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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stop

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Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.

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Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And

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Speaker 1: before we get go in here, I just want to

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Speaker 1: shot up a quick reminder to everybody. Go on over

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Speaker 1: to Stuff with All your Mind dot com if you

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Speaker 1: want to learn more about the show, you want to

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Speaker 1: find old episodes, you want to explore our blog content,

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Speaker 1: our video content, or linked out the various social media

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Speaker 1: accounts of just Facebook, Twitter, and tumbling. And also, hey,

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Speaker 1: if you listen to us through iTunes through the Apple System,

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Speaker 1: what did you head on over there and give us

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Speaker 1: a little love on the review there. It'll help out

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Speaker 1: the algorithm for our show and it's a good way

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Speaker 1: to give back and ensure that we get to keep

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Speaker 1: putting out this kind of content for you. So this

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Speaker 1: episode today is going to be about Tetris, and it's

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Speaker 1: going to be part one of a two part series

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Speaker 1: that we're doing on the science of Tetris, the ancient

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Speaker 1: mystery puzzle of the universe. Yeah, so the first live

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Speaker 1: is mostly dealing with the power of Tetris and the

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Speaker 1: history of Tetris. Second part is going to dive into

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Speaker 1: some possible uses for that power and knowledge. So, Robert,

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Speaker 1: I have a perhaps pretty weird question for you. Alright,

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Speaker 1: hit me with a pretty weird question. If there were

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Speaker 1: no thinking beings in the universe, would numbers exist? Oh,

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Speaker 1: this is a great question. Our numbers a human discovery

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Speaker 1: or humans are are numbers of human invention? Right? Like

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Speaker 1: the number seven? Is that an inherent feature of the

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Speaker 1: universe or is that just sort of like an idea

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Speaker 1: we've come up with to describe what happens when there

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Speaker 1: are seven of something. I tend to see it as

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Speaker 1: kind of a mix of the two. Like, yes, there

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Speaker 1: is there is an inherent number sense to the universe,

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Speaker 1: but obviously there's a there's a human ordering system layered

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Speaker 1: on top of that so that we can interact with

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Speaker 1: it and understand it. Yeah, I think that's a sensible

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Speaker 1: way of looking at it. But there are certainly people

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Speaker 1: who I think would be called platonists in this sense

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Speaker 1: that their platonic in the sense that they believe in

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Speaker 1: the real existence of abstract objects that are inherent to

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Speaker 1: the universe, like numbers, mathematical objects, the theorems that those

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Speaker 1: things actually do exist as objects in some sense, even

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Speaker 1: though they don't have physical matter in any way. And

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Speaker 1: I sort of feel the same way the Platonists feel

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Speaker 1: about numbers. I feel that way about Tetris. So tell

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Speaker 1: me your personal Tetris history. Well, I think it is

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Speaker 1: ideal that this episode is publishing during December, because for me,

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Speaker 1: there's always something kind of Christmas e about Tetris because

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Speaker 1: I got it back in the day on old school Nintendo.

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Speaker 1: I think I got it for Christmas, so it arrived

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Speaker 1: in the Christmas season, and some of the wonderful music

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Speaker 1: um that was on that game included um, I believe

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Speaker 1: danced the sugar plumb Ferries from The Nutcracker, which of

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Speaker 1: course is a Christmas themed ballet, a ballet that I

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Speaker 1: had to set through or or got to sit through,

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Speaker 1: however you want to look at it many many times,

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Speaker 1: as I had two sisters who were both involved in dance. Oh,

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Speaker 1: it wasn't one of those things where your school took

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Speaker 1: you to The Nutcracker every year. No, I had to,

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Speaker 1: I think, go every year to see one of my

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Speaker 1: two sisters of performing it. And and the Nutcracker is

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Speaker 1: an interesting thing to have to sit through because the

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Speaker 1: first is totally front loaded. The first half has a

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Speaker 1: rat king, it has battles, it has a fabulous candyland discovery,

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Speaker 1: weird uncles with an eye patch, and then the second

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Speaker 1: half is just just a slumber fest of various dances

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Speaker 1: that are performed for the victors like they've already won.

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Speaker 1: It's just all complete. Afterthought, huh, that's interesting. Yeah, it

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Speaker 1: does have a lot of great hallucinatory imagery. I recalled though.

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Speaker 1: I remember that there's a lady with a huge dress

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Speaker 1: and a bunch of creatures come out from under her dress. Yes, yeah,

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Speaker 1: but anyway, Yeah, the dance of the sugar Plum Ferry

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Speaker 1: was on the any S version I played of the

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Speaker 1: game Boy version, And I also associate this with Christmas.

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Speaker 1: I think maybe because I associate most video games I

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Speaker 1: played as a child with Christmas, because that, you know,

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Speaker 1: Christmas is when you get the game and then you

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Speaker 1: have that huge allotment of time and to vote to

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Speaker 1: the game. You can just completely meld your brain to

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Speaker 1: this game, play at nine hours a day because there's

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Speaker 1: no school and your you know, your parents don't want

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Speaker 1: to deal with you during Uh So, yeah, I I

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Speaker 1: totally had that. I had a couple other games for

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Speaker 1: the game Boy too. Back in the early nineties, when

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Speaker 1: I was a kid, I had Tetris, but also had

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Speaker 1: Super Mario Land. I don't know if you played that

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Speaker 1: on the Game Boy. It involves weird it kind of

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Speaker 1: like ancient Egyptian themes that are it's sort of unique

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Speaker 1: Mario game. And then I also had a video game

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Speaker 1: called Altered Space, which involved isometric movements. It was very

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Speaker 1: hard to control h and mostly you would just fall

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Speaker 1: on spikes and run out of air and die. You

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Speaker 1: play a little astronaut who has minute because I was

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Speaker 1: initially imagining some sort of Timothy Leary themed game that,

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Speaker 1: oh no, that would have been wonderful. Like as a kid,

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Speaker 1: I had the game version of the William Hurt movie

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Speaker 1: where it takes ayahuasca and gets in the sensory deprivation tank.

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Speaker 1: You know another thing about about having it. I wonder

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Speaker 1: if this is the case with you as well. I

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Speaker 1: had some horrible Nintendo games, like I had Mission Impossible,

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Speaker 1: which was an impossibly difficult game, and then a few

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Speaker 1: other games that really had limited appeal even to me.

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Speaker 1: But Tetris was a game that I played like crazy.

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Speaker 1: My sister my sister, who was old enough to play

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Speaker 1: the played like crazy, and even my my dad got

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Speaker 1: in on the act and was playing Tetris, and it

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Speaker 1: just ensnaring all to all of us. Yeah, it does

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Speaker 1: have this very universal appeal which has been chalked up

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Speaker 1: to several different factors from people were gonna talk about

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Speaker 1: later in this episode. But the reason I mentioned those

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Speaker 1: other games I had on the game Boy was going

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Speaker 1: back to this very first thing I said, which is

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Speaker 1: that I sensed, even as a child, that there was

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Speaker 1: something very very different between Tetris and these other games,

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Speaker 1: even popular games like you know, the Mario game. I

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Speaker 1: mean like it didn't have to be a bad game.

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Speaker 1: Other games to me felt like human artifacts. They felt

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Speaker 1: invented in the sense that you know that that a

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Speaker 1: wheelbarrow is invented. Tetris to me felt like a fundamental,

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Speaker 1: inherent aspect of the universe that was an ancient, secret mystery,

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Speaker 1: and it just seemed to me impossible to believe there

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Speaker 1: was ever a time when there wasn't Tetris woven into

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Speaker 1: the fabric of physics and mathematics. So you're you're basically

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Speaker 1: imagining a scenario where the the hominids in two thousand

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Speaker 1: and one of Space Odyssey are looking up. Instead of

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Speaker 1: seeing a complete um monolith, they're seeing the long bar. Yah,

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Speaker 1: seeing the Tetris shapes fall inform the monolith. Yeah, and

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Speaker 1: it's got to be the long bar, because that's the

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Speaker 1: most coveted piece among avid Tetris players, as long as

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Speaker 1: you've prepared yourself for its insertion. Yeah, exactly, how true

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Speaker 1: that is? No, I see, I see what you're saying.

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Speaker 1: Exactly this Uh, it feels perfectly natural, like playing Tetris

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Speaker 1: is like coming home on some level. Um. I definitely

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Speaker 1: remember playing it and being obsessed with it, and and

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Speaker 1: it was just startled to realize this was a new

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Speaker 1: thing in the world. I couldn't believe. I mean, this

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Speaker 1: is a game that was invented in Ur, but it

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Speaker 1: didn't feel that way. I even even old old games

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Speaker 1: like go and checkers and chess, I mean, these old

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Speaker 1: board games still felt like artifacts. They still felt invented

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Speaker 1: by humans in a way that Tetris didn't. Tetris felt

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Speaker 1: like an ancient mystery. And I'm still not quite sure

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Speaker 1: exactly why that is. But I think throughout these couple

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Speaker 1: of episodes, we're going to do on the science of Tetris.

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Speaker 1: We we may have some leads about why it feels

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Speaker 1: that way to me at least and I think to

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Speaker 1: to some other people too, or simply the case it

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Speaker 1: could just be the case that God itself is the

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Speaker 1: long bar or or some sort of multidimensional um shape

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Speaker 1: that we can't quite understand, but that fits into all

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Speaker 1: possible Tetris scenarios. But indeed, as we explore here, we're

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Speaker 1: also going to get into some of the recreational mathematical

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Speaker 1: roots of Tetris, and even those don't go back tremendously

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Speaker 1: far h that they only go back into the early

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Speaker 1: twentieth century. Nevertheless, I insist there is an ancient mystery

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Speaker 1: at the secret of this journey, and maybe by the

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Speaker 1: end will unlock it. But I think we should actually

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Speaker 1: look at the game Tetris now it's history and where

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Speaker 1: it comes from. And the first thing I've got to

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Speaker 1: start with is uh, sort of incidental to the game

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Speaker 1: of Tetris itself. But did you know that the famous

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Speaker 1: Tetris music, that theme right there is based on a

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Speaker 1: Russian folk song that actually has lyrics. I do not

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Speaker 1: know this. The Tetris theme with lyrics. I love it

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Speaker 1: so much. I looked it up. This is the Wikipedia translation,

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Speaker 1: so this may not be the most accurate, but but

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Speaker 1: the first verses, oh my crate is so full, I've

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Speaker 1: got chintz and brocade. Take pity o, sweetie, of this

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Speaker 1: lad's shoulder seems kind of appropriate for the game where

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Speaker 1: you're you're stacking the blocks forever. My great, it overflows all.

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Speaker 1: That is a revelation for me. Yeah, but surely Tetris

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Speaker 1: didn't just appear out of thin air. I mean, obviously

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Speaker 1: it grew out of some kind of puzzle tradition. Yes, yes,

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Speaker 1: and so I mean certainly you can if you want to,

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Speaker 1: to take the roots of Tetris and extend them back

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Speaker 1: just completely geometrically. Yes, you can get back into the

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Speaker 1: history of geometry itself. But for the most part, we

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Speaker 1: can begin the birth of Tetris with something that was

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Speaker 1: called a pin tomino. This is an arrangement of five

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Speaker 1: unit squares or cubes, all joined along their edges. Um

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Speaker 1: they're twelve free pintomenos. They're shaped roughly like the letters vt, W, X, U, z, F,

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Speaker 1: P I, N Y L. There, that's funny. I looked

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Speaker 1: up some of these designations of like the letter to

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Speaker 1: the pentomeno, and some of them makes sense, like the

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Speaker 1: W pintomeno looks like a W, the Y pintomeno looks

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Speaker 1: like a long bar with a lump on the side. Yeah. Yeah.

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Speaker 1: Some of them are a little little more abstract. They're

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Speaker 1: eighteen one sided pentomenos and sixty three fixed pintomenos. Okay,

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Speaker 1: So essentially, though, the pentomeno is if you take some

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Speaker 1: squares and you line them up so that the sides

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Speaker 1: are touching in one way or another, how many different

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Speaker 1: shapes can you make out of five squares? And that's

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Speaker 1: what it is. Yeah, And then you you had pent

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Speaker 1: amino puzzles that were all about arranging them together into

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Speaker 1: a shape, usually something you know, a rectangle, something fairly simple. Now.

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Speaker 1: The first published pentomino puzzle of this nature, even though

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Speaker 1: it was not named as such, appeared in Henry Dadeny's

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Speaker 1: The Canterbury Puzzles in nineteen o seven. That a companion

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Speaker 1: to the Canterbury Tales. Um, if anything, it would be

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Speaker 1: the section in the back with a crossroad puzzle too,

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Speaker 1: I guess um No. This was basically a puzzle publication,

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Speaker 1: uh and in this particular one that Dundinny put together,

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Speaker 1: you had to fit twelve pentomino shapes together with one

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Speaker 1: square te traumino, and I'll explain the terminology here in

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Speaker 1: a minute. That's four squares as you encounter in tetris

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Speaker 1: later on. You had to join these together on an

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Speaker 1: eight by eight checkerboard. Okay, so you've got like a

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Speaker 1: puzzle space. That's the board, and the problem is you've

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Speaker 1: got all these pieces that you've got to fit into

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Speaker 1: the space so that they're not you know, poking out

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Speaker 1: the sides or something right, And like any good game, um,

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Speaker 1: there's a part of it is the mechanics which have described,

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Speaker 1: but the other part was the fluff. And the fluff

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Speaker 1: here was that William the Conqueror had, out of rage,

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Speaker 1: broken a chess board and you had to have to

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Speaker 1: reassemble the chessboard that these each of these shapes is

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Speaker 1: a piece of the shattered board. The story behind the game. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: I kind of love that when there's a game that's

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Speaker 1: not like an adventure action game with characters, but it's

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Speaker 1: a puzzle game, and yet it has a back story. Yeah, yeah,

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Speaker 1: I mean I think that's essential. I don't want to

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Speaker 1: play a game that's just pure abstract mathematics and mechanics.

