I took the photo above, and I can tell you personally
that the Church of Our Savior on the Spilled Blood is the
most beautiful building in St Petersburg, which likely puts
it in the running for most beautiful in the entire former
Soviet Union. Not that it has much competition, because from
what I've seen of it, the former Soviet Union is really a
dump. Boy, did those guys ever lose the Cold War. There's
probably a parallel you could make to Alexey Pazhitnov himself.
Since he was a government employee, Tetris belonged to the
Russian Academy of Sciences, so AP never got rich off his
invention the way the designers of Super Mario Brothers or
Pac-Man did.
I've been playing Tetris on and off with many different
electronic devices since my stepbrother Dan got his Game Boy
in 1989. I remember a particular family trip where I played
Game Boy Tetris through an entire seven-hour plane ride, using
up an entire set of batteries. I don't recommend doing this,
but it was a stressful plane ride and Tetris at least made
it tolerable. I've never met anyone under the age of forty
who hasn't had at least a fling with the game, and the vast
majority of my friends have had a brief period of total addiction.
If you're reading this, I'll bet you've had that experience
where you've played so much Tetris that you see the tumbling
boxes against your eyelids while you're trying to fall asleep.
I've had it twice, once as a kid and then again in college.
Tetris can exert a remarkably strong grip on your consciousness,
and it's an excellent argument for the theory
of memes.
Tetris is simple, but it isn't dumb. The game
physics vaguely resemble the real world, but there are some
crucial differences. One is the game's law of gravity, which
is quantized in increments of one block. When you complete
lines, the stacks of blocks drop by a distance exactly equal
to the height of the cleared rows below them. Blocks may be
left floating above gaps, a behavior nicknamed 'naïve
gravity' by game designers. Nearly all vertically-oriented
2D games use naïve gravity - think, for example, of the
hovering scenery in Super Mario
Brothers.
Rotation is also quantized in a weird and artificial
way under the laws of Tetris physics, limited to 90 degree
turns around the axis perpendicular to the screen. Even if
the pieces appear to rotate smoothly for graphical presentation's
sake, you can never have a piece at, say, a 37 degree angle.
You've been pushing and rotating things your entire life,
but Tetris asks you to push and rotate imaginary things with
gentle nudges of your thumbs, with one thumb controlling direction
of movement and the other producing instantaneous right-angle
turns.
The strangest aspect of Tetris physics by far is
its representation of time. The game gradually increases speed,
a common enough form of time pressure in computer games, but
a genuine experiential novelty in real life. The acceleration
of time in Tetris and games like it is richly symbolic for
the inner lives of us humans trying to live in the modern
world. It's odd to be able to dial up your internal metronome
in such a deliberate way. The actual experience of Tetris
can be quite anxiety-producing. Inflicting emotional stress
on yourself must be gratifying, or people wouldn't do it,
but it's not the same kind of gratification you get from a
foot massage or an episode of Seinfeld. So why on earth do
humans throughout the high-tech world continue to spend so
much time playing it? Has Alexey Pazhitnov unleashed a sinister
plague upon humanity? Is Tetris just digital heroin? Many
of my friends forbid themselves from playing video games entirely.
Several of my married male friends are forbidden to play them
by their wives, implicitly or explicitly. The fear is that
Tetris can turn a person into a junkie, or a withdrawn Rain-Man-type
obsessive. How can something as simple, pointless and repetitive
as Tetris possibly be useful or compelling to an intelligent,
curious human being after the first three minutes?
I think Tetris is actually fundamentally
a good and valuable thing, as long as it's enjoyed in moderation.
Like most computer games so far, the point of Tetris is ostensibly
to give the feeling of accomplishment, of conquest, of defeating
a foe. Ours is a highly competitive and goal-oriented society,
and most of our recreational activities reflect that, from
basketball to Sudoku. In Tetris, though, you always lose.
No matter how good you are, the computer's better, and eventually
the pace is too fast for your nervous system to keep up with,
or you get bored or distracted. Even when you're playing well,
Tetris is so abstract that there aren't really 'accomplishments.'
