Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stop
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And
Speaker 1: before we get go in here, I just want to
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Speaker 1: putting out this kind of content for you. So this
Speaker 1: episode today is going to be about Tetris, and it's
Speaker 1: going to be part one of a two part series
Speaker 1: that we're doing on the science of Tetris, the ancient
Speaker 1: mystery puzzle of the universe. Yeah, so the first live
Speaker 1: is mostly dealing with the power of Tetris and the
Speaker 1: history of Tetris. Second part is going to dive into
Speaker 1: some possible uses for that power and knowledge. So, Robert,
Speaker 1: I have a perhaps pretty weird question for you. Alright,
Speaker 1: hit me with a pretty weird question. If there were
Speaker 1: no thinking beings in the universe, would numbers exist? Oh,
Speaker 1: this is a great question. Our numbers a human discovery
Speaker 1: or humans are are numbers of human invention? Right? Like
Speaker 1: the number seven? Is that an inherent feature of the
Speaker 1: universe or is that just sort of like an idea
Speaker 1: we've come up with to describe what happens when there
Speaker 1: are seven of something. I tend to see it as
Speaker 1: kind of a mix of the two. Like, yes, there
Speaker 1: is there is an inherent number sense to the universe,
Speaker 1: but obviously there's a there's a human ordering system layered
Speaker 1: on top of that so that we can interact with
Speaker 1: it and understand it. Yeah, I think that's a sensible
Speaker 1: way of looking at it. But there are certainly people
Speaker 1: who I think would be called platonists in this sense
Speaker 1: that their platonic in the sense that they believe in
Speaker 1: the real existence of abstract objects that are inherent to
Speaker 1: the universe, like numbers, mathematical objects, the theorems that those
Speaker 1: things actually do exist as objects in some sense, even
Speaker 1: though they don't have physical matter in any way. And
Speaker 1: I sort of feel the same way the Platonists feel
Speaker 1: about numbers. I feel that way about Tetris. So tell
Speaker 1: me your personal Tetris history. Well, I think it is
Speaker 1: ideal that this episode is publishing during December, because for me,
Speaker 1: there's always something kind of Christmas e about Tetris because
Speaker 1: I got it back in the day on old school Nintendo.
Speaker 1: I think I got it for Christmas, so it arrived
Speaker 1: in the Christmas season, and some of the wonderful music
Speaker 1: um that was on that game included um, I believe
Speaker 1: danced the sugar plumb Ferries from The Nutcracker, which of
Speaker 1: course is a Christmas themed ballet, a ballet that I
Speaker 1: had to set through or or got to sit through,
Speaker 1: however you want to look at it many many times,
Speaker 1: as I had two sisters who were both involved in dance. Oh,
Speaker 1: it wasn't one of those things where your school took
Speaker 1: you to The Nutcracker every year. No, I had to,
Speaker 1: I think, go every year to see one of my
Speaker 1: two sisters of performing it. And and the Nutcracker is
Speaker 1: an interesting thing to have to sit through because the
Speaker 1: first is totally front loaded. The first half has a
Speaker 1: rat king, it has battles, it has a fabulous candyland discovery,
Speaker 1: weird uncles with an eye patch, and then the second
Speaker 1: half is just just a slumber fest of various dances
Speaker 1: that are performed for the victors like they've already won.
Speaker 1: It's just all complete. Afterthought, huh, that's interesting. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: does have a lot of great hallucinatory imagery. I recalled though.
Speaker 1: I remember that there's a lady with a huge dress
Speaker 1: and a bunch of creatures come out from under her dress. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: but anyway, Yeah, the dance of the sugar Plum Ferry
Speaker 1: was on the any S version I played of the
Speaker 1: game Boy version, And I also associate this with Christmas.
Speaker 1: I think maybe because I associate most video games I
Speaker 1: played as a child with Christmas, because that, you know,
Speaker 1: Christmas is when you get the game and then you
Speaker 1: have that huge allotment of time and to vote to
Speaker 1: the game. You can just completely meld your brain to
Speaker 1: this game, play at nine hours a day because there's
Speaker 1: no school and your you know, your parents don't want
Speaker 1: to deal with you during Uh So, yeah, I I
Speaker 1: totally had that. I had a couple other games for
Speaker 1: the game Boy too. Back in the early nineties, when
Speaker 1: I was a kid, I had Tetris, but also had
Speaker 1: Super Mario Land. I don't know if you played that
Speaker 1: on the Game Boy. It involves weird it kind of
Speaker 1: like ancient Egyptian themes that are it's sort of unique
Speaker 1: Mario game. And then I also had a video game
Speaker 1: called Altered Space, which involved isometric movements. It was very
Speaker 1: hard to control h and mostly you would just fall
Speaker 1: on spikes and run out of air and die. You
Speaker 1: play a little astronaut who has minute because I was
Speaker 1: initially imagining some sort of Timothy Leary themed game that,
Speaker 1: oh no, that would have been wonderful. Like as a kid,
Speaker 1: I had the game version of the William Hurt movie
Speaker 1: where it takes ayahuasca and gets in the sensory deprivation tank.
Speaker 1: You know another thing about about having it. I wonder
Speaker 1: if this is the case with you as well. I
Speaker 1: had some horrible Nintendo games, like I had Mission Impossible,
Speaker 1: which was an impossibly difficult game, and then a few
Speaker 1: other games that really had limited appeal even to me.
Speaker 1: But Tetris was a game that I played like crazy.
Speaker 1: My sister my sister, who was old enough to play
Speaker 1: the played like crazy, and even my my dad got
Speaker 1: in on the act and was playing Tetris, and it
Speaker 1: just ensnaring all to all of us. Yeah, it does
Speaker 1: have this very universal appeal which has been chalked up
Speaker 1: to several different factors from people were gonna talk about
Speaker 1: later in this episode. But the reason I mentioned those
Speaker 1: other games I had on the game Boy was going
Speaker 1: back to this very first thing I said, which is
Speaker 1: that I sensed, even as a child, that there was
Speaker 1: something very very different between Tetris and these other games,
Speaker 1: even popular games like you know, the Mario game. I
Speaker 1: mean like it didn't have to be a bad game.
Speaker 1: Other games to me felt like human artifacts. They felt
Speaker 1: invented in the sense that you know that that a
Speaker 1: wheelbarrow is invented. Tetris to me felt like a fundamental,
Speaker 1: inherent aspect of the universe that was an ancient, secret mystery,
Speaker 1: and it just seemed to me impossible to believe there
Speaker 1: was ever a time when there wasn't Tetris woven into
Speaker 1: the fabric of physics and mathematics. So you're you're basically
Speaker 1: imagining a scenario where the the hominids in two thousand
Speaker 1: and one of Space Odyssey are looking up. Instead of
Speaker 1: seeing a complete um monolith, they're seeing the long bar. Yah,
Speaker 1: seeing the Tetris shapes fall inform the monolith. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: it's got to be the long bar, because that's the
Speaker 1: most coveted piece among avid Tetris players, as long as
Speaker 1: you've prepared yourself for its insertion. Yeah, exactly, how true
Speaker 1: that is? No, I see, I see what you're saying.
Speaker 1: Exactly this Uh, it feels perfectly natural, like playing Tetris
Speaker 1: is like coming home on some level. Um. I definitely
Speaker 1: remember playing it and being obsessed with it, and and
Speaker 1: it was just startled to realize this was a new
Speaker 1: thing in the world. I couldn't believe. I mean, this
Speaker 1: is a game that was invented in Ur, but it
Speaker 1: didn't feel that way. I even even old old games
Speaker 1: like go and checkers and chess, I mean, these old
Speaker 1: board games still felt like artifacts. They still felt invented
Speaker 1: by humans in a way that Tetris didn't. Tetris felt
Speaker 1: like an ancient mystery. And I'm still not quite sure
Speaker 1: exactly why that is. But I think throughout these couple
Speaker 1: of episodes, we're going to do on the science of Tetris.
Speaker 1: We we may have some leads about why it feels
Speaker 1: that way to me at least and I think to
Speaker 1: to some other people too, or simply the case it
Speaker 1: could just be the case that God itself is the
Speaker 1: long bar or or some sort of multidimensional um shape
Speaker 1: that we can't quite understand, but that fits into all
Speaker 1: possible Tetris scenarios. But indeed, as we explore here, we're
Speaker 1: also going to get into some of the recreational mathematical
Speaker 1: roots of Tetris, and even those don't go back tremendously
Speaker 1: far h that they only go back into the early
Speaker 1: twentieth century. Nevertheless, I insist there is an ancient mystery
Speaker 1: at the secret of this journey, and maybe by the
Speaker 1: end will unlock it. But I think we should actually
Speaker 1: look at the game Tetris now it's history and where
Speaker 1: it comes from. And the first thing I've got to
Speaker 1: start with is uh, sort of incidental to the game
Speaker 1: of Tetris itself. But did you know that the famous
Speaker 1: Tetris music, that theme right there is based on a
Speaker 1: Russian folk song that actually has lyrics. I do not
Speaker 1: know this. The Tetris theme with lyrics. I love it
Speaker 1: so much. I looked it up. This is the Wikipedia translation,
Speaker 1: so this may not be the most accurate, but but
Speaker 1: the first verses, oh my crate is so full, I've
Speaker 1: got chintz and brocade. Take pity o, sweetie, of this
Speaker 1: lad's shoulder seems kind of appropriate for the game where
Speaker 1: you're you're stacking the blocks forever. My great, it overflows all.
