Tetris Syndrome: A Mind Made of Blocks

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putting out this kind of content for you. So this episode today is going to be about Tetris, and it's going to be part one of a two part series that we're doing on the science of Tetris, the ancient mystery puzzle of the universe. Yeah, so the first live is mostly dealing with the power of Tetris and the history of Tetris. Second part is going to dive into some possible uses for that power and knowledge. So, Robert, I have a perhaps pretty weird question for you. Alright,

hit me with a pretty weird question. If there were no thinking beings in the universe, would numbers exist? Oh, this is a great question. Our numbers a human discovery or humans are are numbers of human invention? Right? Like the number seven? Is that an inherent feature of the universe or is that just sort of like an idea we've come up with to describe what happens when there are seven of something. I tend to see it as

kind of a mix of the two. Like, yes, there is there is an inherent number sense to the universe, but obviously there's a there's a human ordering system layered on top of that so that we can interact with it and understand it. Yeah, I think that's a sensible

way of looking at it. But there are certainly people who I think would be called platonists in this sense that their platonic in the sense that they believe in the real existence of abstract objects that are inherent to the universe, like numbers, mathematical objects, the theorems that those things actually do exist as objects in some sense, even though they don't have physical matter in any way. And I sort of feel the same way the Platonists feel

about numbers. I feel that way about Tetris. So tell me your personal Tetris history. Well, I think it is ideal that this episode is publishing during December, because for me, there's always something kind of Christmas e about Tetris because I got it back in the day on old school Nintendo.

I think I got it for Christmas, so it arrived in the Christmas season, and some of the wonderful music um that was on that game included um, I believe danced the sugar plumb Ferries from The Nutcracker, which of course is a Christmas themed ballet, a ballet that I had to set through or or got to sit through, however you want to look at it many many times, as I had two sisters who were both involved in dance. Oh, it wasn't one of those things where your school took

you to The Nutcracker every year. No, I had to, I think, go every year to see one of my two sisters of performing it. And and the Nutcracker is an interesting thing to have to sit through because the first is totally front loaded. The first half has a rat king, it has battles, it has a fabulous candyland discovery, weird uncles with an eye patch, and then the second half is just just a slumber fest of various dances that are performed for the victors like they've already won.

It's just all complete. Afterthought, huh, that's interesting. Yeah, it does have a lot of great hallucinatory imagery. I recalled though. I remember that there's a lady with a huge dress and a bunch of creatures come out from under her dress. Yes, yeah, but anyway, Yeah, the dance of the sugar Plum Ferry was on the any S version I played of the game Boy version, And I also associate this with Christmas.

I think maybe because I associate most video games I played as a child with Christmas, because that, you know, Christmas is when you get the game and then you have that huge allotment of time and to vote to the game. You can just completely meld your brain to this game, play at nine hours a day because there's no school and your you know, your parents don't want to deal with you during Uh So, yeah, I I totally had that. I had a couple other games for

the game Boy too. Back in the early nineties, when I was a kid, I had Tetris, but also had Super Mario Land. I don't know if you played that on the Game Boy. It involves weird it kind of like ancient Egyptian themes that are it's sort of unique Mario game. And then I also had a video game called Altered Space, which involved isometric movements. It was very hard to control h and mostly you would just fall

on spikes and run out of air and die. You play a little astronaut who has minute because I was initially imagining some sort of Timothy Leary themed game that, oh no, that would have been wonderful. Like as a kid, I had the game version of the William Hurt movie where it takes ayahuasca and gets in the sensory deprivation tank. You know another thing about about having it. I wonder

if this is the case with you as well. I had some horrible Nintendo games, like I had Mission Impossible, which was an impossibly difficult game, and then a few other games that really had limited appeal even to me. But Tetris was a game that I played like crazy. My sister my sister, who was old enough to play the played like crazy, and even my my dad got in on the act and was playing Tetris, and it

just ensnaring all to all of us. Yeah, it does have this very universal appeal which has been chalked up to several different factors from people were gonna talk about later in this episode. But the reason I mentioned those other games I had on the game Boy was going back to this very first thing I said, which is that I sensed, even as a child, that there was something very very different between Tetris and these other games,

even popular games like you know, the Mario game. I mean like it didn't have to be a bad game. Other games to me felt like human artifacts. They felt invented in the sense that you know that that a wheelbarrow is invented. Tetris to me felt like a fundamental, inherent aspect of the universe that was an ancient, secret mystery, and it just seemed to me impossible to believe there was ever a time when there wasn't Tetris woven into

the fabric of physics and mathematics. So you're you're basically imagining a scenario where the the hominids in two thousand and one of Space Odyssey are looking up. Instead of seeing a complete um monolith, they're seeing the long bar. Yah, seeing the Tetris shapes fall inform the monolith. Yeah, and it's got to be the long bar, because that's the most coveted piece among avid Tetris players, as long as you've prepared yourself for its insertion. Yeah, exactly, how true

that is? No, I see, I see what you're saying. Exactly this Uh, it feels perfectly natural, like playing Tetris is like coming home on some level. Um. I definitely remember playing it and being obsessed with it, and and it was just startled to realize this was a new thing in the world. I couldn't believe. I mean, this is a game that was invented in Ur, but it didn't feel that way. I even even old old games like go and checkers and chess, I mean, these old

board games still felt like artifacts. They still felt invented by humans in a way that Tetris didn't. Tetris felt like an ancient mystery. And I'm still not quite sure exactly why that is. But I think throughout these couple of episodes, we're going to do on the science of Tetris.

