Saturday, December 24, 2011

The Addictive Powers of Tetris

By Chris Kiriapolous


Few games have been as original and as universally loved as that ultimate time vacuum, Tetris. Originally the creation of Soviet computer engineer Alexey Pajitnov in 1985, Tetris had a long journey from its development at the Moscow Academy of Science to its status as one of the most successful and widely imitated computer games of all time. But all along the way, Tetris has lured many with its addictive charms.

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.

Helping you strategize is a box which previews the piece that will follow the current one, and you have until the piece floats to the bottom to decide where it should land. As you stay alive, you accumulate points, earned each time you drop a piece or complete a row. When you've cleared a certain number of rows, you go up a level. With each successive level, the game speeds up and gets harder.

Once you become enraptured, you'll find yourself continually pushing to improve your skills, reach higher levels than before, and beat your top scores. The challenges are continuous, and each game is a unique experience as the pieces drop randomly. As you zone in and start your journey towards carpal tunnel syndrome, you experience a series of highs and lows. Landing an I-piece that clears away four rows in one fell swoop. The frustration of over-flipping a piece, or missing a landing, and watching the pieces pile up. Rising like a phoenix to clear away a huge backlog and empty the well again.

Even though every game of Tetris ends with the well filling up, the exercise of clearing it is fun for its own sake. Strategizing so intensely puts your mind into a "Tetris zone", and the effect's power is so great that people find themselves obsessed with the game. They see everything as Tetriminoes, from supermarket products to office buildings to patio stones. So powerful is the effect from playing lots of Tetris that the phenomenon of mental "stickiness" due to prolonged exposure is now referred to as "the Tetris effect". Computer programmers experience the Tetris effect when they dream in software code, for example.

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!




About the Author:



No comments:

Post a Comment

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...