Speaker 1: That is a revelation for me. Yeah, but surely Tetris
Speaker 1: didn't just appear out of thin air. I mean, obviously
Speaker 1: it grew out of some kind of puzzle tradition. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: and so I mean certainly you can if you want to,
Speaker 1: to take the roots of Tetris and extend them back
Speaker 1: just completely geometrically. Yes, you can get back into the
Speaker 1: history of geometry itself. But for the most part, we
Speaker 1: can begin the birth of Tetris with something that was
Speaker 1: called a pin tomino. This is an arrangement of five
Speaker 1: unit squares or cubes, all joined along their edges. Um
Speaker 1: they're twelve free pintomenos. They're shaped roughly like the letters vt, W, X, U, z, F,
Speaker 1: P I, N Y L. There, that's funny. I looked
Speaker 1: up some of these designations of like the letter to
Speaker 1: the pentomeno, and some of them makes sense, like the
Speaker 1: W pintomeno looks like a W, the Y pintomeno looks
Speaker 1: like a long bar with a lump on the side. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Some of them are a little little more abstract. They're
Speaker 1: eighteen one sided pentomenos and sixty three fixed pintomenos. Okay,
Speaker 1: So essentially, though, the pentomeno is if you take some
Speaker 1: squares and you line them up so that the sides
Speaker 1: are touching in one way or another, how many different
Speaker 1: shapes can you make out of five squares? And that's
Speaker 1: what it is. Yeah, And then you you had pent
Speaker 1: amino puzzles that were all about arranging them together into
Speaker 1: a shape, usually something you know, a rectangle, something fairly simple. Now.
Speaker 1: The first published pentomino puzzle of this nature, even though
Speaker 1: it was not named as such, appeared in Henry Dadeny's
Speaker 1: The Canterbury Puzzles in nineteen o seven. That a companion
Speaker 1: to the Canterbury Tales. Um, if anything, it would be
Speaker 1: the section in the back with a crossroad puzzle too,
Speaker 1: I guess um No. This was basically a puzzle publication,
Speaker 1: uh and in this particular one that Dundinny put together,
Speaker 1: you had to fit twelve pentomino shapes together with one
Speaker 1: square te traumino, and I'll explain the terminology here in
Speaker 1: a minute. That's four squares as you encounter in tetris
Speaker 1: later on. You had to join these together on an
Speaker 1: eight by eight checkerboard. Okay, so you've got like a
Speaker 1: puzzle space. That's the board, and the problem is you've
Speaker 1: got all these pieces that you've got to fit into
Speaker 1: the space so that they're not you know, poking out
Speaker 1: the sides or something right, And like any good game, um,
Speaker 1: there's a part of it is the mechanics which have described,
Speaker 1: but the other part was the fluff. And the fluff
Speaker 1: here was that William the Conqueror had, out of rage,
Speaker 1: broken a chess board and you had to have to
Speaker 1: reassemble the chessboard that these each of these shapes is
Speaker 1: a piece of the shattered board. The story behind the game. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I kind of love that when there's a game that's
Speaker 1: not like an adventure action game with characters, but it's
Speaker 1: a puzzle game, and yet it has a back story. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I think that's essential. I don't want to
Speaker 1: play a game that's just pure abstract mathematics and mechanics.
Speaker 1: I want some cool fluff in there. That's how I
Speaker 1: get engaged with it. Of course, the exception would be Tetris, exactly, yes,
Speaker 1: because there is well we'll discuss some that have some
Speaker 1: fluff added on, and sometimes the fluff is delightful, but
Speaker 1: for the most part, tetris is the exception to the rule. Okay,
Speaker 1: but so William the conqueror gets a chessboard, smashes it
Speaker 1: into a bunch of pentominoes, and you've got to fit
Speaker 1: them back together, right though, of course they're not called
Speaker 1: pentominoes at the time. It's not until three that American
Speaker 1: profess their Solomon W. Golam, actually coins the term. So
Speaker 1: what he did is he took the word domino, which,
Speaker 1: of course we know is a little a little block
Speaker 1: that you line up a play dominoes, whether you do
Speaker 1: cascading dominot guy who makes the pizza, yeah, exactly, that
Speaker 1: that sort of domino. So he took the word domino,
Speaker 1: and then he and it. He treated it kind of
Speaker 1: whimsically as if it was die domino, as if omino
Speaker 1: were a shape and Die referred to the number of
Speaker 1: squares cubes making it up because there are two squares
Speaker 1: and a domino exactly, So he said, what if there
Speaker 1: were other omino's, So in this case, a pent domino
Speaker 1: is penta or five plus omino. Likewise, we already mentioned tetromino,
Speaker 1: which would be tetra four plus domino, right, um and uh.
Speaker 1: And he also threw out just a general polyominos, a
Speaker 1: term for these various constructions depending on how many different
Speaker 1: square que elements are making them up. So there could
Speaker 1: be like sex dominoes or sept dominoes exactly. Though. I
Speaker 1: imagine as you go higher and higher up the list
Speaker 1: of cardinal numbers there, the number of possible shapes just explodes, right,
Speaker 1: because as you add more squares to move around in
Speaker 1: different positions, you could probably make an ultimately infinite number
Speaker 1: of shapes. Yeah, Like I mean, the bigger ones are
Speaker 1: going to resemble full blown levels from video games or
Speaker 1: or dungeoning adventures from Dungeons and Dragons with each of
Speaker 1: the cubes, right. Um. Now, all of this comes to
Speaker 1: a head publicly with his nineteen article Checkerboards and Polyominos
Speaker 1: in American Mathematical monthly and this this really came out.
Speaker 1: This kick started a lot of interest in these shapes
Speaker 1: and the kind of puzzles you could have with them. Okay,
Speaker 1: so pentomino puzzles good stuff, big business. Yeah, well, and
Speaker 1: I mean his big business is you're gonna have in
Speaker 1: recreational mathematics in the mid twentieth century. But but it's
Speaker 1: certainly we're not talking about Marl Borrows here, right, But
Speaker 1: it's still it's catching on. It's it already has an
Speaker 1: addictive property to it. In then in Night it actually
Speaker 1: launches off the pen and paper, off the table and
Speaker 1: into the world of computers. Because at this point we
Speaker 1: end up with a computer program that generates solutions for
Speaker 1: an eight by eight polyomino puzzle. So we're already obsolete. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: we're already getting the human element out of it, and
Speaker 1: we're already seeing it take off into the world of
Speaker 1: computer programming in a very early stage. So I imagine,
Speaker 1: if you're just trying to cram pieces together into a checkerboard,
Speaker 1: and you've got a fixed number of pieces and a
Speaker 1: fixed board size, there are a limited number of solutions, right. Yeah.
Speaker 1: According to the University of Victoria Department of computer sciences.
Speaker 1: It's now known that there are two thousand, three hundred
Speaker 1: and thirty nine solutions for the six by ten rectangle,
Speaker 1: a thousand and ten solutions for the five by twelve rectangle,
Speaker 1: three hundred and sixty eight solutions for the four by
Speaker 1: fifteen rectangle, and two solutions for the three by twenty rectangle.