We we may have some leads about why it feels that way to me at least and I think to to some other people too, or simply the case it could just be the case that God itself is the long bar or or some sort of multidimensional um shape that we can't quite understand, but that fits into all

possible Tetris scenarios. But indeed, as we explore here, we're also going to get into some of the recreational mathematical roots of Tetris, and even those don't go back tremendously far h that they only go back into the early twentieth century. Nevertheless, I insist there is an ancient mystery at the secret of this journey, and maybe by the end will unlock it. But I think we should actually look at the game Tetris now it's history and where

it comes from. And the first thing I've got to start with is uh, sort of incidental to the game of Tetris itself. But did you know that the famous Tetris music, that theme right there is based on a Russian folk song that actually has lyrics. I do not know this. The Tetris theme with lyrics. I love it so much. I looked it up. This is the Wikipedia translation, so this may not be the most accurate, but but the first verses, oh my crate is so full, I've

got chintz and brocade. Take pity o, sweetie, of this lad's shoulder seems kind of appropriate for the game where you're you're stacking the blocks forever. My great, it overflows all. That is a revelation for me. Yeah, but surely Tetris didn't just appear out of thin air. I mean, obviously it grew out of some kind of puzzle tradition. Yes, yes, and so I mean certainly you can if you want to, to take the roots of Tetris and extend them back

just completely geometrically. Yes, you can get back into the history of geometry itself. But for the most part, we can begin the birth of Tetris with something that was called a pin tomino. This is an arrangement of five unit squares or cubes, all joined along their edges. Um they're twelve free pintomenos. They're shaped roughly like the letters vt, W, X, U, z, F,

P I, N Y L. There, that's funny. I looked up some of these designations of like the letter to the pentomeno, and some of them makes sense, like the W pintomeno looks like a W, the Y pintomeno looks like a long bar with a lump on the side. Yeah. Yeah. Some of them are a little little more abstract. They're

eighteen one sided pentomenos and sixty three fixed pintomenos. Okay, So essentially, though, the pentomeno is if you take some squares and you line them up so that the sides are touching in one way or another, how many different shapes can you make out of five squares? And that's what it is. Yeah, And then you you had pent amino puzzles that were all about arranging them together into a shape, usually something you know, a rectangle, something fairly simple. Now.

The first published pentomino puzzle of this nature, even though it was not named as such, appeared in Henry Dadeny's The Canterbury Puzzles in nineteen o seven. That a companion to the Canterbury Tales. Um, if anything, it would be the section in the back with a crossroad puzzle too,

I guess um No. This was basically a puzzle publication, uh and in this particular one that Dundinny put together, you had to fit twelve pentomino shapes together with one square te traumino, and I'll explain the terminology here in a minute. That's four squares as you encounter in tetris later on. You had to join these together on an eight by eight checkerboard. Okay, so you've got like a

puzzle space. That's the board, and the problem is you've got all these pieces that you've got to fit into the space so that they're not you know, poking out the sides or something right, And like any good game, um, there's a part of it is the mechanics which have described, but the other part was the fluff. And the fluff here was that William the Conqueror had, out of rage, broken a chess board and you had to have to reassemble the chessboard that these each of these shapes is

a piece of the shattered board. The story behind the game. Yeah, I kind of love that when there's a game that's not like an adventure action game with characters, but it's a puzzle game, and yet it has a back story. Yeah, yeah, I mean I think that's essential. I don't want to play a game that's just pure abstract mathematics and mechanics. I want some cool fluff in there. That's how I

get engaged with it. Of course, the exception would be Tetris, exactly, yes, because there is well we'll discuss some that have some fluff added on, and sometimes the fluff is delightful, but for the most part, tetris is the exception to the rule. Okay, but so William the conqueror gets a chessboard, smashes it into a bunch of pentominoes, and you've got to fit them back together, right though, of course they're not called pentominoes at the time. It's not until three that American

profess their Solomon W. Golam, actually coins the term. So what he did is he took the word domino, which, of course we know is a little a little block that you line up a play dominoes, whether you do cascading dominot guy who makes the pizza, yeah, exactly, that that sort of domino. So he took the word domino,

and then he and it. He treated it kind of whimsically as if it was die domino, as if omino were a shape and Die referred to the number of squares cubes making it up because there are two squares and a domino exactly, So he said, what if there were other omino's, So in this case, a pent domino is penta or five plus omino. Likewise, we already mentioned tetromino, which would be tetra four plus domino, right, um and uh.

And he also threw out just a general polyominos, a term for these various constructions depending on how many different square que elements are making them up. So there could be like sex dominoes or sept dominoes exactly. Though. I imagine as you go higher and higher up the list of cardinal numbers there, the number of possible shapes just explodes, right, because as you add more squares to move around in different positions, you could probably make an ultimately infinite number

of shapes. Yeah, Like I mean, the bigger ones are going to resemble full blown levels from video games or or dungeoning adventures from Dungeons and Dragons with each of the cubes, right. Um. Now, all of this comes to a head publicly with his nineteen article Checkerboards and Polyominos in American Mathematical monthly and this this really came out. This kick started a lot of interest in these shapes and the kind of puzzles you could have with them. Okay,

so pentomino puzzles good stuff, big business. Yeah, well, and I mean his big business is you're gonna have in recreational mathematics in the mid twentieth century. But but it's certainly we're not talking about Marl Borrows here, right, But it's still it's catching on. It's it already has an addictive property to it. In then in Night it actually launches off the pen and paper, off the table and

into the world of computers. Because at this point we end up with a computer program that generates solutions for an eight by eight polyomino puzzle. So we're already obsolete. Yeah, yeah, we're already getting the human element out of it, and we're already seeing it take off into the world of computer programming in a very early stage. So I imagine, if you're just trying to cram pieces together into a checkerboard, and you've got a fixed number of pieces and a

fixed board size, there are a limited number of solutions, right. Yeah. According to the University of Victoria Department of computer sciences. It's now known that there are two thousand, three hundred and thirty nine solutions for the six by ten rectangle, a thousand and ten solutions for the five by twelve rectangle, three hundred and sixty eight solutions for the four by fifteen rectangle, and two solutions for the three by twenty rectangle.

