McCall Mirabella hosted a PowerPoint party, where she and her friends gave slide shows on topics such as their chances of surviving the Hunger Games.

Courtesy of McCall Mirabella.

(CNN) --

For McCall Mirabella's 21st birthday celebration last month, she asked guests to bring just one gift: a PowerPoint presentation.

Mirabella, a TikTok and YouTube personality with more than 1.3 million followers on both platforms, gathered her closest friends and asked them to give a slideshow about anything that came to mind.

The only criterion was "the sillier, the better."

His guests complied.

One attendee rated the appeal of 10 animated characters while another humorously explored the different stages of drug addiction.

Mirabella herself presented her predictions about how long her friends would survive in the Hunger Games (and how violent her endings would be, apparently a popular template for a PowerPoint party).

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Such are the pleasures of PowerPoint presentation nights, they gained popularity during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, but are still loved by party guests (this despite their regular use in corporate offices around the world). world).

Through a silly slideshow, groups of friends learn about each other's specific interests, secret hobbies, and often hilarious takes on their friends' quirks and strengths.

Watching the people she loves get upset for assigning each other Taylor Swift songs that match their personalities or fictitious crimes that would land them in prison is a specific joy of slideshow-centric parties, Mirabella said.

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"They're so unserious," he said of the PowerPoint nights he attended and organized.

“Most of the time, people cry from laughing so much or bend over and breathe hard.”

PowerPoint parties became popular during the pandemic, but they've been around for years

PowerPoint nights involve little more than an HDMI-compatible TV, a slideshow, and a willingness to excite your friends or reveal your hidden passions.

The software itself is almost 40 years old and has since become a staple in many offices and classrooms, but PowerPoint's clever party turns familiar technology into a medium for comedy and camaraderie.

The PowerPoint party concept was formalized in 2012, when three students from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, organized the “Drink, Talk and Learn” event.

Guests at these first parties had to show up with a presentation on a topic of their choosing, such as the moral alignment of Sonic the Hedgehog character Shadow, according to Buzzfeed News.

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The theme became increasingly popular and in 2018 more PowerPoint enthusiasts in the United States joined the trend.

Soon, many, from software engineers in Seattle to students in Boston, were presenting slides on very specific topics to a small crowd, often with a drink in hand.

In the Harvard Crimson's story about a local PowerPoint party, a student presented his argument for why King Claudius is the true hero of Shakespeare's "Hamlet," a divisive opinion if ever there was one.

The presenter told the school newspaper that his enthusiasm for the topic had until then been relegated to “a rant with my friends.

I can finally introduce him to strangers.”

When Covid-19 hit in 2020 and millions of Americans isolated themselves at home, virtual PowerPoint parties became a safe, distanced way for friends to catch up on each other's lives and give each other some much-needed levity. .

Groups separated by the pandemic shared their screens on Zoom or even gathered their housemates to turn an ordinary night in isolation into an opportunity for a private TedTalk.

In Philadelphia, a woman shared an introduction about her single friend in hopes of introducing him to a potential partner.

Credit: Charles Fox/The Philadelphia Inquirer/Zum.

Some tantalizing snippets of these presentations made their way to TikTok (users rarely reveal the juicy content of the slideshows beyond their outrageous titles), and inspired other users to host their own gatherings.

Themes are usually quirky, light-hearted takes on the idiosyncrasies of a group of friends, like how each would fare during a zombie apocalypse, and minor passions or dubious theories like the "real" (read: fictional) reason they died. the dinosaurs.

Since the party format took off in 2020 (and has since racked up over 40 million views on TikTok with related hashtags), TikTok users have tried out inventive new variations on the typical slideshow and surveyed users on different platforms, like Reddit, to get unique submission tips.

Take the host who ambushed his guests by forcing them to present someone else's PowerPoint on a topic they knew nothing about, or the hapless friend who tricked them during a presentation on stock picking.

A Philadelphia group creates slideshows for their single friends to grab the attention of other singles.

One creative TikTok user even came out to his family in a PowerPoint at Christmas.

Although Microsoft PowerPoint software is not a requirement for these presentations (competing services like Prezi, Canva, and Google Slides are also popular), Microsoft issued its own advice for hosting a top-notch PowerPoint party.

Among their suggestions: Take advantage of those quirky transitions so photos can boomerang across the screen and titles disappear with a click.

Since her cousins ​​introduced her to PowerPoint parties during a sleepover eight months ago, Mirabella's presentations have only improved in quality and theatricality.

Their recent Hunger Games-themed slideshow included multimedia elements like Taylor Swift entering the fictional arena for a brief halftime performance to stop the bloodshed.

Her friends voted it the best performance of the night.

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