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Speaker 1: I want some cool fluff in there. That's how I

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Speaker 1: get engaged with it. Of course, the exception would be Tetris, exactly, yes,

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Speaker 1: because there is well we'll discuss some that have some

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Speaker 1: fluff added on, and sometimes the fluff is delightful, but

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Speaker 1: for the most part, tetris is the exception to the rule. Okay,

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Speaker 1: but so William the conqueror gets a chessboard, smashes it

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Speaker 1: into a bunch of pentominoes, and you've got to fit

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Speaker 1: them back together, right though, of course they're not called

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Speaker 1: pentominoes at the time. It's not until three that American

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Speaker 1: profess their Solomon W. Golam, actually coins the term. So

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Speaker 1: what he did is he took the word domino, which,

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Speaker 1: of course we know is a little a little block

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Speaker 1: that you line up a play dominoes, whether you do

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Speaker 1: cascading dominot guy who makes the pizza, yeah, exactly, that

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Speaker 1: that sort of domino. So he took the word domino,

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Speaker 1: and then he and it. He treated it kind of

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Speaker 1: whimsically as if it was die domino, as if omino

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Speaker 1: were a shape and Die referred to the number of

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Speaker 1: squares cubes making it up because there are two squares

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Speaker 1: and a domino exactly, So he said, what if there

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Speaker 1: were other omino's, So in this case, a pent domino

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Speaker 1: is penta or five plus omino. Likewise, we already mentioned tetromino,

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Speaker 1: which would be tetra four plus domino, right, um and uh.

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Speaker 1: And he also threw out just a general polyominos, a

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Speaker 1: term for these various constructions depending on how many different

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Speaker 1: square que elements are making them up. So there could

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Speaker 1: be like sex dominoes or sept dominoes exactly. Though. I

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Speaker 1: imagine as you go higher and higher up the list

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Speaker 1: of cardinal numbers there, the number of possible shapes just explodes, right,

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Speaker 1: because as you add more squares to move around in

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Speaker 1: different positions, you could probably make an ultimately infinite number

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Speaker 1: of shapes. Yeah, Like I mean, the bigger ones are

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Speaker 1: going to resemble full blown levels from video games or

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Speaker 1: or dungeoning adventures from Dungeons and Dragons with each of

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Speaker 1: the cubes, right. Um. Now, all of this comes to

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Speaker 1: a head publicly with his nineteen article Checkerboards and Polyominos

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Speaker 1: in American Mathematical monthly and this this really came out.

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Speaker 1: This kick started a lot of interest in these shapes

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Speaker 1: and the kind of puzzles you could have with them. Okay,

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Speaker 1: so pentomino puzzles good stuff, big business. Yeah, well, and

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Speaker 1: I mean his big business is you're gonna have in

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Speaker 1: recreational mathematics in the mid twentieth century. But but it's

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Speaker 1: certainly we're not talking about Marl Borrows here, right, But

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Speaker 1: it's still it's catching on. It's it already has an

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Speaker 1: addictive property to it. In then in Night it actually

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Speaker 1: launches off the pen and paper, off the table and

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Speaker 1: into the world of computers. Because at this point we

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Speaker 1: end up with a computer program that generates solutions for

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Speaker 1: an eight by eight polyomino puzzle. So we're already obsolete. Yeah, yeah,

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Speaker 1: we're already getting the human element out of it, and

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Speaker 1: we're already seeing it take off into the world of

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Speaker 1: computer programming in a very early stage. So I imagine,

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Speaker 1: if you're just trying to cram pieces together into a checkerboard,

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Speaker 1: and you've got a fixed number of pieces and a

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Speaker 1: fixed board size, there are a limited number of solutions, right. Yeah.

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Speaker 1: According to the University of Victoria Department of computer sciences.

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Speaker 1: It's now known that there are two thousand, three hundred

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Speaker 1: and thirty nine solutions for the six by ten rectangle,

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Speaker 1: a thousand and ten solutions for the five by twelve rectangle,

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Speaker 1: three hundred and sixty eight solutions for the four by

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Speaker 1: fifteen rectangle, and two solutions for the three by twenty rectangle.

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Speaker 1: So so yeah, this is you see this, this idea,

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Speaker 1: this new type of shape puzzle just taking off in

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Speaker 1: the world of recreational mathematics. Uh, finding a warm, warm

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Speaker 1: home there, and that's the sort of sort of soil

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Speaker 1: from which this maddening Tetris vine emerges and you can

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Speaker 1: The interesting thing here is you can even factor in

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Speaker 1: some some interesting non Tetris stuff here. For instance, John

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Speaker 1: Horton Conway's seventy Game of Life cellular automaton simulation. What

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Speaker 1: is that? Oh? I think we may have mentioned it

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Speaker 1: on here in some past episodes, and we should probably

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Speaker 1: discover it in more depth later on. But it's essentially

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Speaker 1: a very simple um geometric based simulation. Many of you

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Speaker 1: may have seen images from this where it basically looks

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Speaker 1: like crazy little Tetris shapes moving around and changing form

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Speaker 1: on a screen sort of one of those uh cell

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Speaker 1: evolutions simulators. Yeah, the big one really, um and uh yeah,

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Speaker 1: it's it's a fascinating topic on to its own, so

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Speaker 1: we may have to come back on on that one

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Speaker 1: at a later day. Okay, well, you have laid the

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Speaker 1: soil out of which you, as you say, the vines

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Speaker 1: of Tetris grow. But I think we should turn to

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Speaker 1: the vines themselves, because what fascinating vines they are, a

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Speaker 1: lot of people might not have guessed this, so some

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Speaker 1: people probably already know the story. Uh. The creation of Tetris,

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Speaker 1: strangely enough, takes place in a nineteen eighties Soviet computing

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Speaker 1: lab in Moscow with a slightly board artificial intelligence researcher

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Speaker 1: discovering the ancient secret of Tetris under the ruse of

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Speaker 1: testing computer hardware capabilities um so. The the creator of

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Speaker 1: Tetris is named Alexei Petnov, and he was a computer

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Speaker 1: programmer and artificial intelligence researcher working for the Academy of

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Speaker 1: Science of the USSR SO the Soviet Union Zone Academy

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Speaker 1: of Science. And he was working in a lab that

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Speaker 1: would occasionally be sent a new piece of computer hardware,

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Speaker 1: and in this case, in the case of Tetris, they

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Speaker 1: were sent this thing called the Electronica sixty. It sounds fancy, yeah, wonderful,

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Speaker 1: And a part of paget knobs duties would be to

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Speaker 1: create software to run on the new computers of the

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Speaker 1: new hardware they're being sent in order to test what

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Speaker 1: it was capable of, so to say like, oh, okay, yeah,

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Speaker 1: this this computer is fine because it can run this

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Speaker 1: demanding piece of software. A okay. So in in paget

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Speaker 1: Knov's own words, this became his quote excuse for making games,

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Speaker 1: which I mean, that's gonna be a pretty cool job

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Speaker 1: comparatively in the Soviet Union. In oh yeah, I mean,

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Speaker 1: that's a pretty great situation anywhere where you find the

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Speaker 1: way to make your job even more engaging, or make

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Speaker 1: it engaging to begin with, without actually just completely knocking

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Speaker 1: off and doing your own thing. Right. So, paget Knobs

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Speaker 1: in this lab testing the electronic of sixty, and what

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Speaker 1: he comes up with to test it is Tetris. Tetris

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Speaker 1: is one of these games he creates. And I don't

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Speaker 1: know to what extent we really try to describe Tetris,

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Speaker 1: because I feel like almost everybody who's going to be

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Speaker 1: listening to this has seen Tetris. If you haven't, you

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Speaker 1: should go watch a video of somebody playing Tetris on YouTube.

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Speaker 1: Any number of official Tetris or Tetris knockoff versions that

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Speaker 1: you can just play online. Yeah, I found a free website.

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Speaker 1: I don't know if this is legal, it's probably not, actually,

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Speaker 1: but I found a website that has an emulator that

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Speaker 1: will emulate the any S version of Tetris that's in browser.

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Speaker 1: And it's pretty great at the any S version. I

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Speaker 1: really like the graphics. Yeah, yeah, it was a great

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Speaker 1: use of the you know, simple graphics to deliver the

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Speaker 1: Tetris experience. Though I do still prefer the music from

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Speaker 1: the game Boy version, but danswer the sugar plumb Ferry

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Speaker 1: is good to either way. You should you should play

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Speaker 1: Tetris a little get in the mood for this episode. Uh,

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Speaker 1: you can pause right here and go do that and

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Speaker 1: come back if you like otherwise we will continue. But basically,

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Speaker 1: what Tetris is is you've got seven blocks of different

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Speaker 1: shapes and these are the tetrominos that we were talking

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Speaker 1: about earlier, and they fall from the top of the

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Speaker 1: screen towards the bottom of the screen on a little

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Speaker 1: playing area, and the player can move the blocks around

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Speaker 1: left to right and can rotate them in increments of

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Speaker 1: ninety degrees, so you can flip the piece and you

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Speaker 1: can move it side to side. But what you can't

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Speaker 1: do is stop it from falling. There's the inexorable creep

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Speaker 1: towards the bottom of the screen. And so what the

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Speaker 1: player does is arranged the blocks to form and then

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Speaker 1: clear solid horizontal lines. Oh yeah, that's satisfying moment where

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Speaker 1: you have blocks all the way across a single line

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Speaker 1: and then that that line just vanishes. Yeah, And so

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Speaker 1: if the blocks stack up all the way to the

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Speaker 1: top of the screen, the game is over. Interestingly enough,

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Speaker 1: Paget and have said that originally the lines did not

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Speaker 1: clear in the version of the game he was making,

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Speaker 1: that you would just try to stack them, but he

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Speaker 1: found that the screen filled up too quick. You know,

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Speaker 1: you'd make these stacked rows and eventually it reached the

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Speaker 1: top of the screen. So then he came up with

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Speaker 1: the idea of every time you created a solid row,

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Speaker 1: having it van ish and and just turn into magical

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00:21:02,040 --> 00:21:06,080
Speaker 1: abstract points. Then I think that's interesting because it you

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Speaker 1: can see the roots of the recreational mathematical puzzle there, right,

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Speaker 1: because you wouldn't have um that much space if you

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Speaker 1: were just throwing this out on a sheet of paper.

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Speaker 1: Yeah yeah. So if if the blocks stack up all

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Speaker 1: the way to the top of the screen, of course

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Speaker 1: games over that that's your death in the game terms.

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Speaker 1: And as the game goes on, the blocks begin to

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Speaker 1: fall faster and faster, which of course makes it harder

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Speaker 1: to fit them in as time goes on, and eventually

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Speaker 1: in most versions of the game, you get to something

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Speaker 1: that the players would call a kill screen or a

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Speaker 1: death screen, which is in the any S version at

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Speaker 1: least level twenty nine, or the transition between level twenty

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Speaker 1: nine and thirty, where the blocks just fall so fast

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Speaker 1: it's impossible to play anymore. You cannot continue though. Actually,

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Speaker 1: before we did this episode, I watched a documentary called

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Speaker 1: The Ecstasy of Order about tetris Cha ampiends that, which

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00:22:01,080 --> 00:22:03,040
Speaker 1: I recommend if if you'll at home, want to watch

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00:22:03,080 --> 00:22:05,359
Speaker 1: it. It It was really interesting and there are a couple

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Speaker 1: of players who do manage to get to level thirty.

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Speaker 1: In it, it's a very brief, fleeting victory. Does it

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Speaker 1: so that the game itself does not stop and say, hey,

401
00:22:13,840 --> 00:22:16,240
Speaker 1: you've won Tetris, but you've merely you've made it to

402
00:22:16,560 --> 00:22:20,600
Speaker 1: a threshold of survivability that no one else has reached.

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Speaker 1: With a vast majority of players know, it's not like

404
00:22:23,280 --> 00:22:26,520
Speaker 1: you've won. You've still died. You've just died a little

405
00:22:26,560 --> 00:22:30,200
Speaker 1: bit farther along the track the trail than anybody else

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Speaker 1: has gone before. And that's an interesting thing about Tetris too.

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Speaker 1: You can never win. There is no winning, there's only

408
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Speaker 1: getting farther before you die, which makes Tetris a lot

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Speaker 1: like life. It is, yeah, and been probably a good

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00:22:44,320 --> 00:22:48,199
Speaker 1: lesson for a young gamer to encounter, where you especially

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Speaker 1: if you're up against the impossibility of mission impossible, where

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Speaker 1: there's just no getting to the end of it and

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Speaker 1: you just feel constantly like the metal gear these dogs stop. Well,

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Speaker 1: now I'll play Tetris. It's like the experience of the

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00:23:00,119 --> 00:23:02,520
Speaker 1: game is you're never gonna get your money's worth out

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00:23:02,520 --> 00:23:04,919
Speaker 1: of that game because you're not getting to the end

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00:23:04,920 --> 00:23:06,520
Speaker 1: of it, to the narrative end of the game. But

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00:23:06,560 --> 00:23:09,119
Speaker 1: there is no narrative in Tetris other than the simple

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00:23:09,200 --> 00:23:12,440
Speaker 1: narrative of shapes coming at you that are stacked them

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00:23:12,640 --> 00:23:15,320
Speaker 1: and try to stave off the inevitable. Yeah, so what

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00:23:15,480 --> 00:23:19,159
Speaker 1: happened when Alexey Pajitnov made this game? So? He claimed

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Speaker 1: he was inspired by his love of puzzle games like

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Speaker 1: pin Tominoes, the ones that we're talking about before, and

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00:23:25,119 --> 00:23:28,400
Speaker 1: he he came up with the mechanics of Tetris with

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Speaker 1: pent tominoes in mind, but then he decided to go

426
00:23:31,240 --> 00:23:35,040
Speaker 1: with tetrauminos to simplify things, basically, to make the game simpler.