So so yeah, this is you see this, this idea, this new type of shape puzzle just taking off in the world of recreational mathematics. Uh, finding a warm, warm home there, and that's the sort of sort of soil from which this maddening Tetris vine emerges and you can The interesting thing here is you can even factor in some some interesting non Tetris stuff here. For instance, John Horton Conway's seventy Game of Life cellular automaton simulation. What

is that? Oh? I think we may have mentioned it on here in some past episodes, and we should probably discover it in more depth later on. But it's essentially a very simple um geometric based simulation. Many of you may have seen images from this where it basically looks like crazy little Tetris shapes moving around and changing form on a screen sort of one of those uh cell

evolutions simulators. Yeah, the big one really, um and uh yeah, it's it's a fascinating topic on to its own, so we may have to come back on on that one at a later day. Okay, well, you have laid the soil out of which you, as you say, the vines of Tetris grow. But I think we should turn to the vines themselves, because what fascinating vines they are, a lot of people might not have guessed this, so some

people probably already know the story. Uh. The creation of Tetris, strangely enough, takes place in a nineteen eighties Soviet computing lab in Moscow with a slightly board artificial intelligence researcher discovering the ancient secret of Tetris under the ruse of

testing computer hardware capabilities um so. The the creator of Tetris is named Alexei Petnov, and he was a computer programmer and artificial intelligence researcher working for the Academy of Science of the USSR SO the Soviet Union Zone Academy of Science. And he was working in a lab that would occasionally be sent a new piece of computer hardware, and in this case, in the case of Tetris, they

were sent this thing called the Electronica sixty. It sounds fancy, yeah, wonderful, And a part of paget knobs duties would be to create software to run on the new computers of the new hardware they're being sent in order to test what it was capable of, so to say like, oh, okay, yeah, this this computer is fine because it can run this

demanding piece of software. A okay. So in in paget Knov's own words, this became his quote excuse for making games, which I mean, that's gonna be a pretty cool job comparatively in the Soviet Union. In oh yeah, I mean, that's a pretty great situation anywhere where you find the way to make your job even more engaging, or make it engaging to begin with, without actually just completely knocking

off and doing your own thing. Right. So, paget Knobs in this lab testing the electronic of sixty, and what he comes up with to test it is Tetris. Tetris is one of these games he creates. And I don't know to what extent we really try to describe Tetris, because I feel like almost everybody who's going to be listening to this has seen Tetris. If you haven't, you should go watch a video of somebody playing Tetris on YouTube. Any number of official Tetris or Tetris knockoff versions that

you can just play online. Yeah, I found a free website. I don't know if this is legal, it's probably not, actually, but I found a website that has an emulator that will emulate the any S version of Tetris that's in browser. And it's pretty great at the any S version. I really like the graphics. Yeah, yeah, it was a great use of the you know, simple graphics to deliver the Tetris experience. Though I do still prefer the music from the game Boy version, but danswer the sugar plumb Ferry

is good to either way. You should you should play Tetris a little get in the mood for this episode. Uh, you can pause right here and go do that and

come back if you like otherwise we will continue. But basically, what Tetris is is you've got seven blocks of different shapes and these are the tetrominos that we were talking about earlier, and they fall from the top of the screen towards the bottom of the screen on a little playing area, and the player can move the blocks around left to right and can rotate them in increments of ninety degrees, so you can flip the piece and you can move it side to side. But what you can't

do is stop it from falling. There's the inexorable creep towards the bottom of the screen. And so what the player does is arranged the blocks to form and then clear solid horizontal lines. Oh yeah, that's satisfying moment where you have blocks all the way across a single line and then that that line just vanishes. Yeah, And so if the blocks stack up all the way to the

top of the screen, the game is over. Interestingly enough, Paget and have said that originally the lines did not clear in the version of the game he was making, that you would just try to stack them, but he found that the screen filled up too quick. You know, you'd make these stacked rows and eventually it reached the top of the screen. So then he came up with the idea of every time you created a solid row, having it van ish and and just turn into magical

abstract points. Then I think that's interesting because it you can see the roots of the recreational mathematical puzzle there, right, because you wouldn't have um that much space if you were just throwing this out on a sheet of paper. Yeah yeah. So if if the blocks stack up all the way to the top of the screen, of course games over that that's your death in the game terms.

And as the game goes on, the blocks begin to fall faster and faster, which of course makes it harder to fit them in as time goes on, and eventually in most versions of the game, you get to something that the players would call a kill screen or a death screen, which is in the any S version at least level twenty nine, or the transition between level twenty nine and thirty, where the blocks just fall so fast

it's impossible to play anymore. You cannot continue though. Actually, before we did this episode, I watched a documentary called The Ecstasy of Order about tetris Cha ampiends that, which I recommend if if you'll at home, want to watch it. It It was really interesting and there are a couple of players who do manage to get to level thirty.