Speaker 1: So so yeah, this is you see this, this idea,
Speaker 1: this new type of shape puzzle just taking off in
Speaker 1: the world of recreational mathematics. Uh, finding a warm, warm
Speaker 1: home there, and that's the sort of sort of soil
Speaker 1: from which this maddening Tetris vine emerges and you can
Speaker 1: The interesting thing here is you can even factor in
Speaker 1: some some interesting non Tetris stuff here. For instance, John
Speaker 1: Horton Conway's seventy Game of Life cellular automaton simulation. What
Speaker 1: is that? Oh? I think we may have mentioned it
Speaker 1: on here in some past episodes, and we should probably
Speaker 1: discover it in more depth later on. But it's essentially
Speaker 1: a very simple um geometric based simulation. Many of you
Speaker 1: may have seen images from this where it basically looks
Speaker 1: like crazy little Tetris shapes moving around and changing form
Speaker 1: on a screen sort of one of those uh cell
Speaker 1: evolutions simulators. Yeah, the big one really, um and uh yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's a fascinating topic on to its own, so
Speaker 1: we may have to come back on on that one
Speaker 1: at a later day. Okay, well, you have laid the
Speaker 1: soil out of which you, as you say, the vines
Speaker 1: of Tetris grow. But I think we should turn to
Speaker 1: the vines themselves, because what fascinating vines they are, a
Speaker 1: lot of people might not have guessed this, so some
Speaker 1: people probably already know the story. Uh. The creation of Tetris,
Speaker 1: strangely enough, takes place in a nineteen eighties Soviet computing
Speaker 1: lab in Moscow with a slightly board artificial intelligence researcher
Speaker 1: discovering the ancient secret of Tetris under the ruse of
Speaker 1: testing computer hardware capabilities um so. The the creator of
Speaker 1: Tetris is named Alexei Petnov, and he was a computer
Speaker 1: programmer and artificial intelligence researcher working for the Academy of
Speaker 1: Science of the USSR SO the Soviet Union Zone Academy
Speaker 1: of Science. And he was working in a lab that
Speaker 1: would occasionally be sent a new piece of computer hardware,
Speaker 1: and in this case, in the case of Tetris, they
Speaker 1: were sent this thing called the Electronica sixty. It sounds fancy, yeah, wonderful,
Speaker 1: And a part of paget knobs duties would be to
Speaker 1: create software to run on the new computers of the
Speaker 1: new hardware they're being sent in order to test what
Speaker 1: it was capable of, so to say like, oh, okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: this this computer is fine because it can run this
Speaker 1: demanding piece of software. A okay. So in in paget
Speaker 1: Knov's own words, this became his quote excuse for making games,
Speaker 1: which I mean, that's gonna be a pretty cool job
Speaker 1: comparatively in the Soviet Union. In oh yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: that's a pretty great situation anywhere where you find the
Speaker 1: way to make your job even more engaging, or make
Speaker 1: it engaging to begin with, without actually just completely knocking
Speaker 1: off and doing your own thing. Right. So, paget Knobs
Speaker 1: in this lab testing the electronic of sixty, and what
Speaker 1: he comes up with to test it is Tetris. Tetris
Speaker 1: is one of these games he creates. And I don't
Speaker 1: know to what extent we really try to describe Tetris,
Speaker 1: because I feel like almost everybody who's going to be
Speaker 1: listening to this has seen Tetris. If you haven't, you
Speaker 1: should go watch a video of somebody playing Tetris on YouTube.
Speaker 1: Any number of official Tetris or Tetris knockoff versions that
Speaker 1: you can just play online. Yeah, I found a free website.
Speaker 1: I don't know if this is legal, it's probably not, actually,
Speaker 1: but I found a website that has an emulator that
Speaker 1: will emulate the any S version of Tetris that's in browser.
Speaker 1: And it's pretty great at the any S version. I
Speaker 1: really like the graphics. Yeah, yeah, it was a great
Speaker 1: use of the you know, simple graphics to deliver the
Speaker 1: Tetris experience. Though I do still prefer the music from
Speaker 1: the game Boy version, but danswer the sugar plumb Ferry
Speaker 1: is good to either way. You should you should play
Speaker 1: Tetris a little get in the mood for this episode. Uh,
Speaker 1: you can pause right here and go do that and
Speaker 1: come back if you like otherwise we will continue. But basically,
Speaker 1: what Tetris is is you've got seven blocks of different
Speaker 1: shapes and these are the tetrominos that we were talking
Speaker 1: about earlier, and they fall from the top of the
Speaker 1: screen towards the bottom of the screen on a little
Speaker 1: playing area, and the player can move the blocks around
Speaker 1: left to right and can rotate them in increments of
Speaker 1: ninety degrees, so you can flip the piece and you
Speaker 1: can move it side to side. But what you can't
Speaker 1: do is stop it from falling. There's the inexorable creep
Speaker 1: towards the bottom of the screen. And so what the
Speaker 1: player does is arranged the blocks to form and then
Speaker 1: clear solid horizontal lines. Oh yeah, that's satisfying moment where
Speaker 1: you have blocks all the way across a single line
Speaker 1: and then that that line just vanishes. Yeah, And so
Speaker 1: if the blocks stack up all the way to the
Speaker 1: top of the screen, the game is over. Interestingly enough,
Speaker 1: Paget and have said that originally the lines did not
Speaker 1: clear in the version of the game he was making,
Speaker 1: that you would just try to stack them, but he
Speaker 1: found that the screen filled up too quick. You know,
Speaker 1: you'd make these stacked rows and eventually it reached the
Speaker 1: top of the screen. So then he came up with
Speaker 1: the idea of every time you created a solid row,
Speaker 1: having it van ish and and just turn into magical
Speaker 1: abstract points. Then I think that's interesting because it you
Speaker 1: can see the roots of the recreational mathematical puzzle there, right,
Speaker 1: because you wouldn't have um that much space if you
Speaker 1: were just throwing this out on a sheet of paper.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah. So if if the blocks stack up all
Speaker 1: the way to the top of the screen, of course
Speaker 1: games over that that's your death in the game terms.
Speaker 1: And as the game goes on, the blocks begin to
Speaker 1: fall faster and faster, which of course makes it harder
Speaker 1: to fit them in as time goes on, and eventually
Speaker 1: in most versions of the game, you get to something
Speaker 1: that the players would call a kill screen or a
Speaker 1: death screen, which is in the any S version at
Speaker 1: least level twenty nine, or the transition between level twenty
Speaker 1: nine and thirty, where the blocks just fall so fast
Speaker 1: it's impossible to play anymore. You cannot continue though. Actually,
Speaker 1: before we did this episode, I watched a documentary called
Speaker 1: The Ecstasy of Order about tetris Cha ampiends that, which
Speaker 1: I recommend if if you'll at home, want to watch
Speaker 1: it. It It was really interesting and there are a couple
Speaker 1: of players who do manage to get to level thirty.
Speaker 1: In it, it's a very brief, fleeting victory. Does it
Speaker 1: so that the game itself does not stop and say, hey,
Speaker 1: you've won Tetris, but you've merely you've made it to
Speaker 1: a threshold of survivability that no one else has reached.
Speaker 1: With a vast majority of players know, it's not like
Speaker 1: you've won. You've still died. You've just died a little
Speaker 1: bit farther along the track the trail than anybody else
Speaker 1: has gone before. And that's an interesting thing about Tetris too.
Speaker 1: You can never win. There is no winning, there's only
Speaker 1: getting farther before you die, which makes Tetris a lot
Speaker 1: like life. It is, yeah, and been probably a good
Speaker 1: lesson for a young gamer to encounter, where you especially
Speaker 1: if you're up against the impossibility of mission impossible, where
Speaker 1: there's just no getting to the end of it and
Speaker 1: you just feel constantly like the metal gear these dogs stop. Well,
Speaker 1: now I'll play Tetris. It's like the experience of the
Speaker 1: game is you're never gonna get your money's worth out
Speaker 1: of that game because you're not getting to the end
Speaker 1: of it, to the narrative end of the game. But
Speaker 1: there is no narrative in Tetris other than the simple
Speaker 1: narrative of shapes coming at you that are stacked them
Speaker 1: and try to stave off the inevitable. Yeah, so what
Speaker 1: happened when Alexey Pajitnov made this game? So? He claimed
Speaker 1: he was inspired by his love of puzzle games like
Speaker 1: pin Tominoes, the ones that we're talking about before, and
Speaker 1: he he came up with the mechanics of Tetris with
Speaker 1: pent tominoes in mind, but then he decided to go
Speaker 1: with tetrauminos to simplify things, basically, to make the game simpler.
Speaker 1: Uh fun fact, since the Electronica sixty that he was
Speaker 1: using had very little in the way of graphical capabilities,
Speaker 1: the original shapes were made out of text characters. I
Speaker 1: think there were brackets, so that would make sense. So
Speaker 1: falling shapes made out of brackets. I do want to
Speaker 1: throw in that there there are plenty of other knockoffs
Speaker 1: of Tetris out there, and apparently some of them do
Speaker 1: use pin tominos rather than tetrauminose. Oh dude. In preparing
Speaker 1: for this episode, I played one. There's one online called
Speaker 1: pent Trist that uses not pent Trist but but pent
Speaker 1: Trists like Tetris, and it uses pin tominoes, and at
Speaker 1: least in the time I played it, it was significantly
Speaker 1: harder than Tetris. Yeah, yeah, I imagine it would be
Speaker 1: just one more piece. Likewise, if you were to play
Speaker 1: Tetris with simpler shapes, I imagine it would the game
Speaker 1: would fall apart too easily, Like what if you were
Speaker 1: playing them with dominoes, that would be that would just
Speaker 1: be base level, way too easy, to the point if
Speaker 1: you would get bored out it almost immediately. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think four really is the perfect number. I I will
Speaker 1: argue very strongly in that in that propositions defense. But anyway,
Speaker 1: pactually not recounts to The Guardian where he told his
Speaker 1: own story about this. He says, quote, I pretended I
Speaker 1: was debugging my program, but in truth I just couldn't
Speaker 1: stop playing it. When other people tried it, they couldn't either.