427
00:23:35,720 --> 00:23:38,840
Speaker 1: Uh fun fact, since the Electronica sixty that he was

428
00:23:38,960 --> 00:23:41,920
Speaker 1: using had very little in the way of graphical capabilities,

429
00:23:42,080 --> 00:23:45,440
Speaker 1: the original shapes were made out of text characters. I

430
00:23:45,440 --> 00:23:48,359
Speaker 1: think there were brackets, so that would make sense. So

431
00:23:48,480 --> 00:23:51,040
Speaker 1: falling shapes made out of brackets. I do want to

432
00:23:51,080 --> 00:23:53,800
Speaker 1: throw in that there there are plenty of other knockoffs

433
00:23:53,800 --> 00:23:55,600
Speaker 1: of Tetris out there, and apparently some of them do

434
00:23:55,800 --> 00:23:59,800
Speaker 1: use pin tominos rather than tetrauminose. Oh dude. In preparing

435
00:23:59,840 --> 00:24:02,520
Speaker 1: for this episode, I played one. There's one online called

436
00:24:02,560 --> 00:24:06,720
Speaker 1: pent Trist that uses not pent Trist but but pent

437
00:24:06,760 --> 00:24:11,119
Speaker 1: Trists like Tetris, and it uses pin tominoes, and at

438
00:24:11,160 --> 00:24:13,320
Speaker 1: least in the time I played it, it was significantly

439
00:24:13,359 --> 00:24:16,240
Speaker 1: harder than Tetris. Yeah, yeah, I imagine it would be

440
00:24:16,359 --> 00:24:19,280
Speaker 1: just one more piece. Likewise, if you were to play

441
00:24:19,280 --> 00:24:22,920
Speaker 1: Tetris with simpler shapes, I imagine it would the game

442
00:24:22,960 --> 00:24:24,800
Speaker 1: would fall apart too easily, Like what if you were

443
00:24:24,800 --> 00:24:27,359
Speaker 1: playing them with dominoes, that would be that would just

444
00:24:27,440 --> 00:24:30,800
Speaker 1: be base level, way too easy, to the point if

445
00:24:30,800 --> 00:24:33,080
Speaker 1: you would get bored out it almost immediately. Yeah, I

446
00:24:33,080 --> 00:24:36,440
Speaker 1: think four really is the perfect number. I I will

447
00:24:36,560 --> 00:24:42,000
Speaker 1: argue very strongly in that in that propositions defense. But anyway,

448
00:24:42,200 --> 00:24:45,119
Speaker 1: pactually not recounts to The Guardian where he told his

449
00:24:45,119 --> 00:24:47,679
Speaker 1: own story about this. He says, quote, I pretended I

450
00:24:47,720 --> 00:24:51,640
Speaker 1: was debugging my program, but in truth I just couldn't

451
00:24:51,640 --> 00:24:54,920
Speaker 1: stop playing it. When other people tried it, they couldn't either.

452
00:24:55,280 --> 00:24:58,399
Speaker 1: It was so abstract that was its great quality. It

453
00:24:58,440 --> 00:25:01,679
Speaker 1: appealed to everybody. And I think this may be something

454
00:25:01,680 --> 00:25:05,280
Speaker 1: about why so many people can get into Tetris, even

455
00:25:05,320 --> 00:25:07,920
Speaker 1: people who don't usually play video games. They can pick

456
00:25:08,000 --> 00:25:11,840
Speaker 1: up Tetris and immediately feel at home and intrigued. And

457
00:25:12,240 --> 00:25:14,320
Speaker 1: I think it has something to do with the lack

458
00:25:14,400 --> 00:25:19,639
Speaker 1: of representational nature of it. It's like geometrical art you

459
00:25:19,720 --> 00:25:22,280
Speaker 1: might see in a mosque or something. You know, it's

460
00:25:22,320 --> 00:25:27,840
Speaker 1: like it doesn't have characters or familiar objects. It's just

461
00:25:28,119 --> 00:25:34,480
Speaker 1: shapes and space and time and movement. Utterly universal. Yeah, yeah,

462
00:25:34,520 --> 00:25:40,360
Speaker 1: completely devoid of any dependency on on its as similarity

463
00:25:40,440 --> 00:25:44,920
Speaker 1: to a real world scenario. It's completely in its own universe. Yeah.

464
00:25:45,000 --> 00:25:48,800
Speaker 1: So what happens when you create an amazing and addictive

465
00:25:48,840 --> 00:25:53,520
Speaker 1: game while employed by the Soviet Union, Well that was

466
00:25:53,560 --> 00:25:55,919
Speaker 1: an interesting question for peasant Nov and he kind of

467
00:25:55,920 --> 00:25:58,600
Speaker 1: feared what would happen if he tried to make money

468
00:25:58,680 --> 00:26:01,080
Speaker 1: off of his game. So the game started getting passed

469
00:26:01,119 --> 00:26:04,680
Speaker 1: around from place to place. In in Russia, there were

470
00:26:04,760 --> 00:26:09,280
Speaker 1: floppy disks of it that people were taking two different workplaces,

471
00:26:09,320 --> 00:26:11,280
Speaker 1: and then everybody would get addicted to it and not

472
00:26:11,359 --> 00:26:14,520
Speaker 1: do their jobs, so it sort of posed a problem.

473
00:26:14,560 --> 00:26:18,160
Speaker 1: Eventually it made its way to Hungary, and then from

474
00:26:18,280 --> 00:26:21,000
Speaker 1: Hungary it made its way to the rest of Europe,

475
00:26:21,119 --> 00:26:25,200
Speaker 1: the United States, Japan, and the whole world. Um. But

476
00:26:25,560 --> 00:26:29,480
Speaker 1: for for ten years, Paget Knobs seeded the game rights

477
00:26:29,520 --> 00:26:32,439
Speaker 1: to the government to the Soviet Union, and so he

478
00:26:32,480 --> 00:26:35,440
Speaker 1: didn't really see much money from Tetris for a long time.

479
00:26:35,440 --> 00:26:39,120
Speaker 1: But eventually, once that expired, in the nineties he got

480
00:26:39,160 --> 00:26:42,080
Speaker 1: more involved, and uh, I'm not sure if how much

481
00:26:42,080 --> 00:26:45,640
Speaker 1: money he eventually made off of Tetris. I I hope,

482
00:26:45,800 --> 00:26:47,800
Speaker 1: I hope it did well for him. Yeah, I hope

483
00:26:47,800 --> 00:26:50,760
Speaker 1: so too. I certainly remember seeing his name on even

484
00:26:50,760 --> 00:26:54,399
Speaker 1: the ne s because his ties. Your eyes were glued

485
00:26:54,440 --> 00:26:56,600
Speaker 1: to the program and you couldn't help but notice anything

486
00:26:57,119 --> 00:27:01,280
Speaker 1: in the system that resembled the outside world, such as

487
00:27:01,280 --> 00:27:04,159
Speaker 1: such as his name or St. Basil's Cathedral, which was

488
00:27:04,160 --> 00:27:06,880
Speaker 1: on the loading screen. Yeah, or yeah, if you did

489
00:27:06,920 --> 00:27:08,920
Speaker 1: really well in the game, I think you could watch St.

490
00:27:08,960 --> 00:27:13,440
Speaker 1: Basil's Cathedral being launched into space. Goodness, gracious, yes, yes,

491
00:27:13,800 --> 00:27:16,119
Speaker 1: why I haven't thought about that forever. I never really

492
00:27:16,480 --> 00:27:19,600
Speaker 1: understood why that happens, but it was it was it

493
00:27:19,680 --> 00:27:22,760
Speaker 1: the idea that the cathedral is secretly an alien spaceship

494
00:27:22,880 --> 00:27:25,840
Speaker 1: that has been planted on Earth. Then yes, and it

495
00:27:26,000 --> 00:27:28,560
Speaker 1: just it had to use our brain power, the collective

496
00:27:28,600 --> 00:27:33,480
Speaker 1: brain power of a Tetris obsessed planet, to to actually

497
00:27:33,560 --> 00:27:37,440
Speaker 1: launch it back into the stars. Yeah. But so Passion

498
00:27:37,520 --> 00:27:40,880
Speaker 1: now gives a pretty cool perspective on the role Tetris

499
00:27:40,920 --> 00:27:45,000
Speaker 1: played in the early consumer adoption of the computer. Actually,

500
00:27:45,000 --> 00:27:47,840
Speaker 1: he says Tetris came along early and had a very

501
00:27:47,880 --> 00:27:52,040
Speaker 1: important role in breaking down ordinary people's inhibitions in front

502
00:27:52,080 --> 00:27:56,000
Speaker 1: of computers, which were scary objects to non professionals used

503
00:27:56,000 --> 00:27:58,600
Speaker 1: to pen and paper. But the fact that something so

504
00:27:58,640 --> 00:28:02,240
Speaker 1: simple and beautiful could have here on screen destroyed that barrier.

505
00:28:02,960 --> 00:28:05,120
Speaker 1: I like to think that's true. Yeah, yeah, I would

506
00:28:05,160 --> 00:28:07,160
Speaker 1: think so. I mean you think of if you think

507
00:28:07,200 --> 00:28:10,600
Speaker 1: back to early computer games, to some many but not

508
00:28:10,640 --> 00:28:14,159
Speaker 1: all of them, we're a bit abstract looking on the

509
00:28:14,200 --> 00:28:16,000
Speaker 1: screen to the point where I could see them being

510
00:28:16,040 --> 00:28:18,960
Speaker 1: very intimidating. Like I remember as a kid, we were

511
00:28:19,000 --> 00:28:20,480
Speaker 1: at somebody's house and they had at some sort of

512
00:28:20,520 --> 00:28:24,520
Speaker 1: submarine simulation game, and only you really had to use

513
00:28:24,560 --> 00:28:28,760
Speaker 1: your imagination to see the any kind of actual submarine

514
00:28:29,800 --> 00:28:32,439
Speaker 1: uh simulation going on. Yeah, well, I mean have you

515
00:28:32,480 --> 00:28:36,200
Speaker 1: seen any of the old hundred Star Wars games where

516
00:28:36,240 --> 00:28:39,120
Speaker 1: they're trying to represent the characters from Star Wars or

517
00:28:39,160 --> 00:28:41,800
Speaker 1: the ships from Star Wars. But you know they've got

518
00:28:41,800 --> 00:28:44,640
Speaker 1: an a t a t walker like in the Empire

519
00:28:44,680 --> 00:28:50,240
Speaker 1: Strikes Back, and it's just it's a big dog. It's

520
00:28:50,240 --> 00:28:52,800
Speaker 1: like or it's a horse. It's a four legged animal

521
00:28:52,880 --> 00:28:55,760
Speaker 1: of some kind and you're just like some pixels flying

522
00:28:55,760 --> 00:28:58,880
Speaker 1: around shooting at it. And I don't want to criticize

523
00:28:59,560 --> 00:29:03,280
Speaker 1: limited graphics and and the importance of imagination, because some

524
00:29:03,320 --> 00:29:06,960
Speaker 1: of my favorite gaming experiences that had yet uh to

525
00:29:07,000 --> 00:29:09,760
Speaker 1: be equaled by our our heavy graphics age, or some

526
00:29:09,840 --> 00:29:13,320
Speaker 1: of those where you had just enough graphics graph graphical

527
00:29:13,400 --> 00:29:15,400
Speaker 1: detail to give you an idea of what it was

528
00:29:15,400 --> 00:29:17,800
Speaker 1: and the rest was your imagination. So yeah, yeah, that

529
00:29:17,960 --> 00:29:19,920
Speaker 1: that's true. I just think that there's less of a

530
00:29:19,960 --> 00:29:22,960
Speaker 1: gap when you're talking about using limited graphics to do

531
00:29:23,040 --> 00:29:26,040
Speaker 1: something abstract versus to do something that's supposed to be

532
00:29:26,080 --> 00:29:32,040
Speaker 1: representational of images you recognize. But anyway, Tetris after this

533
00:29:32,080 --> 00:29:35,080
Speaker 1: went on to become big business all around the world.

534
00:29:35,200 --> 00:29:38,880
Speaker 1: It was eventually licensed from the Russians by a video

535
00:29:38,880 --> 00:29:42,360
Speaker 1: game licensor named Hank Rogers, which led to what was,

536
00:29:42,600 --> 00:29:45,760
Speaker 1: as I've said, in my opinion, the definitive version of

537
00:29:46,440 --> 00:29:50,160
Speaker 1: Tetris with the definitive music Tetris on the game Boy.

538
00:29:50,320 --> 00:29:53,560
Speaker 1: And so in nineteen nine Nintendo released Tetris for the

539
00:29:53,560 --> 00:29:56,960
Speaker 1: game Boy and the NES and sold millions of copies.

540
00:29:57,440 --> 00:30:01,720
Speaker 1: And then of course in ninet Tetris became the central

541
00:30:01,800 --> 00:30:05,640
Speaker 1: game in the Do you remember these the Nintendo World Championships.

542
00:30:05,840 --> 00:30:08,959
Speaker 1: Oh this was There was the Fred Savage movie The Wizard.

543
00:30:09,280 --> 00:30:12,960
Speaker 1: Uh that I think it was all promotion for that. Yes,

544
00:30:13,040 --> 00:30:15,160
Speaker 1: so tech with Tetris in The Wizard. It's been so

545
00:30:15,320 --> 00:30:18,000
Speaker 1: ungin I've seen you know what, I've never actually seen

546
00:30:18,040 --> 00:30:21,480
Speaker 1: The Wizard. I remember virtually nothing. I think it was

547
00:30:21,120 --> 00:30:23,320
Speaker 1: really Wasn't it just a commercial for the power of

548
00:30:23,440 --> 00:30:27,680
Speaker 1: love pretty much? But this is the perfect game for

549
00:30:27,680 --> 00:30:29,800
Speaker 1: for that kind of scenario, right, because it's a it's

550
00:30:29,920 --> 00:30:34,000
Speaker 1: a test of a true test of skill. Yeah. Absolutely,

551
00:30:34,080 --> 00:30:36,080
Speaker 1: I think it makes perfect sense for this to be

552
00:30:36,280 --> 00:30:40,320
Speaker 1: the central game and a video game competition, because, like

553
00:30:40,360 --> 00:30:44,480
Speaker 1: I say, it's so universal, it feels so core, so ancient.

554
00:30:44,560 --> 00:30:49,480
Speaker 1: It's like the ultimate game, and there's something about playing

555
00:30:49,560 --> 00:30:53,360
Speaker 1: Tetris that is so inherently human. One of the things, Uh.

556
00:30:53,600 --> 00:30:57,160
Speaker 1: An interesting fact I came across about Tetris is that

557
00:30:57,440 --> 00:31:03,040
Speaker 1: Tetris is considered, it's in computational theory, a hard problem.