In it, it's a very brief, fleeting victory. Does it so that the game itself does not stop and say, hey, you've won Tetris, but you've merely you've made it to a threshold of survivability that no one else has reached. With a vast majority of players know, it's not like you've won. You've still died. You've just died a little bit farther along the track the trail than anybody else has gone before. And that's an interesting thing about Tetris too.

You can never win. There is no winning, there's only getting farther before you die, which makes Tetris a lot like life. It is, yeah, and been probably a good lesson for a young gamer to encounter, where you especially if you're up against the impossibility of mission impossible, where there's just no getting to the end of it and you just feel constantly like the metal gear these dogs stop. Well,

now I'll play Tetris. It's like the experience of the game is you're never gonna get your money's worth out of that game because you're not getting to the end of it, to the narrative end of the game. But there is no narrative in Tetris other than the simple narrative of shapes coming at you that are stacked them and try to stave off the inevitable. Yeah, so what

happened when Alexey Pajitnov made this game? So? He claimed he was inspired by his love of puzzle games like pin Tominoes, the ones that we're talking about before, and he he came up with the mechanics of Tetris with pent tominoes in mind, but then he decided to go with tetrauminos to simplify things, basically, to make the game simpler. Uh fun fact, since the Electronica sixty that he was using had very little in the way of graphical capabilities,

the original shapes were made out of text characters. I think there were brackets, so that would make sense. So falling shapes made out of brackets. I do want to throw in that there there are plenty of other knockoffs of Tetris out there, and apparently some of them do use pin tominos rather than tetrauminose. Oh dude. In preparing

for this episode, I played one. There's one online called pent Trist that uses not pent Trist but but pent Trists like Tetris, and it uses pin tominoes, and at least in the time I played it, it was significantly harder than Tetris. Yeah, yeah, I imagine it would be

just one more piece. Likewise, if you were to play Tetris with simpler shapes, I imagine it would the game would fall apart too easily, Like what if you were playing them with dominoes, that would be that would just be base level, way too easy, to the point if you would get bored out it almost immediately. Yeah, I think four really is the perfect number. I I will argue very strongly in that in that propositions defense. But anyway, pactually not recounts to The Guardian where he told his

own story about this. He says, quote, I pretended I was debugging my program, but in truth I just couldn't stop playing it. When other people tried it, they couldn't either. It was so abstract that was its great quality. It appealed to everybody. And I think this may be something about why so many people can get into Tetris, even people who don't usually play video games. They can pick up Tetris and immediately feel at home and intrigued. And I think it has something to do with the lack

of representational nature of it. It's like geometrical art you might see in a mosque or something. You know, it's like it doesn't have characters or familiar objects. It's just shapes and space and time and movement. Utterly universal. Yeah, yeah, completely devoid of any dependency on on its as similarity to a real world scenario. It's completely in its own universe. Yeah.

So what happens when you create an amazing and addictive game while employed by the Soviet Union, Well that was an interesting question for peasant Nov and he kind of feared what would happen if he tried to make money off of his game. So the game started getting passed around from place to place. In in Russia, there were floppy disks of it that people were taking two different workplaces, and then everybody would get addicted to it and not do their jobs, so it sort of posed a problem.

Eventually it made its way to Hungary, and then from Hungary it made its way to the rest of Europe, the United States, Japan, and the whole world. Um. But for for ten years, Paget Knobs seeded the game rights to the government to the Soviet Union, and so he didn't really see much money from Tetris for a long time. But eventually, once that expired, in the nineties he got more involved, and uh, I'm not sure if how much money he eventually made off of Tetris. I I hope,

I hope it did well for him. Yeah, I hope so too. I certainly remember seeing his name on even the ne s because his ties. Your eyes were glued to the program and you couldn't help but notice anything in the system that resembled the outside world, such as such as his name or St. Basil's Cathedral, which was on the loading screen. Yeah, or yeah, if you did really well in the game, I think you could watch St. Basil's Cathedral being launched into space. Goodness, gracious, yes, yes,

why I haven't thought about that forever. I never really understood why that happens, but it was it was it the idea that the cathedral is secretly an alien spaceship that has been planted on Earth. Then yes, and it just it had to use our brain power, the collective brain power of a Tetris obsessed planet, to to actually launch it back into the stars. Yeah. But so Passion now gives a pretty cool perspective on the role Tetris

played in the early consumer adoption of the computer. Actually, he says Tetris came along early and had a very important role in breaking down ordinary people's inhibitions in front of computers, which were scary objects to non professionals used to pen and paper. But the fact that something so simple and beautiful could have here on screen destroyed that barrier. I like to think that's true. Yeah, yeah, I would

think so. I mean you think of if you think back to early computer games, to some many but not all of them, we're a bit abstract looking on the screen to the point where I could see them being very intimidating. Like I remember as a kid, we were at somebody's house and they had at some sort of submarine simulation game, and only you really had to use your imagination to see the any kind of actual submarine

uh simulation going on. Yeah, well, I mean have you seen any of the old hundred Star Wars games where they're trying to represent the characters from Star Wars or the ships from Star Wars. But you know they've got an a t a t walker like in the Empire Strikes Back, and it's just it's a big dog. It's like or it's a horse. It's a four legged animal of some kind and you're just like some pixels flying

around shooting at it. And I don't want to criticize limited graphics and and the importance of imagination, because some of my favorite gaming experiences that had yet uh to be equaled by our our heavy graphics age, or some of those where you had just enough graphics graph graphical detail to give you an idea of what it was and the rest was your imagination. So yeah, yeah, that

that's true. I just think that there's less of a gap when you're talking about using limited graphics to do something abstract versus to do something that's supposed to be representational of images you recognize. But anyway, Tetris after this went on to become big business all around the world.