Speaker 1: It was so abstract that was its great quality. It
Speaker 1: appealed to everybody. And I think this may be something
Speaker 1: about why so many people can get into Tetris, even
Speaker 1: people who don't usually play video games. They can pick
Speaker 1: up Tetris and immediately feel at home and intrigued. And
Speaker 1: I think it has something to do with the lack
Speaker 1: of representational nature of it. It's like geometrical art you
Speaker 1: might see in a mosque or something. You know, it's
Speaker 1: like it doesn't have characters or familiar objects. It's just
Speaker 1: shapes and space and time and movement. Utterly universal. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: completely devoid of any dependency on on its as similarity
Speaker 1: to a real world scenario. It's completely in its own universe. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So what happens when you create an amazing and addictive
Speaker 1: game while employed by the Soviet Union, Well that was
Speaker 1: an interesting question for peasant Nov and he kind of
Speaker 1: feared what would happen if he tried to make money
Speaker 1: off of his game. So the game started getting passed
Speaker 1: around from place to place. In in Russia, there were
Speaker 1: floppy disks of it that people were taking two different workplaces,
Speaker 1: and then everybody would get addicted to it and not
Speaker 1: do their jobs, so it sort of posed a problem.
Speaker 1: Eventually it made its way to Hungary, and then from
Speaker 1: Hungary it made its way to the rest of Europe,
Speaker 1: the United States, Japan, and the whole world. Um. But
Speaker 1: for for ten years, Paget Knobs seeded the game rights
Speaker 1: to the government to the Soviet Union, and so he
Speaker 1: didn't really see much money from Tetris for a long time.
Speaker 1: But eventually, once that expired, in the nineties he got
Speaker 1: more involved, and uh, I'm not sure if how much
Speaker 1: money he eventually made off of Tetris. I I hope,
Speaker 1: I hope it did well for him. Yeah, I hope
Speaker 1: so too. I certainly remember seeing his name on even
Speaker 1: the ne s because his ties. Your eyes were glued
Speaker 1: to the program and you couldn't help but notice anything
Speaker 1: in the system that resembled the outside world, such as
Speaker 1: such as his name or St. Basil's Cathedral, which was
Speaker 1: on the loading screen. Yeah, or yeah, if you did
Speaker 1: really well in the game, I think you could watch St.
Speaker 1: Basil's Cathedral being launched into space. Goodness, gracious, yes, yes,
Speaker 1: why I haven't thought about that forever. I never really
Speaker 1: understood why that happens, but it was it was it
Speaker 1: the idea that the cathedral is secretly an alien spaceship
Speaker 1: that has been planted on Earth. Then yes, and it
Speaker 1: just it had to use our brain power, the collective
Speaker 1: brain power of a Tetris obsessed planet, to to actually
Speaker 1: launch it back into the stars. Yeah. But so Passion
Speaker 1: now gives a pretty cool perspective on the role Tetris
Speaker 1: played in the early consumer adoption of the computer. Actually,
Speaker 1: he says Tetris came along early and had a very
Speaker 1: important role in breaking down ordinary people's inhibitions in front
Speaker 1: of computers, which were scary objects to non professionals used
Speaker 1: to pen and paper. But the fact that something so
Speaker 1: simple and beautiful could have here on screen destroyed that barrier.
Speaker 1: I like to think that's true. Yeah, yeah, I would
Speaker 1: think so. I mean you think of if you think
Speaker 1: back to early computer games, to some many but not
Speaker 1: all of them, we're a bit abstract looking on the
Speaker 1: screen to the point where I could see them being
Speaker 1: very intimidating. Like I remember as a kid, we were
Speaker 1: at somebody's house and they had at some sort of
Speaker 1: submarine simulation game, and only you really had to use
Speaker 1: your imagination to see the any kind of actual submarine
Speaker 1: uh simulation going on. Yeah, well, I mean have you
Speaker 1: seen any of the old hundred Star Wars games where
Speaker 1: they're trying to represent the characters from Star Wars or
Speaker 1: the ships from Star Wars. But you know they've got
Speaker 1: an a t a t walker like in the Empire
Speaker 1: Strikes Back, and it's just it's a big dog. It's
Speaker 1: like or it's a horse. It's a four legged animal
Speaker 1: of some kind and you're just like some pixels flying
Speaker 1: around shooting at it. And I don't want to criticize
Speaker 1: limited graphics and and the importance of imagination, because some
Speaker 1: of my favorite gaming experiences that had yet uh to
Speaker 1: be equaled by our our heavy graphics age, or some
Speaker 1: of those where you had just enough graphics graph graphical
Speaker 1: detail to give you an idea of what it was
Speaker 1: and the rest was your imagination. So yeah, yeah, that
Speaker 1: that's true. I just think that there's less of a
Speaker 1: gap when you're talking about using limited graphics to do
Speaker 1: something abstract versus to do something that's supposed to be
Speaker 1: representational of images you recognize. But anyway, Tetris after this
Speaker 1: went on to become big business all around the world.
Speaker 1: It was eventually licensed from the Russians by a video
Speaker 1: game licensor named Hank Rogers, which led to what was,
Speaker 1: as I've said, in my opinion, the definitive version of
Speaker 1: Tetris with the definitive music Tetris on the game Boy.
Speaker 1: And so in nineteen nine Nintendo released Tetris for the
Speaker 1: game Boy and the NES and sold millions of copies.
Speaker 1: And then of course in ninet Tetris became the central
Speaker 1: game in the Do you remember these the Nintendo World Championships.
Speaker 1: Oh this was There was the Fred Savage movie The Wizard.
Speaker 1: Uh that I think it was all promotion for that. Yes,
Speaker 1: so tech with Tetris in The Wizard. It's been so
Speaker 1: ungin I've seen you know what, I've never actually seen
Speaker 1: The Wizard. I remember virtually nothing. I think it was
Speaker 1: really Wasn't it just a commercial for the power of
Speaker 1: love pretty much? But this is the perfect game for
Speaker 1: for that kind of scenario, right, because it's a it's
Speaker 1: a test of a true test of skill. Yeah. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: I think it makes perfect sense for this to be
Speaker 1: the central game and a video game competition, because, like
Speaker 1: I say, it's so universal, it feels so core, so ancient.
Speaker 1: It's like the ultimate game, and there's something about playing
Speaker 1: Tetris that is so inherently human. One of the things, Uh.
Speaker 1: An interesting fact I came across about Tetris is that
Speaker 1: Tetris is considered, it's in computational theory, a hard problem.
Speaker 1: It's considered MP complete, meaning that even a computer cannot
Speaker 1: play perfect Tetris. You can't write a computer program that
Speaker 1: automatically optimizes Tetris moves and always makes the best move
Speaker 1: because there is no known strategy for always determining the
Speaker 1: optimal move. And this is not the case for a
Speaker 1: lot of games. There are games like Connect four or
Speaker 1: you know, plenty of other puzzle games where there is
Speaker 1: inherently a best move you can make that you know
Speaker 1: logic times. Humans might not have enough computational ability to
Speaker 1: know what it is, but a computer can know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think we can all relate to that in front
Speaker 1: of Tetris playing experience, because you start off with a
Speaker 1: definite strategy in mind. Generally you want to build it
Speaker 1: up so that you can shoot down a vertical um
Speaker 1: tetramino and just clear four rows at once, and then
Speaker 1: do that again, do that as many times as you can,
Speaker 1: but you're going to reach that point where that's no
Speaker 1: longer an option. Where each shape, each new shape as
Speaker 1: it comes and maybe you have the preview box that
Speaker 1: tells you what the next one is going to be.
Speaker 1: You can try and crunch that data as well, but
Speaker 1: it's very much a real time problem from from block
Speaker 1: to block. Yeah. Yeah, the preview boxes actually, I think
Speaker 1: a really important part of Tetris strategy. I don't know
Speaker 1: if I mentioned that when I was describing Tetris earlier.
Speaker 1: I mean, you've played Tetris, you know. But the big
Speaker 1: thing about Tetris strategy is it will show you not
Speaker 1: just the block that's currently falling, but what the next
Speaker 1: block up is. But after that, it's a big mystery.
Speaker 1: And and even the computer can't solve this problem. There
Speaker 1: is no computer that that can solve Tetris. It's a
Speaker 1: it's a mystery. It's an ancient mystery. I insist it is. Okay,
Speaker 1: So in this episode, we're eventually going to talk about
Speaker 1: the neurological effects of Tetris on the human brain, the
Speaker 1: sort of the psychology and neurology of Tetris. But before
Speaker 1: we get into that, we got to mention one more
Speaker 1: thing about Tetris and culture, which is all of the
Speaker 1: wonderful Tetris knockoffs that have that have come from this game. Because,
Speaker 1: like anything that sells millions and millions of copies and
Speaker 1: becomes a phenomenon, uh, like Tetris, you're gonna see other
Speaker 1: people wanted to get in on the on the action,
Speaker 1: uh and put their own particular spin on it. And
Speaker 1: a lot of many of them are great. They're perfectly serviceable,
Speaker 1: they're just complete rip offs. Sometimes they try and add
Speaker 1: their own thing, like trying to use a different polyomino
Speaker 1: in order in order to spice things up. But one
Speaker 1: of my favorites is just pure fluff on top of
Speaker 1: a traditional Tetris game, and that's the release Monty Python
Speaker 1: and the Quest for the Holy Grail, a PC game
Speaker 1: which included a Tetris mini game called drop Dead that
Speaker 1: involved fabulously throwing plague victims into a mass grave. So
Speaker 1: so they were shaped, Yes, each tetromino is shaped like
Speaker 1: a medieval peasant, and sometimes their body has been you know,
Speaker 1: this way or that, or they're just completely uh straight,
Speaker 1: but you're throw you're throwing those into the mass grave
Speaker 1: and the bodies keep piling up and they're falling fast
Speaker 1: like any kind of a Tetris game, with the added
Speaker 1: feature that sometimes one isn't quite dead yet and makes
Speaker 1: it makes moving it around more challenging because it's fighting
Speaker 1: back and trying to to wiggle free, and you just
Speaker 1: want to throw as many bodies into the mass grave
Speaker 1: as possible. Right, Yeah, you got a job to do. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So that's that's the best I've I've ever seen. Um,
Speaker 1: you there have been various other attempts to spice it up.