558
00:31:03,080 --> 00:31:07,520
Speaker 1: It's considered MP complete, meaning that even a computer cannot

559
00:31:07,600 --> 00:31:11,560
Speaker 1: play perfect Tetris. You can't write a computer program that

560
00:31:11,720 --> 00:31:15,840
Speaker 1: automatically optimizes Tetris moves and always makes the best move

561
00:31:15,880 --> 00:31:19,760
Speaker 1: because there is no known strategy for always determining the

562
00:31:19,760 --> 00:31:22,080
Speaker 1: optimal move. And this is not the case for a

563
00:31:22,120 --> 00:31:25,240
Speaker 1: lot of games. There are games like Connect four or

564
00:31:25,680 --> 00:31:28,719
Speaker 1: you know, plenty of other puzzle games where there is

565
00:31:28,880 --> 00:31:31,880
Speaker 1: inherently a best move you can make that you know

566
00:31:32,200 --> 00:31:35,520
Speaker 1: logic times. Humans might not have enough computational ability to

567
00:31:35,600 --> 00:31:38,160
Speaker 1: know what it is, but a computer can know. Yeah,

568
00:31:38,160 --> 00:31:40,040
Speaker 1: I think we can all relate to that in front

569
00:31:40,040 --> 00:31:42,560
Speaker 1: of Tetris playing experience, because you start off with a

570
00:31:42,600 --> 00:31:45,600
Speaker 1: definite strategy in mind. Generally you want to build it

571
00:31:45,680 --> 00:31:48,400
Speaker 1: up so that you can shoot down a vertical um

572
00:31:48,800 --> 00:31:51,800
Speaker 1: tetramino and just clear four rows at once, and then

573
00:31:51,800 --> 00:31:53,760
Speaker 1: do that again, do that as many times as you can,

574
00:31:54,000 --> 00:31:55,960
Speaker 1: but you're going to reach that point where that's no

575
00:31:56,040 --> 00:31:59,040
Speaker 1: longer an option. Where each shape, each new shape as

576
00:31:59,080 --> 00:32:01,000
Speaker 1: it comes and maybe you have the preview box that

577
00:32:01,040 --> 00:32:02,360
Speaker 1: tells you what the next one is going to be.

578
00:32:02,640 --> 00:32:04,680
Speaker 1: You can try and crunch that data as well, but

579
00:32:04,800 --> 00:32:08,520
Speaker 1: it's very much a real time problem from from block

580
00:32:08,560 --> 00:32:12,000
Speaker 1: to block. Yeah. Yeah, the preview boxes actually, I think

581
00:32:12,040 --> 00:32:14,680
Speaker 1: a really important part of Tetris strategy. I don't know

582
00:32:14,720 --> 00:32:17,000
Speaker 1: if I mentioned that when I was describing Tetris earlier.

583
00:32:17,080 --> 00:32:19,880
Speaker 1: I mean, you've played Tetris, you know. But the big

584
00:32:19,920 --> 00:32:22,400
Speaker 1: thing about Tetris strategy is it will show you not

585
00:32:22,520 --> 00:32:25,040
Speaker 1: just the block that's currently falling, but what the next

586
00:32:25,080 --> 00:32:28,520
Speaker 1: block up is. But after that, it's a big mystery.

587
00:32:29,040 --> 00:32:32,480
Speaker 1: And and even the computer can't solve this problem. There

588
00:32:32,600 --> 00:32:35,880
Speaker 1: is no computer that that can solve Tetris. It's a

589
00:32:36,040 --> 00:32:41,000
Speaker 1: it's a mystery. It's an ancient mystery. I insist it is. Okay,

590
00:32:41,040 --> 00:32:44,080
Speaker 1: So in this episode, we're eventually going to talk about

591
00:32:44,120 --> 00:32:48,320
Speaker 1: the neurological effects of Tetris on the human brain, the

592
00:32:48,520 --> 00:32:51,840
Speaker 1: sort of the psychology and neurology of Tetris. But before

593
00:32:51,880 --> 00:32:53,640
Speaker 1: we get into that, we got to mention one more

594
00:32:53,680 --> 00:32:56,280
Speaker 1: thing about Tetris and culture, which is all of the

595
00:32:56,280 --> 00:33:00,560
Speaker 1: wonderful Tetris knockoffs that have that have come from this game. Because,

596
00:33:00,600 --> 00:33:03,000
Speaker 1: like anything that sells millions and millions of copies and

597
00:33:03,040 --> 00:33:07,280
Speaker 1: becomes a phenomenon, uh, like Tetris, you're gonna see other

598
00:33:07,320 --> 00:33:09,200
Speaker 1: people wanted to get in on the on the action,

599
00:33:09,560 --> 00:33:11,719
Speaker 1: uh and put their own particular spin on it. And

600
00:33:11,880 --> 00:33:14,960
Speaker 1: a lot of many of them are great. They're perfectly serviceable,

601
00:33:15,000 --> 00:33:18,160
Speaker 1: they're just complete rip offs. Sometimes they try and add

602
00:33:18,200 --> 00:33:21,040
Speaker 1: their own thing, like trying to use a different polyomino

603
00:33:21,200 --> 00:33:24,400
Speaker 1: in order in order to spice things up. But one

604
00:33:24,400 --> 00:33:28,239
Speaker 1: of my favorites is just pure fluff on top of

605
00:33:28,480 --> 00:33:33,560
Speaker 1: a traditional Tetris game, and that's the release Monty Python

606
00:33:33,720 --> 00:33:36,000
Speaker 1: and the Quest for the Holy Grail, a PC game

607
00:33:36,040 --> 00:33:40,080
Speaker 1: which included a Tetris mini game called drop Dead that

608
00:33:40,200 --> 00:33:45,240
Speaker 1: involved fabulously throwing plague victims into a mass grave. So

609
00:33:45,240 --> 00:33:49,440
Speaker 1: so they were shaped, Yes, each tetromino is shaped like

610
00:33:49,760 --> 00:33:53,280
Speaker 1: a medieval peasant, and sometimes their body has been you know,

611
00:33:53,440 --> 00:33:56,360
Speaker 1: this way or that, or they're just completely uh straight,

612
00:33:56,480 --> 00:33:58,920
Speaker 1: but you're throw you're throwing those into the mass grave

613
00:33:59,360 --> 00:34:02,800
Speaker 1: and the bodies keep piling up and they're falling fast

614
00:34:03,000 --> 00:34:05,719
Speaker 1: like any kind of a Tetris game, with the added

615
00:34:05,760 --> 00:34:10,360
Speaker 1: feature that sometimes one isn't quite dead yet and makes

616
00:34:10,760 --> 00:34:14,480
Speaker 1: it makes moving it around more challenging because it's fighting

617
00:34:14,520 --> 00:34:17,279
Speaker 1: back and trying to to wiggle free, and you just

618
00:34:17,280 --> 00:34:19,239
Speaker 1: want to throw as many bodies into the mass grave

619
00:34:19,360 --> 00:34:21,879
Speaker 1: as possible. Right, Yeah, you got a job to do. Yeah,

620
00:34:21,920 --> 00:34:25,640
Speaker 1: So that's that's the best I've I've ever seen. Um,

621
00:34:25,840 --> 00:34:29,239
Speaker 1: you there have been various other attempts to spice it up.

622
00:34:29,280 --> 00:34:32,839
Speaker 1: There was a particularly there's a two thousand four mini

623
00:34:32,880 --> 00:34:35,919
Speaker 1: game in Mortal Kombat Deception. Oh man, they're still making

624
00:34:35,960 --> 00:34:38,839
Speaker 1: Mortal Kombat games in two thousand four. Yeah, they still

625
00:34:38,840 --> 00:34:41,680
Speaker 1: make them today, I guess. Yeah. In Mortal Kombat X

626
00:34:41,760 --> 00:34:44,000
Speaker 1: just came out. I don't think. I don't think everyone

627
00:34:44,120 --> 00:34:47,759
Speaker 1: beyond Mortal Kombat three in the arcade game version, well

628
00:34:47,880 --> 00:34:50,640
Speaker 1: there was you know, four was kind of a I think,

629
00:34:50,640 --> 00:34:52,799
Speaker 1: a dark point for a lot of people. But I

630
00:34:52,840 --> 00:34:54,479
Speaker 1: know that they put up They put out some great

631
00:34:54,480 --> 00:34:58,319
Speaker 1: games in recent times. But the Tetris mini game in

632
00:34:58,360 --> 00:35:01,920
Speaker 1: two thousand four was not actually so great. It was

633
00:35:02,000 --> 00:35:05,400
Speaker 1: just like typical Tetris with some little bobble head Mortal

634
00:35:05,440 --> 00:35:08,440
Speaker 1: Kombat characters. I think they would have been far better

635
00:35:08,480 --> 00:35:11,360
Speaker 1: off just ripping off Monty Python's take on it and

636
00:35:11,520 --> 00:35:14,879
Speaker 1: just have you know, dead monks and ninjas falling into

637
00:35:14,880 --> 00:35:18,440
Speaker 1: a pit. Yeah, so, uh, Katana's out there doing finishing

638
00:35:18,480 --> 00:35:21,360
Speaker 1: moves on people and throwing all their dead body parts

639
00:35:21,400 --> 00:35:23,360
Speaker 1: into the I can see that. But they were probably

640
00:35:23,520 --> 00:35:25,919
Speaker 1: you know, pressed for time, so that seems like they've

641
00:35:25,960 --> 00:35:32,040
Speaker 1: got just violent variations on Tetris basically. Yeah, but then

642
00:35:32,080 --> 00:35:35,400
Speaker 1: there's also the sexy take, and I'm gonna leave you,

643
00:35:35,600 --> 00:35:37,840
Speaker 1: the listener to explore this more on your own. I

644
00:35:37,880 --> 00:35:40,960
Speaker 1: don't know if there's a definitive sexy Tetris, but it

645
00:35:40,960 --> 00:35:46,120
Speaker 1: looks like they're various scenarios that involve humanoid tetraumino's interlocking

646
00:35:46,680 --> 00:35:52,840
Speaker 1: with each other. So it seems inherently disturbing, like stacking sex.

647
00:35:53,120 --> 00:35:56,760
Speaker 1: I guess, you know, kind of a Kama Sutra um

648
00:35:56,960 --> 00:36:00,279
Speaker 1: group sex take on Tetris. It's out there if you

649
00:36:00,280 --> 00:36:02,839
Speaker 1: want to explore it. Uh. And then I think they

650
00:36:02,880 --> 00:36:07,480
Speaker 1: also just have Tetris with a backdrop of a naked

651
00:36:07,480 --> 00:36:10,919
Speaker 1: person or something, so that exists as well. Uh, an

652
00:36:10,920 --> 00:36:14,440
Speaker 1: interesting attempt to put some sort of fluff on top

653
00:36:14,560 --> 00:36:17,360
Speaker 1: of this most perfect game. You don't need that. That

654
00:36:17,440 --> 00:36:20,319
Speaker 1: would be distracting. It's Tetris, That's what I'm thinking. I mean,

655
00:36:20,960 --> 00:36:23,320
Speaker 1: why are you trying to mess with Tetris. Yeah, it

656
00:36:23,360 --> 00:36:25,239
Speaker 1: seems like you would have only that's the kind of

657
00:36:25,800 --> 00:36:28,000
Speaker 1: game you would only play for a few minutes and

658
00:36:28,000 --> 00:36:29,880
Speaker 1: go like ha ha, that's clever, or oh that's not

659
00:36:29,920 --> 00:36:32,200
Speaker 1: really clever, and then you'd move back to just playing

660
00:36:32,239 --> 00:36:35,360
Speaker 1: pure tetris right. One of the Tetris arcade games I

661
00:36:35,400 --> 00:36:38,200
Speaker 1: saw in the in the documentary I was talking about earlier,

662
00:36:38,200 --> 00:36:41,759
Speaker 1: the Ecstasy of Order is invisible Tetris. I didn't know

663
00:36:41,800 --> 00:36:44,319
Speaker 1: about this before, but that's where you can only see

664
00:36:44,360 --> 00:36:47,440
Speaker 1: the blocks while they're falling, but once they land, they

665
00:36:47,480 --> 00:36:50,759
Speaker 1: become invisible. I can't even imagine trying to play that.

666
00:36:50,760 --> 00:36:53,920
Speaker 1: That sounds really frustratingly hard. I would again, I'd rather

667
00:36:53,960 --> 00:36:56,160
Speaker 1: just play regular Tetris, and of course would be remiss

668
00:36:56,160 --> 00:36:58,000
Speaker 1: if we didn't mention the various three D forms of

669
00:36:58,040 --> 00:37:00,440
Speaker 1: Tetris that have come out where you're using three natural

670
00:37:00,800 --> 00:37:04,400
Speaker 1: tetrominos and trying to assemble them. And I played those before.

671
00:37:04,480 --> 00:37:08,319
Speaker 1: Those those I feel like those are also fun for

672
00:37:08,360 --> 00:37:10,080
Speaker 1: a limited amount of time, and then you want to

673
00:37:10,080 --> 00:37:13,279
Speaker 1: go back to good old two dimensional Tetris. We keep

674
00:37:13,320 --> 00:37:15,960
Speaker 1: saying Texas instead of Tetris. It makes me think that

675
00:37:16,000 --> 00:37:20,640
Speaker 1: there should be a geographical representations or like you know,

676
00:37:20,840 --> 00:37:25,600
Speaker 1: U S States represented as as as square block formations

677
00:37:25,640 --> 00:37:28,640
Speaker 1: that you try to fit together. Yeah, yeah, the United

678
00:37:28,680 --> 00:37:31,640
Speaker 1: States as an assembl at Like, how does t see

679
00:37:31,680 --> 00:37:35,120
Speaker 1: fit into Texas? I guess you couldn't do it proportionally

680
00:37:35,160 --> 00:37:37,440
Speaker 1: because every time in Alaska fell, the game would just

681
00:37:37,440 --> 00:37:42,399
Speaker 1: be over. But we should take a break to hear

682
00:37:42,440 --> 00:37:44,600
Speaker 1: from our sponsor, and then when we come back, we're

683
00:37:44,600 --> 00:37:49,000
Speaker 1: going to talk about some of the brain science of Tetris.

684
00:37:49,000 --> 00:37:51,360
Speaker 1: Some of the science has been done on how Tetris

685
00:37:51,400 --> 00:38:03,160
Speaker 1: affects our minds. Hey, we're back, So it is time

686
00:38:03,200 --> 00:38:06,239
Speaker 1: to talk about something that has been called in the

687
00:38:06,280 --> 00:38:10,719
Speaker 1: media the Tetris effect or Tetris syndrome, which I like

688
00:38:10,800 --> 00:38:13,879
Speaker 1: that one even more because it has a slightly nefarious

689
00:38:13,920 --> 00:38:16,479
Speaker 1: air to it. Yeah, so I have talked about how

690
00:38:16,520 --> 00:38:20,000
Speaker 1: I think Tetris is an ancient mystery. But have you

691
00:38:20,040 --> 00:38:24,279
Speaker 1: ever noticed how the six rectangular pains on each half

692
00:38:24,320 --> 00:38:27,280
Speaker 1: of a home window can form all of the Tetris

693
00:38:27,280 --> 00:38:31,440
Speaker 1: blocks except, of course, the most beautiful and most cherished

694
00:38:31,440 --> 00:38:34,600
Speaker 1: of all blocks, the long bar, But all the other blocks.