It was eventually licensed from the Russians by a video game licensor named Hank Rogers, which led to what was, as I've said, in my opinion, the definitive version of Tetris with the definitive music Tetris on the game Boy. And so in nineteen nine Nintendo released Tetris for the game Boy and the NES and sold millions of copies. And then of course in ninet Tetris became the central game in the Do you remember these the Nintendo World Championships.

Oh this was There was the Fred Savage movie The Wizard. Uh that I think it was all promotion for that. Yes, so tech with Tetris in The Wizard. It's been so ungin I've seen you know what, I've never actually seen The Wizard. I remember virtually nothing. I think it was really Wasn't it just a commercial for the power of love pretty much? But this is the perfect game for for that kind of scenario, right, because it's a it's

a test of a true test of skill. Yeah. Absolutely, I think it makes perfect sense for this to be the central game and a video game competition, because, like I say, it's so universal, it feels so core, so ancient. It's like the ultimate game, and there's something about playing Tetris that is so inherently human. One of the things, Uh. An interesting fact I came across about Tetris is that Tetris is considered, it's in computational theory, a hard problem.

It's considered MP complete, meaning that even a computer cannot play perfect Tetris. You can't write a computer program that automatically optimizes Tetris moves and always makes the best move because there is no known strategy for always determining the optimal move. And this is not the case for a lot of games. There are games like Connect four or you know, plenty of other puzzle games where there is inherently a best move you can make that you know

logic times. Humans might not have enough computational ability to know what it is, but a computer can know. Yeah, I think we can all relate to that in front of Tetris playing experience, because you start off with a definite strategy in mind. Generally you want to build it up so that you can shoot down a vertical um tetramino and just clear four rows at once, and then do that again, do that as many times as you can, but you're going to reach that point where that's no

longer an option. Where each shape, each new shape as it comes and maybe you have the preview box that tells you what the next one is going to be. You can try and crunch that data as well, but it's very much a real time problem from from block to block. Yeah. Yeah, the preview boxes actually, I think a really important part of Tetris strategy. I don't know if I mentioned that when I was describing Tetris earlier.

I mean, you've played Tetris, you know. But the big thing about Tetris strategy is it will show you not just the block that's currently falling, but what the next block up is. But after that, it's a big mystery. And and even the computer can't solve this problem. There is no computer that that can solve Tetris. It's a it's a mystery. It's an ancient mystery. I insist it is. Okay, So in this episode, we're eventually going to talk about the neurological effects of Tetris on the human brain, the

sort of the psychology and neurology of Tetris. But before we get into that, we got to mention one more thing about Tetris and culture, which is all of the wonderful Tetris knockoffs that have that have come from this game. Because, like anything that sells millions and millions of copies and becomes a phenomenon, uh, like Tetris, you're gonna see other people wanted to get in on the on the action, uh and put their own particular spin on it. And

a lot of many of them are great. They're perfectly serviceable, they're just complete rip offs. Sometimes they try and add their own thing, like trying to use a different polyomino in order in order to spice things up. But one of my favorites is just pure fluff on top of a traditional Tetris game, and that's the release Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail, a PC game which included a Tetris mini game called drop Dead that

involved fabulously throwing plague victims into a mass grave. So so they were shaped, Yes, each tetromino is shaped like a medieval peasant, and sometimes their body has been you know, this way or that, or they're just completely uh straight, but you're throw you're throwing those into the mass grave and the bodies keep piling up and they're falling fast like any kind of a Tetris game, with the added feature that sometimes one isn't quite dead yet and makes

it makes moving it around more challenging because it's fighting back and trying to to wiggle free, and you just want to throw as many bodies into the mass grave as possible. Right, Yeah, you got a job to do. Yeah, So that's that's the best I've I've ever seen. Um, you there have been various other attempts to spice it up. There was a particularly there's a two thousand four mini game in Mortal Kombat Deception. Oh man, they're still making

Mortal Kombat games in two thousand four. Yeah, they still make them today, I guess. Yeah. In Mortal Kombat X just came out. I don't think. I don't think everyone beyond Mortal Kombat three in the arcade game version, well there was you know, four was kind of a I think, a dark point for a lot of people. But I know that they put up They put out some great games in recent times. But the Tetris mini game in

two thousand four was not actually so great. It was just like typical Tetris with some little bobble head Mortal Kombat characters. I think they would have been far better off just ripping off Monty Python's take on it and just have you know, dead monks and ninjas falling into a pit. Yeah, so, uh, Katana's out there doing finishing moves on people and throwing all their dead body parts into the I can see that. But they were probably you know, pressed for time, so that seems like they've

got just violent variations on Tetris basically. Yeah, but then there's also the sexy take, and I'm gonna leave you, the listener to explore this more on your own. I don't know if there's a definitive sexy Tetris, but it looks like they're various scenarios that involve humanoid tetraumino's interlocking with each other. So it seems inherently disturbing, like stacking sex. I guess, you know, kind of a Kama Sutra um group sex take on Tetris. It's out there if you

want to explore it. Uh. And then I think they also just have Tetris with a backdrop of a naked person or something, so that exists as well. Uh, an interesting attempt to put some sort of fluff on top of this most perfect game. You don't need that. That would be distracting. It's Tetris, That's what I'm thinking. I mean,