Speaker 1: There was a particularly there's a two thousand four mini
Speaker 1: game in Mortal Kombat Deception. Oh man, they're still making
Speaker 1: Mortal Kombat games in two thousand four. Yeah, they still
Speaker 1: make them today, I guess. Yeah. In Mortal Kombat X
Speaker 1: just came out. I don't think. I don't think everyone
Speaker 1: beyond Mortal Kombat three in the arcade game version, well
Speaker 1: there was you know, four was kind of a I think,
Speaker 1: a dark point for a lot of people. But I
Speaker 1: know that they put up They put out some great
Speaker 1: games in recent times. But the Tetris mini game in
Speaker 1: two thousand four was not actually so great. It was
Speaker 1: just like typical Tetris with some little bobble head Mortal
Speaker 1: Kombat characters. I think they would have been far better
Speaker 1: off just ripping off Monty Python's take on it and
Speaker 1: just have you know, dead monks and ninjas falling into
Speaker 1: a pit. Yeah, so, uh, Katana's out there doing finishing
Speaker 1: moves on people and throwing all their dead body parts
Speaker 1: into the I can see that. But they were probably
Speaker 1: you know, pressed for time, so that seems like they've
Speaker 1: got just violent variations on Tetris basically. Yeah, but then
Speaker 1: there's also the sexy take, and I'm gonna leave you,
Speaker 1: the listener to explore this more on your own. I
Speaker 1: don't know if there's a definitive sexy Tetris, but it
Speaker 1: looks like they're various scenarios that involve humanoid tetraumino's interlocking
Speaker 1: with each other. So it seems inherently disturbing, like stacking sex.
Speaker 1: I guess, you know, kind of a Kama Sutra um
Speaker 1: group sex take on Tetris. It's out there if you
Speaker 1: want to explore it. Uh. And then I think they
Speaker 1: also just have Tetris with a backdrop of a naked
Speaker 1: person or something, so that exists as well. Uh, an
Speaker 1: interesting attempt to put some sort of fluff on top
Speaker 1: of this most perfect game. You don't need that. That
Speaker 1: would be distracting. It's Tetris, That's what I'm thinking. I mean,
Speaker 1: why are you trying to mess with Tetris. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: seems like you would have only that's the kind of
Speaker 1: game you would only play for a few minutes and
Speaker 1: go like ha ha, that's clever, or oh that's not
Speaker 1: really clever, and then you'd move back to just playing
Speaker 1: pure tetris right. One of the Tetris arcade games I
Speaker 1: saw in the in the documentary I was talking about earlier,
Speaker 1: the Ecstasy of Order is invisible Tetris. I didn't know
Speaker 1: about this before, but that's where you can only see
Speaker 1: the blocks while they're falling, but once they land, they
Speaker 1: become invisible. I can't even imagine trying to play that.
Speaker 1: That sounds really frustratingly hard. I would again, I'd rather
Speaker 1: just play regular Tetris, and of course would be remiss
Speaker 1: if we didn't mention the various three D forms of
Speaker 1: Tetris that have come out where you're using three natural
Speaker 1: tetrominos and trying to assemble them. And I played those before.
Speaker 1: Those those I feel like those are also fun for
Speaker 1: a limited amount of time, and then you want to
Speaker 1: go back to good old two dimensional Tetris. We keep
Speaker 1: saying Texas instead of Tetris. It makes me think that
Speaker 1: there should be a geographical representations or like you know,
Speaker 1: U S States represented as as as square block formations
Speaker 1: that you try to fit together. Yeah, yeah, the United
Speaker 1: States as an assembl at Like, how does t see
Speaker 1: fit into Texas? I guess you couldn't do it proportionally
Speaker 1: because every time in Alaska fell, the game would just
Speaker 1: be over. But we should take a break to hear
Speaker 1: from our sponsor, and then when we come back, we're
Speaker 1: going to talk about some of the brain science of Tetris.
Speaker 1: Some of the science has been done on how Tetris
Speaker 1: affects our minds. Hey, we're back, So it is time
Speaker 1: to talk about something that has been called in the
Speaker 1: media the Tetris effect or Tetris syndrome, which I like
Speaker 1: that one even more because it has a slightly nefarious
Speaker 1: air to it. Yeah, so I have talked about how
Speaker 1: I think Tetris is an ancient mystery. But have you
Speaker 1: ever noticed how the six rectangular pains on each half
Speaker 1: of a home window can form all of the Tetris
Speaker 1: blocks except, of course, the most beautiful and most cherished
Speaker 1: of all blocks, the long bar, But all the other blocks.
Speaker 1: You know, you you've got the six pains arranged in
Speaker 1: the two by three formation. You can make the T,
Speaker 1: you can make the L, you can make the S
Speaker 1: and the Z and the square. And how the corners
Speaker 1: of the coffee table in your house are kind of
Speaker 1: like L blocks, which just fits so nicely against the
Speaker 1: square block. That really is the essence of this foot rest.
Speaker 1: And really, when droplets of water be together on a
Speaker 1: rain splashed window and eventually flow away, it really is
Speaker 1: a lot like how the stacks of blocks flow away
Speaker 1: from viewing Tetris once you've completed four solid lines. And
Speaker 1: then of course you begin to see how the Tetris
Speaker 1: blocks do come creeping down from the darkness at night
Speaker 1: when you lie in bed, and they follow you into
Speaker 1: your dreams. And how I'm going to stop you there, Joe,
Speaker 1: because this sounds like, if not Tetris syndrome or the
Speaker 1: Tetris effect, perhaps even Tatris madness, all blown Tetris madness. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is what most people have described as the Tetris effect. It's,
Speaker 1: in short, when Tetris players have dreams or mild hallucinations
Speaker 1: about the game, the mechanics and visual aesthetic of the
Speaker 1: game follow you beyond the gameplay itself into your life.
Speaker 1: You see Tetris in the world, you hallucinate blocks and
Speaker 1: places where they're not, and you dream about them as
Speaker 1: you're falling asleep at night. I definitely remember this from
Speaker 1: that Christmas that we got Tetris playing it for certain
Speaker 1: a number of hours, and then afterwards you close your
Speaker 1: eyes and then against the darkness, you see the blocks falling.
Speaker 1: And then you're trying to sleep at night and you
Speaker 1: see the blocks following, and you're dreaming and the blocks
Speaker 1: are still falling. And it was never frightening, but it
Speaker 1: was just it was like unlike anything I'd experienced before.
Speaker 1: It was essentially a paranormal experience, uh, but but one
Speaker 1: that was so abstract, so so without narrative. It wasn't
Speaker 1: like I was seeing space, aliens or anything. You were
Speaker 1: just seeing the pure geometric wonder of Tetris playing through
Speaker 1: your your vision, you know. I looked up online to
Speaker 1: see if this had happened with any other games, and
Speaker 1: it certainly has, I think, maybe not to the same
Speaker 1: extent as Tetris. But I google the Minecraft to hallucinations.
Speaker 1: I've never played Minecraft, but I just wanted to see
Speaker 1: what you'd come up with, and oh yeah, I found
Speaker 1: some Yahoo q and Yahoo answers and some forum threads
Speaker 1: where people are like, I'm I'm dreaming about things from Minecraft,
Speaker 1: and I'm seeing Minecraft blocks all over the place. This
Speaker 1: does seem to be a way in which our brains
Speaker 1: are susceptible to visuospatial tasks or images that we have
Speaker 1: to manipulate in a virtual world, especially in something as
Speaker 1: addictive and engrossing as Tetris. And this has been reported
Speaker 1: on for a while now. The earliest reference I can
Speaker 1: find to the term the Tetris effect. Uh, and this
Speaker 1: seems to be most people say that this is the
Speaker 1: first time the term appears is a n article called
Speaker 1: this is Your Brain on Tetris from Wired. Yes, great article.