695
00:38:34,640 --> 00:38:37,440
Speaker 1: You know, you you've got the six pains arranged in

696
00:38:37,920 --> 00:38:40,520
Speaker 1: the two by three formation. You can make the T,

697
00:38:41,400 --> 00:38:44,080
Speaker 1: you can make the L, you can make the S

698
00:38:44,080 --> 00:38:47,280
Speaker 1: and the Z and the square. And how the corners

699
00:38:47,280 --> 00:38:49,440
Speaker 1: of the coffee table in your house are kind of

700
00:38:49,480 --> 00:38:52,200
Speaker 1: like L blocks, which just fits so nicely against the

701
00:38:52,239 --> 00:38:55,720
Speaker 1: square block. That really is the essence of this foot rest.

702
00:38:56,880 --> 00:39:00,640
Speaker 1: And really, when droplets of water be together on a

703
00:39:00,760 --> 00:39:03,920
Speaker 1: rain splashed window and eventually flow away, it really is

704
00:39:03,920 --> 00:39:06,720
Speaker 1: a lot like how the stacks of blocks flow away

705
00:39:06,719 --> 00:39:10,960
Speaker 1: from viewing Tetris once you've completed four solid lines. And

706
00:39:11,000 --> 00:39:13,600
Speaker 1: then of course you begin to see how the Tetris

707
00:39:13,640 --> 00:39:16,799
Speaker 1: blocks do come creeping down from the darkness at night

708
00:39:16,880 --> 00:39:19,399
Speaker 1: when you lie in bed, and they follow you into

709
00:39:19,440 --> 00:39:22,200
Speaker 1: your dreams. And how I'm going to stop you there, Joe,

710
00:39:22,280 --> 00:39:26,279
Speaker 1: because this sounds like, if not Tetris syndrome or the

711
00:39:26,280 --> 00:39:29,959
Speaker 1: Tetris effect, perhaps even Tatris madness, all blown Tetris madness. Yeah,

712
00:39:29,960 --> 00:39:34,759
Speaker 1: this is what most people have described as the Tetris effect. It's,

713
00:39:34,760 --> 00:39:39,680
Speaker 1: in short, when Tetris players have dreams or mild hallucinations

714
00:39:39,719 --> 00:39:42,880
Speaker 1: about the game, the mechanics and visual aesthetic of the

715
00:39:42,920 --> 00:39:47,160
Speaker 1: game follow you beyond the gameplay itself into your life.

716
00:39:47,239 --> 00:39:50,960
Speaker 1: You see Tetris in the world, you hallucinate blocks and

717
00:39:51,000 --> 00:39:53,759
Speaker 1: places where they're not, and you dream about them as

718
00:39:53,760 --> 00:39:57,080
Speaker 1: you're falling asleep at night. I definitely remember this from

719
00:39:57,120 --> 00:40:00,400
Speaker 1: that Christmas that we got Tetris playing it for certain

720
00:40:00,520 --> 00:40:04,239
Speaker 1: a number of hours, and then afterwards you close your

721
00:40:04,239 --> 00:40:06,880
Speaker 1: eyes and then against the darkness, you see the blocks falling.

722
00:40:07,080 --> 00:40:08,400
Speaker 1: And then you're trying to sleep at night and you

723
00:40:08,440 --> 00:40:10,600
Speaker 1: see the blocks following, and you're dreaming and the blocks

724
00:40:10,600 --> 00:40:14,680
Speaker 1: are still falling. And it was never frightening, but it

725
00:40:14,760 --> 00:40:17,879
Speaker 1: was just it was like unlike anything I'd experienced before.

726
00:40:17,920 --> 00:40:22,960
Speaker 1: It was essentially a paranormal experience, uh, but but one

727
00:40:23,000 --> 00:40:27,640
Speaker 1: that was so abstract, so so without narrative. It wasn't

728
00:40:27,680 --> 00:40:29,960
Speaker 1: like I was seeing space, aliens or anything. You were

729
00:40:29,960 --> 00:40:34,680
Speaker 1: just seeing the pure geometric wonder of Tetris playing through

730
00:40:34,719 --> 00:40:37,880
Speaker 1: your your vision, you know. I looked up online to

731
00:40:37,960 --> 00:40:41,399
Speaker 1: see if this had happened with any other games, and

732
00:40:41,520 --> 00:40:43,480
Speaker 1: it certainly has, I think, maybe not to the same

733
00:40:43,520 --> 00:40:46,960
Speaker 1: extent as Tetris. But I google the Minecraft to hallucinations.

734
00:40:46,960 --> 00:40:50,040
Speaker 1: I've never played Minecraft, but I just wanted to see

735
00:40:50,080 --> 00:40:51,960
Speaker 1: what you'd come up with, and oh yeah, I found

736
00:40:52,000 --> 00:40:57,080
Speaker 1: some Yahoo q and Yahoo answers and some forum threads

737
00:40:57,080 --> 00:41:01,560
Speaker 1: where people are like, I'm I'm dreaming about things from Minecraft,

738
00:41:01,640 --> 00:41:05,560
Speaker 1: and I'm seeing Minecraft blocks all over the place. This

739
00:41:05,640 --> 00:41:08,440
Speaker 1: does seem to be a way in which our brains

740
00:41:08,520 --> 00:41:14,759
Speaker 1: are susceptible to visuospatial tasks or images that we have

741
00:41:14,880 --> 00:41:19,319
Speaker 1: to manipulate in a virtual world, especially in something as

742
00:41:19,400 --> 00:41:24,520
Speaker 1: addictive and engrossing as Tetris. And this has been reported

743
00:41:24,560 --> 00:41:27,200
Speaker 1: on for a while now. The earliest reference I can

744
00:41:27,320 --> 00:41:32,239
Speaker 1: find to the term the Tetris effect. Uh, and this

745
00:41:32,280 --> 00:41:34,719
Speaker 1: seems to be most people say that this is the

746
00:41:34,760 --> 00:41:38,960
Speaker 1: first time the term appears is a n article called

747
00:41:39,120 --> 00:41:43,600
Speaker 1: this is Your Brain on Tetris from Wired. Yes, great article.

748
00:41:43,640 --> 00:41:46,160
Speaker 1: It's still off online, you can still access it. Yeah.

749
00:41:46,200 --> 00:41:49,200
Speaker 1: So it was written by Jeffrey Goldsmith. And if you're

750
00:41:49,200 --> 00:41:51,600
Speaker 1: too young to remember the this is your Brain on

751
00:41:51,680 --> 00:41:55,280
Speaker 1: Drugs commercials And I don't know how widespread that reference

752
00:41:55,280 --> 00:41:58,000
Speaker 1: point is anymore. Uh, it was, well, it was one

753
00:41:58,000 --> 00:42:00,840
Speaker 1: of the most charming touchstones in the nineteen He's propaganda,

754
00:42:00,920 --> 00:42:04,239
Speaker 1: Ward's narcotics. But Guy's got an egg. He holds up

755
00:42:04,239 --> 00:42:06,920
Speaker 1: the egg, he says, this is your brain. He cracks it,

756
00:42:07,000 --> 00:42:09,239
Speaker 1: drops it in a pan, pries it says, this is

757
00:42:09,239 --> 00:42:14,439
Speaker 1: your brain on drugs. Yeah. Great, great marketing. Uh, but

758
00:42:14,440 --> 00:42:16,960
Speaker 1: but the the effectiveness of that marketing is a is

759
00:42:17,000 --> 00:42:20,200
Speaker 1: a topic unto itself for sure. Yeah. So the obvious

760
00:42:20,239 --> 00:42:23,440
Speaker 1: implication is of Goldsmith's title This is Your Brain on

761
00:42:23,480 --> 00:42:26,560
Speaker 1: Tetris is that he's sort of accusing Tetris of being

762
00:42:26,600 --> 00:42:30,759
Speaker 1: a hallucinogen or some kind of psychotropic agent. Uh. Yet

763
00:42:30,880 --> 00:42:35,160
Speaker 1: he also brings over the associations with addictiveness or compulsive behavior,

764
00:42:35,760 --> 00:42:38,000
Speaker 1: and I would just want to read a quote from

765
00:42:38,120 --> 00:42:42,120
Speaker 1: his article. He says no home was sweet without a

766
00:42:42,160 --> 00:42:45,440
Speaker 1: game boy. In nine that year, I stayed for a

767
00:42:45,480 --> 00:42:48,480
Speaker 1: week with a friend in Tokyo. For a week in

768
00:42:48,600 --> 00:42:53,319
Speaker 1: quotation marks I think meaning longer uh, and tetris enslaved

769
00:42:53,400 --> 00:42:57,280
Speaker 1: my brain at night. Geometric shapes fell in the darkness

770
00:42:57,280 --> 00:42:59,760
Speaker 1: as I lay on the loan to tommy floor space.

771
00:43:00,360 --> 00:43:03,320
Speaker 1: Days I sat on a lavender suede sofa and played

772
00:43:03,360 --> 00:43:07,640
Speaker 1: Tetris furiously. During rare jaunts from the house, I visually

773
00:43:07,719 --> 00:43:11,440
Speaker 1: fit cars and trees and people together, dubiously. Hunting a

774
00:43:11,560 --> 00:43:14,359
Speaker 1: job in a house, I was still there two months later,

775
00:43:14,480 --> 00:43:19,000
Speaker 1: still jobless, still playing my friend. An economists threatened a

776
00:43:19,040 --> 00:43:22,560
Speaker 1: battery deprivation, but he knew my habit ran deep, knew

777
00:43:22,560 --> 00:43:25,520
Speaker 1: that I could always tilt, blinded by sunlight, to a

778
00:43:25,560 --> 00:43:28,680
Speaker 1: convenience store to save face. I would buy a box

779
00:43:28,680 --> 00:43:32,040
Speaker 1: of tiny chocolate filled bears as if double A power

780
00:43:32,080 --> 00:43:36,120
Speaker 1: cells were an afterthought, not the meaning of my wretched life.

781
00:43:36,960 --> 00:43:39,280
Speaker 1: And he also refers to Tetris later in the article

782
00:43:39,280 --> 00:43:43,080
Speaker 1: as an electronic drug or and this is a great term,

783
00:43:43,239 --> 00:43:48,640
Speaker 1: a pharmatronic farmatronic. I like it. I don't know if

784
00:43:48,680 --> 00:43:51,680
Speaker 1: that later appeared in like William Gibson novels or something,

785
00:43:51,719 --> 00:43:55,359
Speaker 1: but it sounds like it should. But anyway. Goldsmith then

786
00:43:55,440 --> 00:43:58,040
Speaker 1: reports on some research we're going to describe in in

787
00:43:58,080 --> 00:44:01,600
Speaker 1: just a minute about what the brain of a Tetris

788
00:44:01,600 --> 00:44:05,640
Speaker 1: player looks like. But the term Tetris effect shows up

789
00:44:05,760 --> 00:44:08,920
Speaker 1: later in his article, where he says the Tetris effect

790
00:44:08,960 --> 00:44:14,279
Speaker 1: is a biochemical reductionistic metaphor, if you will, for curiosity invention.

791
00:44:14,640 --> 00:44:18,759
Speaker 1: The creative urge to fit shapes together is to organize,

792
00:44:18,800 --> 00:44:22,360
Speaker 1: to build, to make deals, to fix, to understand, to

793
00:44:22,560 --> 00:44:26,640
Speaker 1: fold sheets. All of our mental activities are analogous, each

794
00:44:26,680 --> 00:44:30,440
Speaker 1: as potentially addictive as the next. So once again we

795
00:44:30,520 --> 00:44:34,840
Speaker 1: see that Tetris it's a perfect metaphor for just about

796
00:44:34,840 --> 00:44:36,880
Speaker 1: everything we do in our life. Yeah, I mean not

797
00:44:37,160 --> 00:44:42,160
Speaker 1: only just the inevitability of of annihilation, but just the

798
00:44:42,280 --> 00:44:45,480
Speaker 1: it's just our the basic way that we tackle mental tasks.

799
00:44:46,000 --> 00:44:50,479
Speaker 1: It combines the the seeking order effect, like we're trying

800
00:44:50,520 --> 00:44:55,040
Speaker 1: to create solid blocks out of these you know, disordered,

801
00:44:55,239 --> 00:44:59,560
Speaker 1: unfitting shapes, and so we're seeking to create order to

802
00:44:59,600 --> 00:45:02,480
Speaker 1: impose his order on a chaotic universe. But it also

803
00:45:02,640 --> 00:45:07,560
Speaker 1: has the uh, the task clearance type of mechanic that

804
00:45:07,600 --> 00:45:09,920
Speaker 1: we use throughout our daily work lives. You know, you

805
00:45:09,920 --> 00:45:12,600
Speaker 1: have a you have a to do list, and the

806
00:45:12,640 --> 00:45:15,560
Speaker 1: most satisfying part of every day is crossing that thing

807
00:45:15,680 --> 00:45:18,480
Speaker 1: off your to do list, which in Tetris you get

808
00:45:18,520 --> 00:45:20,960
Speaker 1: you get to do constantly. You know, every some number

809
00:45:21,000 --> 00:45:23,960
Speaker 1: of seconds, you clear a line and it disappears, it

810
00:45:24,080 --> 00:45:28,600
Speaker 1: quite literally disappears, and in being crossed automatically off your

811
00:45:28,640 --> 00:45:35,200
Speaker 1: to do list. So it Tetris again mimics life, and

812
00:45:35,280 --> 00:45:38,400
Speaker 1: sometimes life throws some bad blocks at you and you

813
00:45:38,520 --> 00:45:40,879
Speaker 1: just have to accept that they're not going to fit

814
00:45:40,960 --> 00:45:44,480
Speaker 1: into your order. But maybe that next block will help

815
00:45:44,480 --> 00:45:47,960
Speaker 1: you work this one out and it's eventually you'll create

816
00:45:48,040 --> 00:45:50,439
Speaker 1: some sort of order around it. Yeah, I think that's

817
00:45:50,640 --> 00:45:54,960
Speaker 1: entirely true. And if you listen to these professional Tetris players,

818
00:45:54,960 --> 00:45:56,919
Speaker 1: the one who are the ones who get really deep

819
00:45:56,920 --> 00:45:59,879
Speaker 1: into it, you know, they'll they'll talk about the sort

820
00:45:59,880 --> 00:46:04,520
Speaker 1: of the fortune goddess of Tetris, the Tetris god who

821
00:46:04,640 --> 00:46:07,640
Speaker 1: doles out good blocks and bad blocks. And you know,

822
00:46:07,960 --> 00:46:11,600
Speaker 1: to a certain extent, the blocks you get are randomized. Um,

823
00:46:11,880 --> 00:46:14,200
Speaker 1: but they're randomized in a particular way. There's this thing

824
00:46:14,239 --> 00:46:16,479
Speaker 1: referred to as a bag that keeps a certain number

825
00:46:16,520 --> 00:46:18,440
Speaker 1: of blocks in it, and you get you get the

826
00:46:18,440 --> 00:46:22,879
Speaker 1: blocks from the bag, and then it's re randomized. But uh,

827
00:46:22,880 --> 00:46:25,520
Speaker 1: they like, you can get a good run where they'll

828
00:46:25,520 --> 00:46:27,839
Speaker 1: give you lots of long bars and it's very nice,

829
00:46:27,840 --> 00:46:32,360
Speaker 1: happy times. You can get that to be to to

830
00:46:32,440 --> 00:46:34,920
Speaker 1: be irritating though, if you've got too many long bars,

831
00:46:34,960 --> 00:46:36,560
Speaker 1: Like why am I getting all these long bars now?