why are you trying to mess with Tetris. Yeah, it seems like you would have only that's the kind of game you would only play for a few minutes and go like ha ha, that's clever, or oh that's not really clever, and then you'd move back to just playing pure tetris right. One of the Tetris arcade games I saw in the in the documentary I was talking about earlier,

the Ecstasy of Order is invisible Tetris. I didn't know about this before, but that's where you can only see the blocks while they're falling, but once they land, they become invisible. I can't even imagine trying to play that. That sounds really frustratingly hard. I would again, I'd rather just play regular Tetris, and of course would be remiss if we didn't mention the various three D forms of Tetris that have come out where you're using three natural

tetrominos and trying to assemble them. And I played those before. Those those I feel like those are also fun for a limited amount of time, and then you want to go back to good old two dimensional Tetris. We keep saying Texas instead of Tetris. It makes me think that there should be a geographical representations or like you know, U S States represented as as as square block formations that you try to fit together. Yeah, yeah, the United States as an assembl at Like, how does t see

fit into Texas? I guess you couldn't do it proportionally because every time in Alaska fell, the game would just be over. But we should take a break to hear from our sponsor, and then when we come back, we're going to talk about some of the brain science of Tetris. Some of the science has been done on how Tetris

affects our minds. Hey, we're back, So it is time to talk about something that has been called in the media the Tetris effect or Tetris syndrome, which I like that one even more because it has a slightly nefarious air to it. Yeah, so I have talked about how

I think Tetris is an ancient mystery. But have you ever noticed how the six rectangular pains on each half of a home window can form all of the Tetris blocks except, of course, the most beautiful and most cherished of all blocks, the long bar, But all the other blocks. You know, you you've got the six pains arranged in the two by three formation. You can make the T, you can make the L, you can make the S

and the Z and the square. And how the corners of the coffee table in your house are kind of like L blocks, which just fits so nicely against the square block. That really is the essence of this foot rest. And really, when droplets of water be together on a rain splashed window and eventually flow away, it really is a lot like how the stacks of blocks flow away

from viewing Tetris once you've completed four solid lines. And then of course you begin to see how the Tetris blocks do come creeping down from the darkness at night when you lie in bed, and they follow you into your dreams. And how I'm going to stop you there, Joe, because this sounds like, if not Tetris syndrome or the Tetris effect, perhaps even Tatris madness, all blown Tetris madness. Yeah,

this is what most people have described as the Tetris effect. It's, in short, when Tetris players have dreams or mild hallucinations about the game, the mechanics and visual aesthetic of the game follow you beyond the gameplay itself into your life. You see Tetris in the world, you hallucinate blocks and places where they're not, and you dream about them as

you're falling asleep at night. I definitely remember this from that Christmas that we got Tetris playing it for certain a number of hours, and then afterwards you close your eyes and then against the darkness, you see the blocks falling. And then you're trying to sleep at night and you see the blocks following, and you're dreaming and the blocks are still falling. And it was never frightening, but it was just it was like unlike anything I'd experienced before.

It was essentially a paranormal experience, uh, but but one that was so abstract, so so without narrative. It wasn't like I was seeing space, aliens or anything. You were just seeing the pure geometric wonder of Tetris playing through your your vision, you know. I looked up online to see if this had happened with any other games, and it certainly has, I think, maybe not to the same extent as Tetris. But I google the Minecraft to hallucinations.

I've never played Minecraft, but I just wanted to see what you'd come up with, and oh yeah, I found some Yahoo q and Yahoo answers and some forum threads where people are like, I'm I'm dreaming about things from Minecraft, and I'm seeing Minecraft blocks all over the place. This does seem to be a way in which our brains are susceptible to visuospatial tasks or images that we have to manipulate in a virtual world, especially in something as

addictive and engrossing as Tetris. And this has been reported on for a while now. The earliest reference I can find to the term the Tetris effect. Uh, and this seems to be most people say that this is the first time the term appears is a n article called this is Your Brain on Tetris from Wired. Yes, great article. It's still off online, you can still access it. Yeah.

So it was written by Jeffrey Goldsmith. And if you're too young to remember the this is your Brain on Drugs commercials And I don't know how widespread that reference point is anymore. Uh, it was, well, it was one of the most charming touchstones in the nineteen He's propaganda, Ward's narcotics. But Guy's got an egg. He holds up the egg, he says, this is your brain. He cracks it, drops it in a pan, pries it says, this is

your brain on drugs. Yeah. Great, great marketing. Uh, but but the the effectiveness of that marketing is a is a topic unto itself for sure. Yeah. So the obvious implication is of Goldsmith's title This is Your Brain on Tetris is that he's sort of accusing Tetris of being a hallucinogen or some kind of psychotropic agent. Uh. Yet he also brings over the associations with addictiveness or compulsive behavior, and I would just want to read a quote from

his article. He says no home was sweet without a game boy. In nine that year, I stayed for a week with a friend in Tokyo. For a week in quotation marks I think meaning longer uh, and tetris enslaved my brain at night. Geometric shapes fell in the darkness as I lay on the loan to tommy floor space. Days I sat on a lavender suede sofa and played Tetris furiously. During rare jaunts from the house, I visually

fit cars and trees and people together, dubiously. Hunting a job in a house, I was still there two months later, still jobless, still playing my friend. An economists threatened a battery deprivation, but he knew my habit ran deep, knew that I could always tilt, blinded by sunlight, to a convenience store to save face. I would buy a box of tiny chocolate filled bears as if double A power cells were an afterthought, not the meaning of my wretched life.