Speaker 1: It's still off online, you can still access it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So it was written by Jeffrey Goldsmith. And if you're
Speaker 1: too young to remember the this is your Brain on
Speaker 1: Drugs commercials And I don't know how widespread that reference
Speaker 1: point is anymore. Uh, it was, well, it was one
Speaker 1: of the most charming touchstones in the nineteen He's propaganda,
Speaker 1: Ward's narcotics. But Guy's got an egg. He holds up
Speaker 1: the egg, he says, this is your brain. He cracks it,
Speaker 1: drops it in a pan, pries it says, this is
Speaker 1: your brain on drugs. Yeah. Great, great marketing. Uh, but
Speaker 1: but the the effectiveness of that marketing is a is
Speaker 1: a topic unto itself for sure. Yeah. So the obvious
Speaker 1: implication is of Goldsmith's title This is Your Brain on
Speaker 1: Tetris is that he's sort of accusing Tetris of being
Speaker 1: a hallucinogen or some kind of psychotropic agent. Uh. Yet
Speaker 1: he also brings over the associations with addictiveness or compulsive behavior,
Speaker 1: and I would just want to read a quote from
Speaker 1: his article. He says no home was sweet without a
Speaker 1: game boy. In nine that year, I stayed for a
Speaker 1: week with a friend in Tokyo. For a week in
Speaker 1: quotation marks I think meaning longer uh, and tetris enslaved
Speaker 1: my brain at night. Geometric shapes fell in the darkness
Speaker 1: as I lay on the loan to tommy floor space.
Speaker 1: Days I sat on a lavender suede sofa and played
Speaker 1: Tetris furiously. During rare jaunts from the house, I visually
Speaker 1: fit cars and trees and people together, dubiously. Hunting a
Speaker 1: job in a house, I was still there two months later,
Speaker 1: still jobless, still playing my friend. An economists threatened a
Speaker 1: battery deprivation, but he knew my habit ran deep, knew
Speaker 1: that I could always tilt, blinded by sunlight, to a
Speaker 1: convenience store to save face. I would buy a box
Speaker 1: of tiny chocolate filled bears as if double A power
Speaker 1: cells were an afterthought, not the meaning of my wretched life.
Speaker 1: And he also refers to Tetris later in the article
Speaker 1: as an electronic drug or and this is a great term,
Speaker 1: a pharmatronic farmatronic. I like it. I don't know if
Speaker 1: that later appeared in like William Gibson novels or something,
Speaker 1: but it sounds like it should. But anyway. Goldsmith then
Speaker 1: reports on some research we're going to describe in in
Speaker 1: just a minute about what the brain of a Tetris
Speaker 1: player looks like. But the term Tetris effect shows up
Speaker 1: later in his article, where he says the Tetris effect
Speaker 1: is a biochemical reductionistic metaphor, if you will, for curiosity invention.
Speaker 1: The creative urge to fit shapes together is to organize,
Speaker 1: to build, to make deals, to fix, to understand, to
Speaker 1: fold sheets. All of our mental activities are analogous, each
Speaker 1: as potentially addictive as the next. So once again we
Speaker 1: see that Tetris it's a perfect metaphor for just about
Speaker 1: everything we do in our life. Yeah, I mean not
Speaker 1: only just the inevitability of of annihilation, but just the
Speaker 1: it's just our the basic way that we tackle mental tasks.
Speaker 1: It combines the the seeking order effect, like we're trying
Speaker 1: to create solid blocks out of these you know, disordered,
Speaker 1: unfitting shapes, and so we're seeking to create order to
Speaker 1: impose his order on a chaotic universe. But it also
Speaker 1: has the uh, the task clearance type of mechanic that
Speaker 1: we use throughout our daily work lives. You know, you
Speaker 1: have a you have a to do list, and the
Speaker 1: most satisfying part of every day is crossing that thing
Speaker 1: off your to do list, which in Tetris you get
Speaker 1: you get to do constantly. You know, every some number
Speaker 1: of seconds, you clear a line and it disappears, it
Speaker 1: quite literally disappears, and in being crossed automatically off your
Speaker 1: to do list. So it Tetris again mimics life, and
Speaker 1: sometimes life throws some bad blocks at you and you
Speaker 1: just have to accept that they're not going to fit
Speaker 1: into your order. But maybe that next block will help
Speaker 1: you work this one out and it's eventually you'll create
Speaker 1: some sort of order around it. Yeah, I think that's
Speaker 1: entirely true. And if you listen to these professional Tetris players,
Speaker 1: the one who are the ones who get really deep
Speaker 1: into it, you know, they'll they'll talk about the sort
Speaker 1: of the fortune goddess of Tetris, the Tetris god who
Speaker 1: doles out good blocks and bad blocks. And you know,
Speaker 1: to a certain extent, the blocks you get are randomized. Um,
Speaker 1: but they're randomized in a particular way. There's this thing
Speaker 1: referred to as a bag that keeps a certain number
Speaker 1: of blocks in it, and you get you get the
Speaker 1: blocks from the bag, and then it's re randomized. But uh,
Speaker 1: they like, you can get a good run where they'll
Speaker 1: give you lots of long bars and it's very nice,
Speaker 1: happy times. You can get that to be to to
Speaker 1: be irritating though, if you've got too many long bars,
Speaker 1: Like why am I getting all these long bars now?
Speaker 1: I'm just having to just throw them on top of
Speaker 1: each other horizontally at the bottom. I need these later
Speaker 1: to to really drive home and kill. Yeah, why wasn't
Speaker 1: I getting these long bars when I was getting like
Speaker 1: seventeen S and Z bars. Uh? Those S and Z
Speaker 1: bars really are the worst. They're the ones that make
Speaker 1: the game as as cruel as it is. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: there was another quote I wanted to read, actually, that
Speaker 1: was from a psychologist, Russian psychologist named Vladimir Pokilko, and
Speaker 1: this sort of addresses the Tetris effect. Pokilko was a
Speaker 1: friend and partner of Alexei Pagetna, of the creator of
Speaker 1: Tetris Tetris, and he was one of the original patients
Speaker 1: in the first outbreak of Tetris madness in Russia in
Speaker 1: nineteen four. He he got to play it before it
Speaker 1: was a commercial item, back when it was a secret
Speaker 1: brain infection being traded on floppy disks around in Moscow.
Speaker 1: And he says about Tetris, quote, the main part is
Speaker 1: visual insight. You make your visual decision and it happens
Speaker 1: almost immediately. Insight means emotion, small but many of them
Speaker 1: every two three seconds. The second mechanism is unfinished action.
Speaker 1: Tetris has many unfinished actions that force you to continue
Speaker 1: and make it very addictive. The third is ottomization. In
Speaker 1: a couple of hours, the activity becomes automatic, a habit,
Speaker 1: a motivation to repeat. So, yeah, you've got some explanations
Speaker 1: there for maybe some of the cognitive appeal of constantly
Speaker 1: returning to thoughts of Tetris, if it's sort of taking
Speaker 1: over your brain, because you've got the pleasing feeling of
Speaker 1: solving a visual problem, you've got in the constant reward.
Speaker 1: Every time you solve it, you've got the unfinished action,
Speaker 1: always drawing you back to the problem. There is no
Speaker 1: conclusion to tetris. You'll never finish it. Yeah, it's impossible,
Speaker 1: and so failure is never super frustrating because failure is inevitable. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And then, of course the thirty says is automization. Eventually
Speaker 1: it becomes uh, not so much a deliberate action, but
Speaker 1: just an automatic part of your brain. You do it
Speaker 1: without even thinking. Yeah. I do also want to mention
Speaker 1: while researching the articles about the Tetris effect in the
Speaker 1: nineteen nineties, that I came across some frankly hilarious or
Speaker 1: at least retrospectively hilarious scare articles about games and technology
Speaker 1: destroying your brain. Uh there, Oh man, it was so
Speaker 1: funny about talking about this theory from the ninety nineties
Speaker 1: called cyber sickness. There there was a paper from the
Speaker 1: Technology Review in the nineties called Cybersickness Virtual Realities Dark Side.
Speaker 1: It's really funny looking back on the techno paranoia of
Speaker 1: a previous age, especially when it's addressed at things that
Speaker 1: we now consider to be so inherently harmless. I mean,
Speaker 1: who is worried about a virtual reality because it turned
Speaker 1: out to be such a bust and be Tetris? Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I think you could. There is a case to be
Speaker 1: made that certainly there are destructive elements to obsessive video
Speaker 1: game playing. So well sure, I mean if it comes
Speaker 1: at a if you spend enough time on it, that
Speaker 1: it's at a cost to your life. But certainly not. Yeah,
Speaker 1: nothing that would that that really matches up to that
Speaker 1: headline cyber sickness. Virtual reality is dark side. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: I think now we need to look at some neuroscience
Speaker 1: and psychiatry to see what's going on when you play
Speaker 1: Tetris and how it affects your brain. Yes, certainly the
Speaker 1: research underlying of these Tetris observations that we've been discussing here.
Speaker 1: So one of the first big ones came out in
Speaker 1: nineteen Uh. This is from a Richard Hare of the
Speaker 1: University of California at Irvine's Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior.