832
00:46:37,040 --> 00:46:38,920
Speaker 1: I'm just having to just throw them on top of

833
00:46:38,960 --> 00:46:42,040
Speaker 1: each other horizontally at the bottom. I need these later

834
00:46:42,160 --> 00:46:45,040
Speaker 1: to to really drive home and kill. Yeah, why wasn't

835
00:46:45,040 --> 00:46:47,200
Speaker 1: I getting these long bars when I was getting like

836
00:46:47,400 --> 00:46:51,480
Speaker 1: seventeen S and Z bars. Uh? Those S and Z

837
00:46:51,640 --> 00:46:54,040
Speaker 1: bars really are the worst. They're the ones that make

838
00:46:54,120 --> 00:46:57,640
Speaker 1: the game as as cruel as it is. Yeah, but

839
00:46:57,719 --> 00:46:59,640
Speaker 1: there was another quote I wanted to read, actually, that

840
00:46:59,760 --> 00:47:05,560
Speaker 1: was from a psychologist, Russian psychologist named Vladimir Pokilko, and

841
00:47:05,680 --> 00:47:09,319
Speaker 1: this sort of addresses the Tetris effect. Pokilko was a

842
00:47:09,440 --> 00:47:12,560
Speaker 1: friend and partner of Alexei Pagetna, of the creator of

843
00:47:12,600 --> 00:47:15,600
Speaker 1: Tetris Tetris, and he was one of the original patients

844
00:47:15,600 --> 00:47:18,719
Speaker 1: in the first outbreak of Tetris madness in Russia in

845
00:47:18,800 --> 00:47:21,440
Speaker 1: nineteen four. He he got to play it before it

846
00:47:21,560 --> 00:47:25,000
Speaker 1: was a commercial item, back when it was a secret

847
00:47:25,920 --> 00:47:29,480
Speaker 1: brain infection being traded on floppy disks around in Moscow.

848
00:47:30,560 --> 00:47:33,640
Speaker 1: And he says about Tetris, quote, the main part is

849
00:47:33,719 --> 00:47:37,120
Speaker 1: visual insight. You make your visual decision and it happens

850
00:47:37,120 --> 00:47:41,439
Speaker 1: almost immediately. Insight means emotion, small but many of them

851
00:47:41,480 --> 00:47:46,040
Speaker 1: every two three seconds. The second mechanism is unfinished action.

852
00:47:46,360 --> 00:47:50,040
Speaker 1: Tetris has many unfinished actions that force you to continue

853
00:47:50,320 --> 00:47:54,319
Speaker 1: and make it very addictive. The third is ottomization. In

854
00:47:54,360 --> 00:47:57,800
Speaker 1: a couple of hours, the activity becomes automatic, a habit,

855
00:47:58,080 --> 00:48:02,120
Speaker 1: a motivation to repeat. So, yeah, you've got some explanations

856
00:48:02,160 --> 00:48:05,080
Speaker 1: there for maybe some of the cognitive appeal of constantly

857
00:48:05,239 --> 00:48:07,920
Speaker 1: returning to thoughts of Tetris, if it's sort of taking

858
00:48:07,920 --> 00:48:11,000
Speaker 1: over your brain, because you've got the pleasing feeling of

859
00:48:11,040 --> 00:48:15,520
Speaker 1: solving a visual problem, you've got in the constant reward.

860
00:48:15,560 --> 00:48:18,640
Speaker 1: Every time you solve it, you've got the unfinished action,

861
00:48:18,680 --> 00:48:20,880
Speaker 1: always drawing you back to the problem. There is no

862
00:48:20,960 --> 00:48:25,120
Speaker 1: conclusion to tetris. You'll never finish it. Yeah, it's impossible,

863
00:48:25,160 --> 00:48:29,960
Speaker 1: and so failure is never super frustrating because failure is inevitable. Yeah.

864
00:48:30,040 --> 00:48:32,760
Speaker 1: And then, of course the thirty says is automization. Eventually

865
00:48:32,760 --> 00:48:36,279
Speaker 1: it becomes uh, not so much a deliberate action, but

866
00:48:36,400 --> 00:48:39,040
Speaker 1: just an automatic part of your brain. You do it

867
00:48:39,120 --> 00:48:42,640
Speaker 1: without even thinking. Yeah. I do also want to mention

868
00:48:42,680 --> 00:48:46,560
Speaker 1: while researching the articles about the Tetris effect in the

869
00:48:46,640 --> 00:48:51,520
Speaker 1: nineteen nineties, that I came across some frankly hilarious or

870
00:48:51,520 --> 00:48:56,919
Speaker 1: at least retrospectively hilarious scare articles about games and technology

871
00:48:57,360 --> 00:49:00,839
Speaker 1: destroying your brain. Uh there, Oh man, it was so

872
00:49:00,880 --> 00:49:05,400
Speaker 1: funny about talking about this theory from the ninety nineties

873
00:49:05,440 --> 00:49:09,040
Speaker 1: called cyber sickness. There there was a paper from the

874
00:49:09,080 --> 00:49:13,240
Speaker 1: Technology Review in the nineties called Cybersickness Virtual Realities Dark Side.

875
00:49:14,080 --> 00:49:17,279
Speaker 1: It's really funny looking back on the techno paranoia of

876
00:49:17,320 --> 00:49:20,759
Speaker 1: a previous age, especially when it's addressed at things that

877
00:49:20,800 --> 00:49:25,160
Speaker 1: we now consider to be so inherently harmless. I mean,

878
00:49:25,200 --> 00:49:29,040
Speaker 1: who is worried about a virtual reality because it turned

879
00:49:29,080 --> 00:49:32,719
Speaker 1: out to be such a bust and be Tetris? Yeah, well,

880
00:49:33,120 --> 00:49:34,719
Speaker 1: I think you could. There is a case to be

881
00:49:34,800 --> 00:49:38,839
Speaker 1: made that certainly there are destructive elements to obsessive video

882
00:49:38,880 --> 00:49:40,919
Speaker 1: game playing. So well sure, I mean if it comes

883
00:49:40,920 --> 00:49:43,440
Speaker 1: at a if you spend enough time on it, that

884
00:49:43,480 --> 00:49:46,919
Speaker 1: it's at a cost to your life. But certainly not. Yeah,

885
00:49:46,960 --> 00:49:50,719
Speaker 1: nothing that would that that really matches up to that

886
00:49:50,800 --> 00:49:54,839
Speaker 1: headline cyber sickness. Virtual reality is dark side. Yeah, but

887
00:49:54,960 --> 00:49:58,440
Speaker 1: I think now we need to look at some neuroscience

888
00:49:58,840 --> 00:50:02,600
Speaker 1: and psychiatry to see what's going on when you play

889
00:50:02,640 --> 00:50:06,960
Speaker 1: Tetris and how it affects your brain. Yes, certainly the

890
00:50:07,480 --> 00:50:11,359
Speaker 1: research underlying of these Tetris observations that we've been discussing here.

891
00:50:11,680 --> 00:50:14,800
Speaker 1: So one of the first big ones came out in

892
00:50:14,960 --> 00:50:19,000
Speaker 1: nineteen Uh. This is from a Richard Hare of the

893
00:50:19,120 --> 00:50:23,480
Speaker 1: University of California at Irvine's Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior.

894
00:50:24,160 --> 00:50:27,279
Speaker 1: So they did what you might expect, they scanned the

895
00:50:27,400 --> 00:50:30,520
Speaker 1: brains of Tetris players. Okay, this is interesting because it's

896
00:50:30,560 --> 00:50:33,000
Speaker 1: not just psychology here. They're not just getting people to

897
00:50:33,040 --> 00:50:36,880
Speaker 1: reflect subjectively in their Tetris experience, but they're gathering physical

898
00:50:36,960 --> 00:50:41,640
Speaker 1: evidence about playing Tetris. What does it actually look like? Yeah,

899
00:50:41,680 --> 00:50:44,920
Speaker 1: so yeah, they're looking and actually looking at brain behavior

900
00:50:45,040 --> 00:50:48,839
Speaker 1: during the playing of Tetris at varying stages, so hair

901
00:50:48,920 --> 00:50:54,360
Speaker 1: is suspected, and ultimately found that the brain requires less

902
00:50:54,520 --> 00:50:59,240
Speaker 1: energy to play higher levels of tetris um as opposed

903
00:50:59,239 --> 00:51:01,760
Speaker 1: to lower levels. We which sounds crazy at first because

904
00:51:01,920 --> 00:51:05,080
Speaker 1: we all know how how easy those early levels are

905
00:51:05,120 --> 00:51:07,640
Speaker 1: and when you first start playing it, you know it's

906
00:51:07,680 --> 00:51:11,200
Speaker 1: it's pretty easy. Going higher levels that gets so fast. Yeah,

907
00:51:11,400 --> 00:51:13,440
Speaker 1: that's when the stress really you think that would be

908
00:51:13,440 --> 00:51:17,440
Speaker 1: when it was just you'd have maximum cognition levels going on.

909
00:51:17,560 --> 00:51:19,640
Speaker 1: But uh so, this is what they found in first

910
00:51:19,640 --> 00:51:25,279
Speaker 1: time users. Tetris significantly raises cerebral glucose metabolic rates or

911
00:51:25,440 --> 00:51:30,319
Speaker 1: g m rs. So brain energy consumption soars as your

912
00:51:30,520 --> 00:51:33,440
Speaker 1: head cheese tackles this puzzle for the first time. So

913
00:51:33,480 --> 00:51:36,880
Speaker 1: your your brain is it's it's dealing with the difficult

914
00:51:36,880 --> 00:51:39,919
Speaker 1: task and it says, I need sugar, give me energy. Yeah,

915
00:51:39,960 --> 00:51:43,200
Speaker 1: and especially with Tetris, and I imagine especially for someone

916
00:51:43,239 --> 00:51:45,440
Speaker 1: who is you know, a novice to puzzle games of

917
00:51:45,520 --> 00:51:50,240
Speaker 1: this nature, You're suddenly encountering this game that is easy

918
00:51:50,280 --> 00:51:53,720
Speaker 1: to get into but drastically different in its presentation compared

919
00:51:53,719 --> 00:51:55,719
Speaker 1: to anything else you've done before. Yeah, so you said

920
00:51:55,840 --> 00:51:58,719
Speaker 1: this was funny. You said in first time users. I

921
00:51:58,719 --> 00:52:02,000
Speaker 1: assume you meant players if you're making a drug joke there.

922
00:52:02,160 --> 00:52:04,839
Speaker 1: I can't remember users that the term that I threw in,

923
00:52:04,960 --> 00:52:07,400
Speaker 1: or if I picked that up from the original study.

924
00:52:07,520 --> 00:52:10,360
Speaker 1: But um, but so, so those were the novices. What

925
00:52:10,440 --> 00:52:13,040
Speaker 1: happened after that? Okay? So after four to eight weeks

926
00:52:13,040 --> 00:52:18,080
Speaker 1: of daily doses of Tetris, uh, g mrs sink to

927
00:52:18,200 --> 00:52:23,880
Speaker 1: normal while performance increases seven fold. Okay, and so ultimately

928
00:52:23,960 --> 00:52:28,480
Speaker 1: Tetris masters have the lowest final g mrs of all.

929
00:52:28,719 --> 00:52:32,120
Speaker 1: So as your skill increases and you get more and more,

930
00:52:32,400 --> 00:52:34,880
Speaker 1: you become the Tetris master. The thing it tells you

931
00:52:34,920 --> 00:52:37,120
Speaker 1: at the end if you do really good, congratulations you

932
00:52:37,160 --> 00:52:41,480
Speaker 1: are Tetris master. Um, your brain uses less energy to

933
00:52:41,520 --> 00:52:44,440
Speaker 1: get you there. Yeah, I mean, in effect, Tetris tain't

934
00:52:44,440 --> 00:52:48,320
Speaker 1: trains your brain uh, and become to become more efficient

935
00:52:48,360 --> 00:52:52,120
Speaker 1: at carrying the cognitive load required to solve the puzzle. Man,

936
00:52:52,120 --> 00:52:54,759
Speaker 1: that seems so counterintuitive. Yeah, but here's the thing. Those

937
00:52:54,880 --> 00:52:57,760
Speaker 1: high GMR levels, they leave you a feeling all amped

938
00:52:57,840 --> 00:53:00,160
Speaker 1: up and uh and this is uh, this is your

939
00:53:00,160 --> 00:53:02,879
Speaker 1: brain amped up to learn something new and guzzling down

940
00:53:02,880 --> 00:53:05,920
Speaker 1: that energy to make it happen. And once it has

941
00:53:06,600 --> 00:53:10,360
Speaker 1: acquired the skills, it ceases to guzzle all that glucose.