You could, I suppose, measure your ability with your score,
but no one does that. You could think in terms of lines completed
or maximum speeds/levels attained, but no one does that either.
Even if you wanted to compare your skills with other people,
there are so many different versions of the game out there
that you wouldn't know where to start. Tetris has actually
removed all of the usual markers for accomplishment, rendering
it one of the most pointless activities ever devised.
Why do I think that getting emotionally
involved in a pointless activity is such a good thing? Pointless
though it is, Tetris offers genuine competition against the
computer, and that competition happens completely in the moment,
a constantly emerging state that results from combinations
of the random sequence of pieces and your responses to them.
As in life, wins and losses happen in Tetris with each successive
moment of the game, every second you're playing. I've heard
people compare Tetris to the challenge of keeping up with
the flow of stuff into their inbox, literal or figurative.
Tetris is extremely popular with women, especially those who
otherwise aren't big gamers. Female Tetris lovers of my acquaintance
have observed that it reminds them of cleaning up, of getting
their lives in order, of keeping pace with the demands that
life is continually throwing at them. I think the game works
very well as a minimalist simulation of what it's like to
be alive in America, trying to maintain a certain level of
throughput in the face of unpredictable predictability. You
know it's going to be one of the same four pieces coming at
you, but you don't know which one or at what angle. Every
time you play, this deceptively minimal computer program creates
a uniquely emergent experience. This reminds me an awful lot
of William James'
and Gerald Edelmans' conceptions of human consciousness,
and Richard
Dawkins' conception of life itself.
Here
are some comments by Stewart Brand on a conference by Wil
Wright and Brian Eno:
Wright observed that science is
all about compressing reality to minimal rule sets, but
generative creation goes the opposite direction. You look
for a combination of the fewest rules that can generate
a whole complex world which will always surprise you, yet
within a framework that stays recognizable. "It's not
engineering and design," he said, "so much as
it is gardening. You plant seeds. Richard Dawkins says that
a willow seed has only about 800K of data in it."
A significant new element in computer
games is the profound command, "Restart." You
get to explore other paths to take in the same situation.
Eno: "That's what we do with everything I call culture,
everything not really necessary, from how we wear our hair
to how we decorate a cupcake. We try something, surrender
to it, and are encouraged to imagine what else might be
tried."
It's interesting that just one verb
is used both for music and for games: 'play'.
Tetris is a very primitive simulation of life,
but like all the best computer games, it captures in-the-moment
conscious experience in a way that other media haven't yet.
No other material art form responds to you so immediately,
and no other narrative's outcome depends so completely on
your actions. Music, dance and computer games are converging
swiftly, with Japanese teenagers leading the charge and Americans
quickly behind them, because all three activities have a fundamentally
great deal in common. Tetris might be a boring dance involving
only your thumbs, but a dance it nevertheless is. Imagine
controlling wall-size Tetris with your feet to a bumping hip-hop
soundtrack! I'd go to the gym every day if that were available.
Gerald
Edelman describes consciousness as living in "the
remembered present." He further describes memories and
imagination to be effectively the same brain activities. Your
waking state is an ongoing effort to contend with the vicissitudes
of life by running super-realistic simulations of the world
in real time. The idea is to find the patterns in your immense
storehouse of sense memories, so you can predict the world
and your body's interaction with it. The key to humanity's
evolutionary success so far is our ability to create hypotheticals
and play them out on our internal simulators without risking
life and limb. Recently, we've been able to move the simulators
out of our heads and into fuller-body territory, so people
like surgeons and pilots don't have to do all their learning
on the job. The mental skills that help you with Tetris can
actually help you with life. If you're stressed and panicky,
your Tetris playing will be terrible. If you're in a state
of serene Zen calm, your Tetris playing will be dazzling,
even at absurd difficulty levels. Tetris is not the best possible
way of attaining a state of Zen calm, but it's better than
nothing, and it can sometimes point people like me in the
right direction.