Speaker 1: So they did what you might expect, they scanned the
Speaker 1: brains of Tetris players. Okay, this is interesting because it's
Speaker 1: not just psychology here. They're not just getting people to
Speaker 1: reflect subjectively in their Tetris experience, but they're gathering physical
Speaker 1: evidence about playing Tetris. What does it actually look like? Yeah,
Speaker 1: so yeah, they're looking and actually looking at brain behavior
Speaker 1: during the playing of Tetris at varying stages, so hair
Speaker 1: is suspected, and ultimately found that the brain requires less
Speaker 1: energy to play higher levels of tetris um as opposed
Speaker 1: to lower levels. We which sounds crazy at first because
Speaker 1: we all know how how easy those early levels are
Speaker 1: and when you first start playing it, you know it's
Speaker 1: it's pretty easy. Going higher levels that gets so fast. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's when the stress really you think that would be
Speaker 1: when it was just you'd have maximum cognition levels going on.
Speaker 1: But uh so, this is what they found in first
Speaker 1: time users. Tetris significantly raises cerebral glucose metabolic rates or
Speaker 1: g m rs. So brain energy consumption soars as your
Speaker 1: head cheese tackles this puzzle for the first time. So
Speaker 1: your your brain is it's it's dealing with the difficult
Speaker 1: task and it says, I need sugar, give me energy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and especially with Tetris, and I imagine especially for someone
Speaker 1: who is you know, a novice to puzzle games of
Speaker 1: this nature, You're suddenly encountering this game that is easy
Speaker 1: to get into but drastically different in its presentation compared
Speaker 1: to anything else you've done before. Yeah, so you said
Speaker 1: this was funny. You said in first time users. I
Speaker 1: assume you meant players if you're making a drug joke there.
Speaker 1: I can't remember users that the term that I threw in,
Speaker 1: or if I picked that up from the original study.
Speaker 1: But um, but so, so those were the novices. What
Speaker 1: happened after that? Okay? So after four to eight weeks
Speaker 1: of daily doses of Tetris, uh, g mrs sink to
Speaker 1: normal while performance increases seven fold. Okay, and so ultimately
Speaker 1: Tetris masters have the lowest final g mrs of all.
Speaker 1: So as your skill increases and you get more and more,
Speaker 1: you become the Tetris master. The thing it tells you
Speaker 1: at the end if you do really good, congratulations you
Speaker 1: are Tetris master. Um, your brain uses less energy to
Speaker 1: get you there. Yeah, I mean, in effect, Tetris tain't
Speaker 1: trains your brain uh, and become to become more efficient
Speaker 1: at carrying the cognitive load required to solve the puzzle. Man,
Speaker 1: that seems so counterintuitive. Yeah, but here's the thing. Those
Speaker 1: high GMR levels, they leave you a feeling all amped
Speaker 1: up and uh and this is uh, this is your
Speaker 1: brain amped up to learn something new and guzzling down
Speaker 1: that energy to make it happen. And once it has
Speaker 1: acquired the skills, it ceases to guzzle all that glucose.
Speaker 1: So so yeah, it's your brain crunching this new problem,
Speaker 1: figuring out how to how to solve it, and figuring
Speaker 1: out how to solve it, uh with with a with
Speaker 1: a lower energy expenditure. Yeah. So, as Hair says, the
Speaker 1: brain might just become more efficient as the Tetris becomes
Speaker 1: or the Tetris solving program in your brain, as he says,
Speaker 1: becomes more unconscious and automatic. Yeah. Alright, So the next
Speaker 1: study we're gonna look at answers that question that many
Speaker 1: of you might have. What if the dude from Memento,
Speaker 1: the guy, the Guy Pierce character, what would happen if
Speaker 1: he played Tetris? Okay, so you're you're not talking about
Speaker 1: Joe Panaliono. No, we're talking talking about Guy Pierces. Uh
Speaker 1: no short, no, no new memories, dude, Interiro grade amnesia.
Speaker 1: He can't form new episodic memories and things that have
Speaker 1: recently happened. Yeah, what would happen if he played tetris? Well,
Speaker 1: Luckily there's a study that examines this. This is a
Speaker 1: two thousand study by Harvard psychiatrist Robert stood God. So
Speaker 1: he set out to study a similar feeling to that
Speaker 1: of playing tetris. Uh, that of a mountain climber who
Speaker 1: continues to feel the rocks beneath his or her hands
Speaker 1: after a day of climbing. And I imagine this is
Speaker 1: similar to you know, that feeling as you lay in
Speaker 1: bed after a day on the beach and the surf,
Speaker 1: where you still feel the surf or certainly something that
Speaker 1: comes to my mind and also, and also reminds me
Speaker 1: of of Tetris hallucinations and Tetris dreams is that when
Speaker 1: I worked in newspapers, I did a lot of paginations,
Speaker 1: like in designed to build these pages in the paper,
Speaker 1: sort of a form of tetris. Really. Yeah, I would
Speaker 1: often refer to it as word tetris because it's just
Speaker 1: words and images articles, and you're blocking all the pieces together,
Speaker 1: and a lot of times they are shaped like Tetris
Speaker 1: blocks to form this complete hole. And of course there's
Speaker 1: the added stress though that this is a product that
Speaker 1: is eventually going to be printed and sent out to
Speaker 1: all these people, and you don't want there to be
Speaker 1: any errors. And there's so many, so many places that
Speaker 1: there can be an error. If only you could have
Speaker 1: the crutch of adjusting the kerning on a real Tetris block. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so the uh, yeah, a little little pagination humor for
Speaker 1: for everyone out there. Um but but I remember having
Speaker 1: dreams at night where I was in my bed, laying
Speaker 1: in my bed and the pillows in the bed were
Speaker 1: either illustrations or articles on a on a on a
Speaker 1: page and in design, and that if I moved in
Speaker 1: the bed at all, it would upset the arrangement of
Speaker 1: the front page of the newspaper. Yeah. So it's that
Speaker 1: sort of thing. Or if you're if you're a Tatris player,
Speaker 1: it's Tatris hallucinations. If you're a rock climber, it's uh,
Speaker 1: it's kind of rock houstin agency experience after the fact. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I got to mention talking about the study the
Speaker 1: title of it, because the title is too good to miss.
Speaker 1: It's called Replaying the Game hypnogogic images in normals and
Speaker 1: amnesis normals normal normals, All right, normals. This is how
Speaker 1: it all went down. So stick Old asked twenty seven
Speaker 1: participants to play seven hours of Tetris over the course
Speaker 1: of three days. There are three groups involved in the study.
Speaker 1: Twelve novices okay, novice players, ten experts they're referred to
Speaker 1: as Tetris masters, and five amnesics with extensive bilateral medial
Speaker 1: temporal lobe damage. These five individuals were absolutely unable to
Speaker 1: learn and retain new episodic memories. Okay, so if you
Speaker 1: sat them down and taught them how to play Tetris
Speaker 1: and then met them again the next day, they would
Speaker 1: not remember that that had happened exactly. Yeah, so this
Speaker 1: is what they found. So the novices and experts all
Speaker 1: reported that they saw Tetris pieces floating down in front
Speaker 1: of their eyes as they were going to sleep at night.
Speaker 1: Not surprising, we know that's how it works. It's expected. However,
Speaker 1: the even the amnesics saw the blocks at night, even
Speaker 1: though they could not rem member playing the game, and
Speaker 1: as it turns out, they actually could play it. Just
Speaker 1: find the quote the performance of the m music patients
Speaker 1: showed only minimal, albeit significant improvement over seven hours of play.
Speaker 1: So their brains were still learning to play tetris even
Speaker 1: though they had no memories. Yeah, they weren't learning as
Speaker 1: well as the other novices, right, but they still were learning. Yeah, uh,
Speaker 1: strange And and this gets in of course, into the
Speaker 1: fact that there are numerous ways that memory works in
Speaker 1: the brain. There are different forms of memory. The two
Speaker 1: most important ones here for our purposes are as follows.
Speaker 1: First of all, in the hippocampus you have. This is
Speaker 1: the area that registers those episodic memories, the very memories
Speaker 1: that the m musics here could not form. Explicit memories
Speaker 1: of actual life events, episodic memories, Yeah, what happened yesterday?
Speaker 1: What did I do? What was it like? Playing tetris?
Speaker 1: But then the cortex registers implicit memories, the stuff we
Speaker 1: learned but no, don't necessarily have conscious access to. So
Speaker 1: might this be something like how to ride a bike
Speaker 1: or like that? Yeah? Things uh? Or imagine many of
Speaker 1: you encounter this with with passwords or things you type
Speaker 1: into the computer. Sometimes you can't you can't say what
Speaker 1: it is. You have to do it too, and then
Speaker 1: rediscover what you're actually doing. Yeah, you've made that method memory,
Speaker 1: but but you don't have a direct recall of the event. Right.