942
00:53:10,440 --> 00:53:14,000
Speaker 1: So so yeah, it's your brain crunching this new problem,

943
00:53:14,200 --> 00:53:15,919
Speaker 1: figuring out how to how to solve it, and figuring

944
00:53:15,920 --> 00:53:18,400
Speaker 1: out how to solve it, uh with with a with

945
00:53:18,440 --> 00:53:21,560
Speaker 1: a lower energy expenditure. Yeah. So, as Hair says, the

946
00:53:21,600 --> 00:53:26,560
Speaker 1: brain might just become more efficient as the Tetris becomes

947
00:53:26,680 --> 00:53:30,319
Speaker 1: or the Tetris solving program in your brain, as he says,

948
00:53:30,360 --> 00:53:34,120
Speaker 1: becomes more unconscious and automatic. Yeah. Alright, So the next

949
00:53:34,120 --> 00:53:36,799
Speaker 1: study we're gonna look at answers that question that many

950
00:53:36,840 --> 00:53:39,680
Speaker 1: of you might have. What if the dude from Memento,

951
00:53:39,840 --> 00:53:43,040
Speaker 1: the guy, the Guy Pierce character, what would happen if

952
00:53:43,040 --> 00:53:45,600
Speaker 1: he played Tetris? Okay, so you're you're not talking about

953
00:53:45,680 --> 00:53:50,480
Speaker 1: Joe Panaliono. No, we're talking talking about Guy Pierces. Uh

954
00:53:50,520 --> 00:53:55,040
Speaker 1: no short, no, no new memories, dude, Interiro grade amnesia.

955
00:53:55,120 --> 00:53:57,680
Speaker 1: He can't form new episodic memories and things that have

956
00:53:57,760 --> 00:54:00,200
Speaker 1: recently happened. Yeah, what would happen if he played tetris? Well,

957
00:54:00,280 --> 00:54:03,200
Speaker 1: Luckily there's a study that examines this. This is a

958
00:54:03,239 --> 00:54:06,239
Speaker 1: two thousand study by Harvard psychiatrist Robert stood God. So

959
00:54:06,320 --> 00:54:10,279
Speaker 1: he set out to study a similar feeling to that

960
00:54:10,320 --> 00:54:13,399
Speaker 1: of playing tetris. Uh, that of a mountain climber who

961
00:54:13,440 --> 00:54:16,760
Speaker 1: continues to feel the rocks beneath his or her hands

962
00:54:16,840 --> 00:54:19,680
Speaker 1: after a day of climbing. And I imagine this is

963
00:54:19,719 --> 00:54:22,400
Speaker 1: similar to you know, that feeling as you lay in

964
00:54:22,440 --> 00:54:24,360
Speaker 1: bed after a day on the beach and the surf,

965
00:54:24,440 --> 00:54:28,560
Speaker 1: where you still feel the surf or certainly something that

966
00:54:28,600 --> 00:54:30,880
Speaker 1: comes to my mind and also, and also reminds me

967
00:54:30,960 --> 00:54:34,399
Speaker 1: of of Tetris hallucinations and Tetris dreams is that when

968
00:54:34,400 --> 00:54:38,240
Speaker 1: I worked in newspapers, I did a lot of paginations,

969
00:54:38,280 --> 00:54:40,880
Speaker 1: like in designed to build these pages in the paper,

970
00:54:41,000 --> 00:54:43,359
Speaker 1: sort of a form of tetris. Really. Yeah, I would

971
00:54:43,400 --> 00:54:45,800
Speaker 1: often refer to it as word tetris because it's just

972
00:54:45,880 --> 00:54:49,440
Speaker 1: words and images articles, and you're blocking all the pieces together,

973
00:54:49,480 --> 00:54:51,560
Speaker 1: and a lot of times they are shaped like Tetris

974
00:54:51,600 --> 00:54:54,839
Speaker 1: blocks to form this complete hole. And of course there's

975
00:54:54,840 --> 00:54:57,480
Speaker 1: the added stress though that this is a product that

976
00:54:57,560 --> 00:54:59,239
Speaker 1: is eventually going to be printed and sent out to

977
00:54:59,239 --> 00:55:01,400
Speaker 1: all these people, and you don't want there to be

978
00:55:01,440 --> 00:55:04,400
Speaker 1: any errors. And there's so many, so many places that

979
00:55:04,520 --> 00:55:06,520
Speaker 1: there can be an error. If only you could have

980
00:55:06,600 --> 00:55:10,560
Speaker 1: the crutch of adjusting the kerning on a real Tetris block. Yeah,

981
00:55:10,920 --> 00:55:14,920
Speaker 1: so the uh, yeah, a little little pagination humor for

982
00:55:14,920 --> 00:55:18,240
Speaker 1: for everyone out there. Um but but I remember having

983
00:55:18,400 --> 00:55:21,479
Speaker 1: dreams at night where I was in my bed, laying

984
00:55:21,480 --> 00:55:24,440
Speaker 1: in my bed and the pillows in the bed were

985
00:55:24,520 --> 00:55:27,920
Speaker 1: either illustrations or articles on a on a on a

986
00:55:27,960 --> 00:55:30,319
Speaker 1: page and in design, and that if I moved in

987
00:55:30,360 --> 00:55:33,319
Speaker 1: the bed at all, it would upset the arrangement of

988
00:55:33,360 --> 00:55:36,759
Speaker 1: the front page of the newspaper. Yeah. So it's that

989
00:55:36,840 --> 00:55:39,080
Speaker 1: sort of thing. Or if you're if you're a Tatris player,

990
00:55:39,080 --> 00:55:42,000
Speaker 1: it's Tatris hallucinations. If you're a rock climber, it's uh,

991
00:55:42,320 --> 00:55:46,880
Speaker 1: it's kind of rock houstin agency experience after the fact. Yeah.

992
00:55:46,960 --> 00:55:49,359
Speaker 1: So I got to mention talking about the study the

993
00:55:49,360 --> 00:55:51,680
Speaker 1: title of it, because the title is too good to miss.

994
00:55:52,080 --> 00:55:56,799
Speaker 1: It's called Replaying the Game hypnogogic images in normals and

995
00:55:56,920 --> 00:56:02,560
Speaker 1: amnesis normals normal normals, All right, normals. This is how

996
00:56:02,600 --> 00:56:05,200
Speaker 1: it all went down. So stick Old asked twenty seven

997
00:56:05,280 --> 00:56:08,479
Speaker 1: participants to play seven hours of Tetris over the course

998
00:56:08,520 --> 00:56:12,120
Speaker 1: of three days. There are three groups involved in the study.

999
00:56:12,480 --> 00:56:18,279
Speaker 1: Twelve novices okay, novice players, ten experts they're referred to

1000
00:56:18,520 --> 00:56:25,320
Speaker 1: as Tetris masters, and five amnesics with extensive bilateral medial

1001
00:56:25,680 --> 00:56:30,839
Speaker 1: temporal lobe damage. These five individuals were absolutely unable to

1002
00:56:30,960 --> 00:56:34,719
Speaker 1: learn and retain new episodic memories. Okay, so if you

1003
00:56:34,760 --> 00:56:37,440
Speaker 1: sat them down and taught them how to play Tetris

1004
00:56:37,480 --> 00:56:39,560
Speaker 1: and then met them again the next day, they would

1005
00:56:39,600 --> 00:56:43,000
Speaker 1: not remember that that had happened exactly. Yeah, so this

1006
00:56:43,040 --> 00:56:45,319
Speaker 1: is what they found. So the novices and experts all

1007
00:56:45,360 --> 00:56:48,400
Speaker 1: reported that they saw Tetris pieces floating down in front

1008
00:56:48,400 --> 00:56:50,360
Speaker 1: of their eyes as they were going to sleep at night.

1009
00:56:50,440 --> 00:56:54,240
Speaker 1: Not surprising, we know that's how it works. It's expected. However,

1010
00:56:54,640 --> 00:56:58,799
Speaker 1: the even the amnesics saw the blocks at night, even

1011
00:56:58,800 --> 00:57:02,439
Speaker 1: though they could not rem member playing the game, and

1012
00:57:02,560 --> 00:57:04,799
Speaker 1: as it turns out, they actually could play it. Just

1013
00:57:04,880 --> 00:57:07,920
Speaker 1: find the quote the performance of the m music patients

1014
00:57:07,960 --> 00:57:13,440
Speaker 1: showed only minimal, albeit significant improvement over seven hours of play.

1015
00:57:13,680 --> 00:57:17,120
Speaker 1: So their brains were still learning to play tetris even

1016
00:57:17,160 --> 00:57:20,040
Speaker 1: though they had no memories. Yeah, they weren't learning as

1017
00:57:20,120 --> 00:57:24,880
Speaker 1: well as the other novices, right, but they still were learning. Yeah, uh,

1018
00:57:24,920 --> 00:57:28,280
Speaker 1: strange And and this gets in of course, into the

1019
00:57:28,320 --> 00:57:32,360
Speaker 1: fact that there are numerous ways that memory works in

1020
00:57:32,400 --> 00:57:35,439
Speaker 1: the brain. There are different forms of memory. The two

1021
00:57:35,680 --> 00:57:40,000
Speaker 1: most important ones here for our purposes are as follows.

1022
00:57:40,040 --> 00:57:42,120
Speaker 1: First of all, in the hippocampus you have. This is

1023
00:57:42,160 --> 00:57:45,200
Speaker 1: the area that registers those episodic memories, the very memories

1024
00:57:45,200 --> 00:57:48,560
Speaker 1: that the m musics here could not form. Explicit memories

1025
00:57:48,560 --> 00:57:53,040
Speaker 1: of actual life events, episodic memories, Yeah, what happened yesterday?

1026
00:57:53,280 --> 00:57:56,240
Speaker 1: What did I do? What was it like? Playing tetris?

1027
00:57:56,280 --> 00:58:00,600
Speaker 1: But then the cortex registers implicit memories, the stuff we

1028
00:58:00,680 --> 00:58:04,160
Speaker 1: learned but no, don't necessarily have conscious access to. So

1029
00:58:04,320 --> 00:58:06,520
Speaker 1: might this be something like how to ride a bike

1030
00:58:06,760 --> 00:58:11,640
Speaker 1: or like that? Yeah? Things uh? Or imagine many of

1031
00:58:11,720 --> 00:58:15,560
Speaker 1: you encounter this with with passwords or things you type

1032
00:58:15,560 --> 00:58:18,400
Speaker 1: into the computer. Sometimes you can't you can't say what

1033
00:58:18,400 --> 00:58:20,120
Speaker 1: it is. You have to do it too, and then

1034
00:58:20,760 --> 00:58:24,600
Speaker 1: rediscover what you're actually doing. Yeah, you've made that method memory,

1035
00:58:24,680 --> 00:58:28,200
Speaker 1: but but you don't have a direct recall of the event. Right.

1036
00:58:28,840 --> 00:58:33,120
Speaker 1: So this study the experiences ob the mnesics here's suggests

1037
00:58:33,240 --> 00:58:36,960
Speaker 1: that Tetris syndrome is as much a matter of implicit

1038
00:58:37,000 --> 00:58:39,960
Speaker 1: memory as anything else, and that the brain is extracting

1039
00:58:39,960 --> 00:58:44,960
Speaker 1: memories from our experience, even subconsciously. Um. And then furthermore,

1040
00:58:45,120 --> 00:58:50,560
Speaker 1: the as memory consolidation uh takes place during sleep, Tetris

1041
00:58:50,600 --> 00:58:53,440
Speaker 1: divisions may stand out as a manifestation of that process.

1042
00:58:54,280 --> 00:58:57,720
Speaker 1: So yeah, I think this is taken as evidence in

1043
00:58:57,800 --> 00:59:00,160
Speaker 1: favor of the hypothesis. I don't know if of what

1044
00:59:00,280 --> 00:59:04,280
Speaker 1: degree it's a hypothesis or a widely accepted theory, but

1045
00:59:04,360 --> 00:59:08,560
Speaker 1: the idea at least that memory consolidation is what dreaming

1046
00:59:08,680 --> 00:59:12,520
Speaker 1: is largely about in sleep. Do you know how accepted

1047
00:59:12,560 --> 00:59:14,560
Speaker 1: that idea is? I mean, is that pretty solid or

1048
00:59:14,600 --> 00:59:19,360
Speaker 1: is that so it's pretty solid based on an episode

1049
00:59:19,480 --> 00:59:23,080
Speaker 1: recorded earlier in the year where I was researching the

1050
00:59:23,120 --> 00:59:26,200
Speaker 1: power of naps and the importance of naps, ethisodic memory

1051
00:59:26,240 --> 00:59:28,560
Speaker 1: formation came up a lot in that, So I think

1052
00:59:28,600 --> 00:59:32,600
Speaker 1: it's pretty accepted. Huh. Okay, Well, that's interesting because the

1053
00:59:32,640 --> 00:59:37,880
Speaker 1: idea that memory consolidation takes place during dreams and sleeping

1054
00:59:38,080 --> 00:59:40,960
Speaker 1: is going to come into play in a paper that

1055
00:59:41,000 --> 00:59:43,000
Speaker 1: I'm going to reference in the next episode, which will

1056
00:59:43,040 --> 00:59:48,160
Speaker 1: also be Tetris themed. So this science is fascinating because, uh,

1057
00:59:48,240 --> 00:59:52,400
Speaker 1: it explains something that is disturbingly common. I mean, one

1058
00:59:52,440 --> 00:59:54,920
Speaker 1: of it would be one thing if every now and

1059
00:59:54,960 --> 00:59:58,720
Speaker 1: then some weirdo said, well, I I hallucinated Tetris blocks.

1060
00:59:58,800 --> 01:00:02,520
Speaker 1: But this seems be completely normal, completely widespread for people

1061
01:00:02,560 --> 01:00:04,600
Speaker 1: who play the game. It takes over their brain in

1062
01:00:04,640 --> 01:00:07,320
Speaker 1: this way and sticks with them, and they hallucinate the

1063
01:00:07,360 --> 01:00:10,400
Speaker 1: blocks later. So I decided, as I said earlier, to

1064
01:00:10,440 --> 01:00:12,720
Speaker 1: search around and see if this happened with other games.

