Tetris: Beware Its Power!
It is quite possible that Tetris, that seductive swallower of so many hours, is the single most universally beloved video game ever created. Developed in 1985 by Alexey Pajitnov, a Soviet computer engineer, Tetris hit the US in the late eighties amid a series of legal wranglings, first as a Russian-flavoured hit PC game and then as the killer cart that made the Game Boy a huge success. Tetris’s power to keep gamers coming back is present in virtually every knock-off that has followed Pajitnov’s original.
Its game play is ingenious. The pieces are shapes called Tetriminoes, made from the seven different arrangements of four square blocks joined along the edge. They drop one at a time into a rectangular well, and the pieces land on the pieces that have fallen before. You have to keep the space from filling up by completing solid rows of blocks, which disappear when filled in all the way. Cover up a gap in the blocks, and the layer stays there until you get rid of all the pieces above it. Miss too many gaps and the pieces pile up to the top. If it fills to the top, the game is over.
You get to see what the next piece will be, and in the few seconds you have before the piece falls and lands in place at the bottom, you have to figure out the best place for it to fit at the bottom. You go for as long as you can, and you earn points for dropping pieces and completing rows. Clear enough rows, and you advance to the next level, where the pieces fall a bit faster, and your reflexes and judgment have to get a bit quicker.
Keeping the game alive as it gets harder and harder always delivers a rush as the pace quickens. From game to game, you may find yourself striving to beat the high score on your computer, whether your own or someone else’s. Along the way you experience a myriad of triumphs and tragedies. You drop an I-piece and clear four rows at once. You leave a spot such that one and only one shape will clear away the rows, and you see it pop up in the preview window. Or you flip a piece too many times and it sticks facing the wrong way.
Every game ends with a mad scramble as you feel your ability to land a piece well slip beyond your grasp. The deep focus required to continually strategize and make split-second judgments can lead to a mental obsession with the falling shapes. People can get fixated to the point of having Tetris dreams and hallucinations. The popularity and addictiveness of Tetris led to the effect of mental burn-in from repeated mental activities being called “the Tetris effect”. Its the same phenomenon as when software programmers dream in code, or when you have dreams where you do your job in your sleep.
There have been too many versions of Tetris created to count them all. As such, its easy to find a free Tetris game to play out there among all the free flash games for kids you can play online. Playing any of the free kids games online where you challenge yourself at simple, repetitive tasks can lead to your brain staying absorbed in a game. Just make sure you’re having fun while you do it!
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