Speaker 1: So this study the experiences ob the mnesics here's suggests
Speaker 1: that Tetris syndrome is as much a matter of implicit
Speaker 1: memory as anything else, and that the brain is extracting
Speaker 1: memories from our experience, even subconsciously. Um. And then furthermore,
Speaker 1: the as memory consolidation uh takes place during sleep, Tetris
Speaker 1: divisions may stand out as a manifestation of that process.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I think this is taken as evidence in
Speaker 1: favor of the hypothesis. I don't know if of what
Speaker 1: degree it's a hypothesis or a widely accepted theory, but
Speaker 1: the idea at least that memory consolidation is what dreaming
Speaker 1: is largely about in sleep. Do you know how accepted
Speaker 1: that idea is? I mean, is that pretty solid or
Speaker 1: is that so it's pretty solid based on an episode
Speaker 1: recorded earlier in the year where I was researching the
Speaker 1: power of naps and the importance of naps, ethisodic memory
Speaker 1: formation came up a lot in that, So I think
Speaker 1: it's pretty accepted. Huh. Okay, Well, that's interesting because the
Speaker 1: idea that memory consolidation takes place during dreams and sleeping
Speaker 1: is going to come into play in a paper that
Speaker 1: I'm going to reference in the next episode, which will
Speaker 1: also be Tetris themed. So this science is fascinating because, uh,
Speaker 1: it explains something that is disturbingly common. I mean, one
Speaker 1: of it would be one thing if every now and
Speaker 1: then some weirdo said, well, I I hallucinated Tetris blocks.
Speaker 1: But this seems be completely normal, completely widespread for people
Speaker 1: who play the game. It takes over their brain in
Speaker 1: this way and sticks with them, and they hallucinate the
Speaker 1: blocks later. So I decided, as I said earlier, to
Speaker 1: search around and see if this happened with other games.
Speaker 1: Like I mentioned, there are people talking about Minecraft hallucinations,
Speaker 1: and there are people who talk about hallucinations related to
Speaker 1: other games, So that the principle of seeing the world
Speaker 1: in terms of visuospatial game elements, or even experiencing hallucinations
Speaker 1: of auditory and visual elements from games, is not unique
Speaker 1: to Tetris, though with Tetris it might be stronger than average,
Speaker 1: or maybe even much stronger than average. But anyway, that
Speaker 1: leads some experts to want to group what we're calling
Speaker 1: the Tetris effect under the broader category of what's called
Speaker 1: game transfer phenomenon. So there has been some research on this,
Speaker 1: but essentially it's been based on interviews and interacting with
Speaker 1: people who play video games and cataloging their experience to
Speaker 1: see if they transfer elements of game content or game
Speaker 1: interface into their real lives. I've seen accounts of individuals
Speaker 1: claiming to see health bars from playing World of Warcraft,
Speaker 1: and I definitely remember, like the only other game transfer
Speaker 1: um phenomenon that I can attest to my own life
Speaker 1: would be from playing way too much Grand Theft, Auto
Speaker 1: Vice City, and I can't, for the life of me,
Speaker 1: I can't exactly remember what I was seeing, but I
Speaker 1: would go from playing a lot of that too, then
Speaker 1: driving to work, which was stealing cars as well. No,
Speaker 1: luckily I can go that far. But certainly, the the
Speaker 1: experience of driving the cars in the game was was
Speaker 1: was was impacting the way that I observed driving a
Speaker 1: car in real life, which was a little scary considering
Speaker 1: all the things you do with cars in that game.
Speaker 1: That is a little scary, and that figures big into
Speaker 1: how the media has covered this. Uh, this scientific recognition
Speaker 1: of video game of game transfer phenomenon. But there there
Speaker 1: are much smaller, more innocuous versions of this. I mean,
Speaker 1: have you ever said, let's press pause or I just
Speaker 1: leveled up on something about a real world situation, or
Speaker 1: achievement unlocked or exactly yeah, somebody, somebody tweets achievement unlocked
Speaker 1: Swedish meatballs for breakfast. I mean, uh, that is that
Speaker 1: is an example of game transfer phenomenon. You're you're porting
Speaker 1: something about the game content or experience into your daily
Speaker 1: life outside the game. It kind of goes back to
Speaker 1: our Techno Religionist episodes that we recorded where we talked
Speaker 1: about how you can't help but incorporate technology into your
Speaker 1: symbolic metaphorical understanding of reality. And so I often think
Speaker 1: of like in many different topics that apply to the
Speaker 1: human experience. I often think in terms of the health
Speaker 1: bar and some of the type of bar, whether you're
Speaker 1: talking particularly. I remember in researching Willpower and how willpower
Speaker 1: our works and in its stated status, is this kind
Speaker 1: of depletable resource in the human mind you end up
Speaker 1: thinking about video games. It's the logical way to make
Speaker 1: sense of that and to picture it. Yeah, So some
Speaker 1: media coverage about exactly the kind of thing you're talking about,
Speaker 1: the intersection of of science and video games is of
Speaker 1: course not so sensible. And and as we've said, this
Speaker 1: example is no exception in response to the game transfer phenomenon.
Speaker 1: I know, one UK newspaper ran the headline gamers can't
Speaker 1: tell real world from fantasy, and generally much coverage has
Speaker 1: focused on sensational, violent implications of this kind of faulty premise.
Speaker 1: The researchers themselves disowned that kind of coverage. They're like, no,
Speaker 1: that's now what we're saying. Almost all of this is harmless,
Speaker 1: and they sort they compare it to the ways we
Speaker 1: incorporate other metaphors from other types of content and media
Speaker 1: we consume into our lives. I mean, it's just you
Speaker 1: could express things in terms of a TV show you
Speaker 1: watched or a book you read. When you participate with media,
Speaker 1: you you get some metaphors or some you know, cognitive
Speaker 1: sticking points from it. Yeah, Like it's not that weird. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like I think of any other phrases that we have,
Speaker 1: you know, fast forwarding through something again, pose on something,
Speaker 1: or let's put a pin in this, which of course
Speaker 1: indicates that the speaker likes to torture insects in the
Speaker 1: fair time, So keep that one in mind. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: the malevolent lepidopterist of your office. Yeah. So while the
Speaker 1: using the phrase achievement un locked or something isn't all
Speaker 1: that weird, I do still think the Tetris effect is
Speaker 1: remarkable and strange the idea of these, uh, these consistent
Speaker 1: and nearly universal Tetris hallucinations and dreams, and that makes
Speaker 1: me wonder, well, does the Tetris effect belong in this
Speaker 1: category of game transfer phenomena or is it something unique?
Speaker 1: Is it something on a separate at a different level.
Speaker 1: Pretty much, I feel like it might be. And in
Speaker 1: the next episode that we that we're doing on Tetris,
Speaker 1: I think we'll see elements of that. Now. I've been
Speaker 1: thinking about it in terms of Tetris being the purest
Speaker 1: form of the drug, and you can, certainly and maybe
Speaker 1: you should, dilute the purity of that drug when you're
Speaker 1: applying it in certain scenarios, right, because, like spice, it
Speaker 1: may enable you to to have some precognition and to
Speaker 1: stand at the top of the dune of the universe
Speaker 1: of space time and see beyond what normal humans can.
Speaker 1: But you've got to keep coming back. Oh, man, I
Speaker 1: wonder how spice would affect your ability to play Tetris,
Speaker 1: Like what would see the entire bag your preview screen
Speaker 1: would have hundreds of blocks in it. Oh and then
Speaker 1: what what the guild navigator? Of course would you would
Speaker 1: would make sure to pick the best block possible for
Speaker 1: the next turn, whatever the safest block choices. But as
Speaker 1: we've showed, there is no such thing. There is no
Speaker 1: optimal Tetris play. There there's better and worst Tetris play,
Speaker 1: but there's no perfect Tetris play. So would you be
Speaker 1: able to find that golden path through Tetris? You couldn't.
Speaker 1: I guess it's an unresolved game. Yeah. Anyway, we are
Speaker 1: so excited about the science of Tetris that we're going
Speaker 1: to come back next time to talk about some very
Speaker 1: fascinating Tetris research, more about how Tetris interacts with our brains.
Speaker 1: We're going to talk about why Tetris feels so good
Speaker 1: to play, but we're also going to talk about tetraspace
Speaker 1: therapies for the Tetris cure. Essentially. Yeah, so we're going
Speaker 1: to continue to dive into the power of Tetris. But
Speaker 1: then what can we do with that power? How can
Speaker 1: we utilize it? How can we harness Tetris and use
Speaker 1: it to improve our lives? In the meantime, if you
Speaker 1: haven't played Tetris in a while, I encourage you to
Speaker 1: unlock that ancient secret yet again. Open the puzzle box,
Speaker 1: play a little bit of Tetris, and then come back
Speaker 1: and visit with us again next time, and and share
Speaker 1: in the deep mystery and wonder of the Platonic puzzle
Speaker 1: universe with us. So until next time, check out stuff
Speaker 1: to blow your mind dot com. That's where we find
Speaker 1: all of our blog posts, are podcast episodes, are videos,
Speaker 1: and indeed the landing page for this episode will include
Speaker 1: links out in some related materials on the site as
Speaker 1: well as some of the resources we've been discussing here
Speaker 1: with you today. And if you want to get in
Speaker 1: touch with us and let us know your personal Tetris
Speaker 1: history or your thoughts about cognition, human neurology and video gameplay,
Speaker 1: you can email us at blow the Mind at how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com for more on those and thousands
Speaker 1: of other topics. Is that how stuff works dot com.
Speaker 1: I don