jd87: The Tetris Effect

by Josh Delman

I'm a crazy college student who likes to write things. I eat peanut butter out of the jar with a spoon. I've really been appreciating bananas recently. I'm going to start telling people that when they ask me "what's new?"

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2009: January / February / March / April / May / June / July / August / September

The Tetris Effect

I have recently got back into playing Tetris and Tetris DX¹ on my Game Boy. I play with the original Game Boy -- there's something very satisfying about its weight and size, like it's perfectly made for my hands, and about the simplicity of the game itself; it requires just the directional pad and one button.

I'm reading now about the Tetris Effect, which is basically the tendency to mentally rearrange objects in real life so that they fit together nicely. What I'm experiencing now though, after about a solid week of playing every day, is that my mind is idly playing Tetris games in my head². I'm seeing falling blocks and rotating them as they fall. All of scenarios I "see" with my third eye are very satisfying in a puzzle-solving type way, i.e. a 4-block line falling in for a Tetris. I seem to find it more satisfying, though, when an L-shaped piece drops in somewhere for a triple (3 lines cleared).

See also Bastard Tetris which uses a super-evil algorithm to take a look at your current block situation and give you the worst possible piece.

1. The difference between the main gameplay mode ("Marathon," in which the blocks keep falling until you run out of room) with regard to Tetris vs. Tetris DX is that in DX, you have a an extra couple hundred milliseconds to move and or rotate a piece once it touches the ground. This amounts to two advantages: one is that you're able to move a piece if you dropped it quick and made a mistake, as I am prone to do, and two is that you have a little bit more time to think about where you'll put the next piece. I average about 100 lines on Tetris and 200 on Tetris DX, so the change is significant.↩

2. Though I'm not experiencing the Tetris Effect, I have experienced something similar for Grand Theft Auto -- as in seeing cars and trying to find their videogame counterparts, as well as thinking about the quickest way I can get somewhere by driving over pedestrians and over medians and on grass. But I don't devote as much time to video game playing as I used to, for the benefit of society.↩

May 29, 2009

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