And he also refers to Tetris later in the article as an electronic drug or and this is a great term, a pharmatronic farmatronic. I like it. I don't know if that later appeared in like William Gibson novels or something, but it sounds like it should. But anyway. Goldsmith then reports on some research we're going to describe in in just a minute about what the brain of a Tetris

player looks like. But the term Tetris effect shows up later in his article, where he says the Tetris effect is a biochemical reductionistic metaphor, if you will, for curiosity invention. The creative urge to fit shapes together is to organize, to build, to make deals, to fix, to understand, to fold sheets. All of our mental activities are analogous, each as potentially addictive as the next. So once again we see that Tetris it's a perfect metaphor for just about

everything we do in our life. Yeah, I mean not only just the inevitability of of annihilation, but just the it's just our the basic way that we tackle mental tasks. It combines the the seeking order effect, like we're trying to create solid blocks out of these you know, disordered, unfitting shapes, and so we're seeking to create order to impose his order on a chaotic universe. But it also has the uh, the task clearance type of mechanic that

we use throughout our daily work lives. You know, you have a you have a to do list, and the most satisfying part of every day is crossing that thing off your to do list, which in Tetris you get you get to do constantly. You know, every some number of seconds, you clear a line and it disappears, it quite literally disappears, and in being crossed automatically off your

to do list. So it Tetris again mimics life, and sometimes life throws some bad blocks at you and you just have to accept that they're not going to fit into your order. But maybe that next block will help you work this one out and it's eventually you'll create some sort of order around it. Yeah, I think that's

entirely true. And if you listen to these professional Tetris players, the one who are the ones who get really deep into it, you know, they'll they'll talk about the sort of the fortune goddess of Tetris, the Tetris god who doles out good blocks and bad blocks. And you know, to a certain extent, the blocks you get are randomized. Um, but they're randomized in a particular way. There's this thing referred to as a bag that keeps a certain number of blocks in it, and you get you get the

blocks from the bag, and then it's re randomized. But uh, they like, you can get a good run where they'll give you lots of long bars and it's very nice, happy times. You can get that to be to to be irritating though, if you've got too many long bars, Like why am I getting all these long bars now? I'm just having to just throw them on top of each other horizontally at the bottom. I need these later

to to really drive home and kill. Yeah, why wasn't I getting these long bars when I was getting like seventeen S and Z bars. Uh? Those S and Z bars really are the worst. They're the ones that make the game as as cruel as it is. Yeah, but there was another quote I wanted to read, actually, that was from a psychologist, Russian psychologist named Vladimir Pokilko, and

this sort of addresses the Tetris effect. Pokilko was a friend and partner of Alexei Pagetna, of the creator of Tetris Tetris, and he was one of the original patients in the first outbreak of Tetris madness in Russia in nineteen four. He he got to play it before it was a commercial item, back when it was a secret brain infection being traded on floppy disks around in Moscow. And he says about Tetris, quote, the main part is visual insight. You make your visual decision and it happens

almost immediately. Insight means emotion, small but many of them every two three seconds. The second mechanism is unfinished action. Tetris has many unfinished actions that force you to continue and make it very addictive. The third is ottomization. In a couple of hours, the activity becomes automatic, a habit,

a motivation to repeat. So, yeah, you've got some explanations there for maybe some of the cognitive appeal of constantly returning to thoughts of Tetris, if it's sort of taking over your brain, because you've got the pleasing feeling of solving a visual problem, you've got in the constant reward. Every time you solve it, you've got the unfinished action, always drawing you back to the problem. There is no conclusion to tetris. You'll never finish it. Yeah, it's impossible,

and so failure is never super frustrating because failure is inevitable. Yeah. And then, of course the thirty says is automization. Eventually it becomes uh, not so much a deliberate action, but just an automatic part of your brain. You do it without even thinking. Yeah. I do also want to mention while researching the articles about the Tetris effect in the nineteen nineties, that I came across some frankly hilarious or at least retrospectively hilarious scare articles about games and technology

destroying your brain. Uh there, Oh man, it was so funny about talking about this theory from the ninety nineties called cyber sickness. There there was a paper from the Technology Review in the nineties called Cybersickness Virtual Realities Dark Side. It's really funny looking back on the techno paranoia of a previous age, especially when it's addressed at things that we now consider to be so inherently harmless. I mean, who is worried about a virtual reality because it turned

out to be such a bust and be Tetris? Yeah, well, I think you could. There is a case to be made that certainly there are destructive elements to obsessive video game playing. So well sure, I mean if it comes at a if you spend enough time on it, that it's at a cost to your life. But certainly not. Yeah, nothing that would that that really matches up to that

headline cyber sickness. Virtual reality is dark side. Yeah, but I think now we need to look at some neuroscience and psychiatry to see what's going on when you play Tetris and how it affects your brain. Yes, certainly the research underlying of these Tetris observations that we've been discussing here. So one of the first big ones came out in nineteen Uh. This is from a Richard Hare of the University of California at Irvine's Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior.

So they did what you might expect, they scanned the brains of Tetris players. Okay, this is interesting because it's not just psychology here. They're not just getting people to reflect subjectively in their Tetris experience, but they're gathering physical

evidence about playing Tetris. What does it actually look like? Yeah, so yeah, they're looking and actually looking at brain behavior during the playing of Tetris at varying stages, so hair is suspected, and ultimately found that the brain requires less energy to play higher levels of tetris um as opposed to lower levels. We which sounds crazy at first because we all know how how easy those early levels are and when you first start playing it, you know it's

it's pretty easy. Going higher levels that gets so fast. Yeah, that's when the stress really you think that would be when it was just you'd have maximum cognition levels going on. But uh so, this is what they found in first time users. Tetris significantly raises cerebral glucose metabolic rates or g m rs. So brain energy consumption soars as your head cheese tackles this puzzle for the first time. So your your brain is it's it's dealing with the difficult

task and it says, I need sugar, give me energy. Yeah, and especially with Tetris, and I imagine especially for someone who is you know, a novice to puzzle games of this nature, You're suddenly encountering this game that is easy to get into but drastically different in its presentation compared to anything else you've done before. Yeah, so you said this was funny. You said in first time users. I assume you meant players if you're making a drug joke there.