1065
01:00:12,760 --> 01:00:16,840
Speaker 1: Like I mentioned, there are people talking about Minecraft hallucinations,

1066
01:00:17,120 --> 01:00:19,800
Speaker 1: and there are people who talk about hallucinations related to

1067
01:00:19,840 --> 01:00:23,320
Speaker 1: other games, So that the principle of seeing the world

1068
01:00:23,400 --> 01:00:29,800
Speaker 1: in terms of visuospatial game elements, or even experiencing hallucinations

1069
01:00:29,840 --> 01:00:33,080
Speaker 1: of auditory and visual elements from games, is not unique

1070
01:00:33,120 --> 01:00:36,640
Speaker 1: to Tetris, though with Tetris it might be stronger than average,

1071
01:00:36,720 --> 01:00:40,400
Speaker 1: or maybe even much stronger than average. But anyway, that

1072
01:00:40,520 --> 01:00:44,120
Speaker 1: leads some experts to want to group what we're calling

1073
01:00:44,120 --> 01:00:48,120
Speaker 1: the Tetris effect under the broader category of what's called

1074
01:00:48,240 --> 01:00:53,920
Speaker 1: game transfer phenomenon. So there has been some research on this,

1075
01:00:54,000 --> 01:00:58,080
Speaker 1: but essentially it's been based on interviews and interacting with

1076
01:00:58,120 --> 01:01:01,880
Speaker 1: people who play video games and cataloging their experience to

1077
01:01:01,960 --> 01:01:06,880
Speaker 1: see if they transfer elements of game content or game

1078
01:01:06,920 --> 01:01:12,320
Speaker 1: interface into their real lives. I've seen accounts of individuals

1079
01:01:12,400 --> 01:01:15,720
Speaker 1: claiming to see health bars from playing World of Warcraft,

1080
01:01:15,960 --> 01:01:20,000
Speaker 1: and I definitely remember, like the only other game transfer

1081
01:01:20,560 --> 01:01:23,919
Speaker 1: um phenomenon that I can attest to my own life

1082
01:01:24,040 --> 01:01:26,720
Speaker 1: would be from playing way too much Grand Theft, Auto

1083
01:01:26,840 --> 01:01:29,240
Speaker 1: Vice City, and I can't, for the life of me,

1084
01:01:29,320 --> 01:01:32,840
Speaker 1: I can't exactly remember what I was seeing, but I

1085
01:01:32,840 --> 01:01:35,640
Speaker 1: would go from playing a lot of that too, then

1086
01:01:35,760 --> 01:01:38,960
Speaker 1: driving to work, which was stealing cars as well. No,

1087
01:01:39,240 --> 01:01:41,920
Speaker 1: luckily I can go that far. But certainly, the the

1088
01:01:41,960 --> 01:01:47,000
Speaker 1: experience of driving the cars in the game was was

1089
01:01:47,000 --> 01:01:50,960
Speaker 1: was was impacting the way that I observed driving a

1090
01:01:51,040 --> 01:01:54,600
Speaker 1: car in real life, which was a little scary considering

1091
01:01:54,600 --> 01:01:56,280
Speaker 1: all the things you do with cars in that game.

1092
01:01:56,400 --> 01:01:59,200
Speaker 1: That is a little scary, and that figures big into

1093
01:01:59,240 --> 01:02:03,200
Speaker 1: how the media has covered this. Uh, this scientific recognition

1094
01:02:03,240 --> 01:02:08,240
Speaker 1: of video game of game transfer phenomenon. But there there

1095
01:02:08,240 --> 01:02:10,920
Speaker 1: are much smaller, more innocuous versions of this. I mean,

1096
01:02:10,960 --> 01:02:14,520
Speaker 1: have you ever said, let's press pause or I just

1097
01:02:14,640 --> 01:02:17,720
Speaker 1: leveled up on something about a real world situation, or

1098
01:02:17,760 --> 01:02:22,280
Speaker 1: achievement unlocked or exactly yeah, somebody, somebody tweets achievement unlocked

1099
01:02:22,280 --> 01:02:26,840
Speaker 1: Swedish meatballs for breakfast. I mean, uh, that is that

1100
01:02:26,960 --> 01:02:30,320
Speaker 1: is an example of game transfer phenomenon. You're you're porting

1101
01:02:30,440 --> 01:02:33,560
Speaker 1: something about the game content or experience into your daily

1102
01:02:33,600 --> 01:02:35,480
Speaker 1: life outside the game. It kind of goes back to

1103
01:02:35,520 --> 01:02:38,520
Speaker 1: our Techno Religionist episodes that we recorded where we talked

1104
01:02:38,520 --> 01:02:42,120
Speaker 1: about how you can't help but incorporate technology into your

1105
01:02:43,120 --> 01:02:47,880
Speaker 1: symbolic metaphorical understanding of reality. And so I often think

1106
01:02:47,920 --> 01:02:50,440
Speaker 1: of like in many different topics that apply to the

1107
01:02:50,520 --> 01:02:53,160
Speaker 1: human experience. I often think in terms of the health

1108
01:02:53,200 --> 01:02:55,480
Speaker 1: bar and some of the type of bar, whether you're

1109
01:02:55,480 --> 01:02:59,960
Speaker 1: talking particularly. I remember in researching Willpower and how willpower

1110
01:03:00,000 --> 01:03:02,320
Speaker 1: our works and in its stated status, is this kind

1111
01:03:02,360 --> 01:03:05,640
Speaker 1: of depletable resource in the human mind you end up

1112
01:03:05,640 --> 01:03:08,120
Speaker 1: thinking about video games. It's the logical way to make

1113
01:03:08,160 --> 01:03:10,640
Speaker 1: sense of that and to picture it. Yeah, So some

1114
01:03:10,840 --> 01:03:14,240
Speaker 1: media coverage about exactly the kind of thing you're talking about,

1115
01:03:14,320 --> 01:03:17,000
Speaker 1: the intersection of of science and video games is of

1116
01:03:17,040 --> 01:03:20,640
Speaker 1: course not so sensible. And and as we've said, this

1117
01:03:20,720 --> 01:03:24,880
Speaker 1: example is no exception in response to the game transfer phenomenon.

1118
01:03:25,160 --> 01:03:28,520
Speaker 1: I know, one UK newspaper ran the headline gamers can't

1119
01:03:28,520 --> 01:03:33,360
Speaker 1: tell real world from fantasy, and generally much coverage has

1120
01:03:33,520 --> 01:03:37,720
Speaker 1: focused on sensational, violent implications of this kind of faulty premise.

1121
01:03:37,760 --> 01:03:41,720
Speaker 1: The researchers themselves disowned that kind of coverage. They're like, no,

1122
01:03:41,960 --> 01:03:45,200
Speaker 1: that's now what we're saying. Almost all of this is harmless,

1123
01:03:45,200 --> 01:03:47,480
Speaker 1: and they sort they compare it to the ways we

1124
01:03:47,520 --> 01:03:51,680
Speaker 1: incorporate other metaphors from other types of content and media

1125
01:03:51,760 --> 01:03:54,560
Speaker 1: we consume into our lives. I mean, it's just you

1126
01:03:54,600 --> 01:03:57,040
Speaker 1: could express things in terms of a TV show you

1127
01:03:57,080 --> 01:04:00,720
Speaker 1: watched or a book you read. When you participate with media,

1128
01:04:00,880 --> 01:04:05,120
Speaker 1: you you get some metaphors or some you know, cognitive

1129
01:04:05,160 --> 01:04:08,600
Speaker 1: sticking points from it. Yeah, Like it's not that weird. Yeah,

1130
01:04:08,600 --> 01:04:10,080
Speaker 1: Like I think of any other phrases that we have,

1131
01:04:10,560 --> 01:04:13,840
Speaker 1: you know, fast forwarding through something again, pose on something,

1132
01:04:14,200 --> 01:04:16,480
Speaker 1: or let's put a pin in this, which of course

1133
01:04:16,520 --> 01:04:19,920
Speaker 1: indicates that the speaker likes to torture insects in the

1134
01:04:20,040 --> 01:04:22,960
Speaker 1: fair time, So keep that one in mind. Yeah, the

1135
01:04:22,960 --> 01:04:28,440
Speaker 1: the malevolent lepidopterist of your office. Yeah. So while the

1136
01:04:28,600 --> 01:04:31,400
Speaker 1: using the phrase achievement un locked or something isn't all

1137
01:04:31,480 --> 01:04:34,000
Speaker 1: that weird, I do still think the Tetris effect is

1138
01:04:34,560 --> 01:04:38,960
Speaker 1: remarkable and strange the idea of these, uh, these consistent

1139
01:04:39,160 --> 01:04:43,600
Speaker 1: and nearly universal Tetris hallucinations and dreams, and that makes

1140
01:04:43,600 --> 01:04:47,120
Speaker 1: me wonder, well, does the Tetris effect belong in this

1141
01:04:47,200 --> 01:04:51,320
Speaker 1: category of game transfer phenomena or is it something unique?

1142
01:04:51,480 --> 01:04:54,360
Speaker 1: Is it something on a separate at a different level.

1143
01:04:54,600 --> 01:04:57,680
Speaker 1: Pretty much, I feel like it might be. And in

1144
01:04:58,640 --> 01:05:01,200
Speaker 1: the next episode that we that we're doing on Tetris,

1145
01:05:01,600 --> 01:05:04,800
Speaker 1: I think we'll see elements of that. Now. I've been

1146
01:05:04,840 --> 01:05:08,840
Speaker 1: thinking about it in terms of Tetris being the purest

1147
01:05:08,880 --> 01:05:12,200
Speaker 1: form of the drug, and you can, certainly and maybe

1148
01:05:12,200 --> 01:05:15,960
Speaker 1: you should, dilute the purity of that drug when you're

1149
01:05:16,000 --> 01:05:19,960
Speaker 1: applying it in certain scenarios, right, because, like spice, it

1150
01:05:20,600 --> 01:05:24,000
Speaker 1: may enable you to to have some precognition and to

1151
01:05:24,120 --> 01:05:26,440
Speaker 1: stand at the top of the dune of the universe

1152
01:05:26,440 --> 01:05:29,919
Speaker 1: of space time and see beyond what normal humans can.

1153
01:05:30,240 --> 01:05:33,760
Speaker 1: But you've got to keep coming back. Oh, man, I

1154
01:05:33,840 --> 01:05:36,680
Speaker 1: wonder how spice would affect your ability to play Tetris,

1155
01:05:36,720 --> 01:05:41,920
Speaker 1: Like what would see the entire bag your preview screen

1156
01:05:41,960 --> 01:05:45,080
Speaker 1: would have hundreds of blocks in it. Oh and then

1157
01:05:45,360 --> 01:05:48,479
Speaker 1: what what the guild navigator? Of course would you would

1158
01:05:48,800 --> 01:05:51,600
Speaker 1: would make sure to pick the best block possible for

1159
01:05:51,600 --> 01:05:54,720
Speaker 1: the next turn, whatever the safest block choices. But as

1160
01:05:54,840 --> 01:05:57,600
Speaker 1: we've showed, there is no such thing. There is no

1161
01:05:57,720 --> 01:06:00,919
Speaker 1: optimal Tetris play. There there's better and worst Tetris play,

1162
01:06:01,000 --> 01:06:04,000
Speaker 1: but there's no perfect Tetris play. So would you be

1163
01:06:04,080 --> 01:06:08,000
Speaker 1: able to find that golden path through Tetris? You couldn't.

1164
01:06:08,080 --> 01:06:13,080
Speaker 1: I guess it's an unresolved game. Yeah. Anyway, we are

1165
01:06:13,240 --> 01:06:15,480
Speaker 1: so excited about the science of Tetris that we're going

1166
01:06:15,520 --> 01:06:18,320
Speaker 1: to come back next time to talk about some very

1167
01:06:18,360 --> 01:06:23,000
Speaker 1: fascinating Tetris research, more about how Tetris interacts with our brains.

1168
01:06:23,600 --> 01:06:26,880
Speaker 1: We're going to talk about why Tetris feels so good

1169
01:06:26,920 --> 01:06:29,680
Speaker 1: to play, but we're also going to talk about tetraspace

1170
01:06:29,840 --> 01:06:34,280
Speaker 1: therapies for the Tetris cure. Essentially. Yeah, so we're going

1171
01:06:34,320 --> 01:06:36,920
Speaker 1: to continue to dive into the power of Tetris. But

1172
01:06:36,960 --> 01:06:38,960
Speaker 1: then what can we do with that power? How can

1173
01:06:39,000 --> 01:06:42,080
Speaker 1: we utilize it? How can we harness Tetris and use

1174
01:06:42,160 --> 01:06:44,680
Speaker 1: it to improve our lives? In the meantime, if you

1175
01:06:44,760 --> 01:06:47,960
Speaker 1: haven't played Tetris in a while, I encourage you to

1176
01:06:48,120 --> 01:06:52,000
Speaker 1: unlock that ancient secret yet again. Open the puzzle box,

1177
01:06:52,280 --> 01:06:54,320
Speaker 1: play a little bit of Tetris, and then come back

1178
01:06:54,360 --> 01:06:57,640
Speaker 1: and visit with us again next time, and and share

1179
01:06:57,880 --> 01:07:01,040
Speaker 1: in the deep mystery and wonder of the Platonic puzzle

1180
01:07:01,160 --> 01:07:04,880
Speaker 1: universe with us. So until next time, check out stuff

1181
01:07:04,880 --> 01:07:06,760
Speaker 1: to blow your mind dot com. That's where we find

1182
01:07:07,240 --> 01:07:10,760
Speaker 1: all of our blog posts, are podcast episodes, are videos,

1183
01:07:10,880 --> 01:07:13,680
Speaker 1: and indeed the landing page for this episode will include

1184
01:07:13,880 --> 01:07:16,480
Speaker 1: links out in some related materials on the site as

1185
01:07:16,520 --> 01:07:18,800
Speaker 1: well as some of the resources we've been discussing here

1186
01:07:18,800 --> 01:07:20,480
Speaker 1: with you today. And if you want to get in

1187
01:07:20,520 --> 01:07:22,920
Speaker 1: touch with us and let us know your personal Tetris

1188
01:07:23,000 --> 01:07:28,600
Speaker 1: history or your thoughts about cognition, human neurology and video gameplay,

1189
01:07:28,880 --> 01:07:31,080
Speaker 1: you can email us at blow the Mind at how

1190
01:07:31,120 --> 01:07:43,560
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com for more on those and thousands

1191
01:07:43,560 --> 01:08:08,000
Speaker 1: of other topics. Is that how stuff works dot com.

1192
01:08:00,000 --> 01:08:00,320
Speaker 1: I don