popularity during the height of the Covid-19 outbreak, continue to captivate partygoers despite being widely used in corporate workplaces worldwide. Groups of friends learn about each other’s secret hobbies, specialized interests, and often funny perspectives on their friends’ weaknesses and talents through a silly presentation.

A pleasure unique to slideshow-centric gatherings, according to Mirabella, is witnessing the people she cares about become agitated over designating Taylor Swift songs that correspond with their personas or made-up crimes that would put them in jail.

She described the PowerPoint nights she’s organized and attended as “so unserious.” “Most of the time, people are bent over wheezing or crying because they laughed so hard.”

Although PowerPoint parties gained popularity during the pandemic, friends have enjoyed them for years.

All you really need for PowerPoint nights are an HDMI-compatible TV, a presentation, and the courage to make your friends laugh or let them in on your secret interests. Although the program has been around for about 40 years and is now a common sight in many offices and classrooms, the clever PowerPoint party transforms the well-known technology into a venue for camaraderie and humor.

In 2012, three students from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, organized a “Drink, Talk & Learn” event that gave rise to the formalization of the PowerPoint party concept. According to Buzzfeed News, attendees of these early parties were required to arrive with a presentation on an arcane topic of their choosing, such as Shadow, the character from Sonic the Hedgehog, and his moral alignment.

Over time, the theme gained popularity, and by 2018, more PowerPoint aficionados in the US had adopted it. Before long, people ranging from undergraduates in Boston to software engineers in Seattle were giving presentations on highly specialized topics to small audiences, frequently while sipping on a drink.

A student gave a controversial presentation at a local PowerPoint party, according to the Harvard Crimson. He argued that King Claudius, rather than Shakespeare’s Hamlet, is the real hero of the play. The speaker claimed to have reduced his fervor for the subject to “a rant to my friends up until now,” as reported by the school newspaper. I can now finally show it to strangers.

In 2020, with the arrival of Covid-19 and millions of Americans cooped up in their homes, virtual PowerPoint parties evolved into a secure, remote means for friends to catch up on each other’s lives and exchange much-needed humor. Divided by the pandemic, groups rallied their housemates or even shared screens on Zoom to transform a typical night of isolation into a private TedTalk.

Teaser clips from these talks made their way onto TikTok, where users hardly ever reveal anything more salacious than the controversial titles of the slideshows. This has encouraged other users to throw their own parties. Usually, the topics are silly, whimsical observations on the peculiarities of a group of pals, such as how they would all fair in a zombie apocalypse, as well as small interests or questionable beliefs, such as the “real” (read: imaginary) cause of the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Following the success of the party format in 2020 (which has garnered over 40 million views on TikTok under relevant hashtags), users of the platform have experimented with inventive takes on the standard slideshow gathering and surveyed users on various platforms, such as Reddit, to get original ideas for presentations. Consider the host who, like the unfortunate friend who bluffed their way through a presentation on stock selection, ambushed their guests by making them present someone else’s PowerPoint on a topic they were completely ignorant of. To attract other singles, a group in Philadelphia makes slideshows for their single pals. On Christmas, one inventive TikTok user even showed their family a PowerPoint of themselves.

Even though other programs like Prezi, Canva, and Google Slides are extremely well-liked, Microsoft PowerPoint software is not necessary for these presentations; nonetheless, Microsoft has released guidelines for organizing a premier PowerPoint celebration. Using those bizarre transitions to make titles vanish with a click and photographs boomerang across the screen is one of its recommendations.

Eight months has passed since Mirabella’s cousins introduced her to PowerPoint parties at a sleepover, and her presentations have only gotten better in terms of quality and theatricality. Taylor Swift interrupted the carnage in her previous slideshow with a Hunger Games theme by entering the fictitious arena for a quick halftime concert. It was chosen by her friends as the evening’s best presentation.