I can't remember users that the term that I threw in, or if I picked that up from the original study. But um, but so, so those were the novices. What happened after that? Okay? So after four to eight weeks of daily doses of Tetris, uh, g mrs sink to normal while performance increases seven fold. Okay, and so ultimately Tetris masters have the lowest final g mrs of all. So as your skill increases and you get more and more,

you become the Tetris master. The thing it tells you at the end if you do really good, congratulations you are Tetris master. Um, your brain uses less energy to get you there. Yeah, I mean, in effect, Tetris tain't trains your brain uh, and become to become more efficient at carrying the cognitive load required to solve the puzzle. Man,

that seems so counterintuitive. Yeah, but here's the thing. Those high GMR levels, they leave you a feeling all amped up and uh and this is uh, this is your brain amped up to learn something new and guzzling down that energy to make it happen. And once it has acquired the skills, it ceases to guzzle all that glucose. So so yeah, it's your brain crunching this new problem, figuring out how to how to solve it, and figuring out how to solve it, uh with with a with

a lower energy expenditure. Yeah. So, as Hair says, the brain might just become more efficient as the Tetris becomes or the Tetris solving program in your brain, as he says, becomes more unconscious and automatic. Yeah. Alright, So the next study we're gonna look at answers that question that many of you might have. What if the dude from Memento, the guy, the Guy Pierce character, what would happen if he played Tetris? Okay, so you're you're not talking about

Joe Panaliono. No, we're talking talking about Guy Pierces. Uh no short, no, no new memories, dude, Interiro grade amnesia. He can't form new episodic memories and things that have recently happened. Yeah, what would happen if he played tetris? Well, Luckily there's a study that examines this. This is a two thousand study by Harvard psychiatrist Robert stood God. So he set out to study a similar feeling to that

of playing tetris. Uh, that of a mountain climber who continues to feel the rocks beneath his or her hands

after a day of climbing. And I imagine this is similar to you know, that feeling as you lay in bed after a day on the beach and the surf, where you still feel the surf or certainly something that comes to my mind and also, and also reminds me of of Tetris hallucinations and Tetris dreams is that when I worked in newspapers, I did a lot of paginations, like in designed to build these pages in the paper,

sort of a form of tetris. Really. Yeah, I would often refer to it as word tetris because it's just words and images articles, and you're blocking all the pieces together, and a lot of times they are shaped like Tetris blocks to form this complete hole. And of course there's the added stress though that this is a product that is eventually going to be printed and sent out to all these people, and you don't want there to be any errors. And there's so many, so many places that

there can be an error. If only you could have the crutch of adjusting the kerning on a real Tetris block. Yeah, so the uh, yeah, a little little pagination humor for for everyone out there. Um but but I remember having dreams at night where I was in my bed, laying in my bed and the pillows in the bed were either illustrations or articles on a on a on a page and in design, and that if I moved in the bed at all, it would upset the arrangement of the front page of the newspaper. Yeah. So it's that

sort of thing. Or if you're if you're a Tatris player, it's Tatris hallucinations. If you're a rock climber, it's uh, it's kind of rock houstin agency experience after the fact. Yeah. So I got to mention talking about the study the title of it, because the title is too good to miss. It's called Replaying the Game hypnogogic images in normals and amnesis normals normal normals, All right, normals. This is how

it all went down. So stick Old asked twenty seven participants to play seven hours of Tetris over the course of three days. There are three groups involved in the study. Twelve novices okay, novice players, ten experts they're referred to as Tetris masters, and five amnesics with extensive bilateral medial temporal lobe damage. These five individuals were absolutely unable to

learn and retain new episodic memories. Okay, so if you sat them down and taught them how to play Tetris and then met them again the next day, they would not remember that that had happened exactly. Yeah, so this is what they found. So the novices and experts all reported that they saw Tetris pieces floating down in front of their eyes as they were going to sleep at night.

Not surprising, we know that's how it works. It's expected. However, the even the amnesics saw the blocks at night, even though they could not rem member playing the game, and as it turns out, they actually could play it. Just find the quote the performance of the m music patients showed only minimal, albeit significant improvement over seven hours of play. So their brains were still learning to play tetris even though they had no memories. Yeah, they weren't learning as

well as the other novices, right, but they still were learning. Yeah, uh, strange And and this gets in of course, into the fact that there are numerous ways that memory works in the brain. There are different forms of memory. The two most important ones here for our purposes are as follows. First of all, in the hippocampus you have. This is the area that registers those episodic memories, the very memories

that the m musics here could not form. Explicit memories of actual life events, episodic memories, Yeah, what happened yesterday? What did I do? What was it like? Playing tetris? But then the cortex registers implicit memories, the stuff we learned but no, don't necessarily have conscious access to. So might this be something like how to ride a bike or like that? Yeah? Things uh? Or imagine many of you encounter this with with passwords or things you type

into the computer. Sometimes you can't you can't say what it is. You have to do it too, and then rediscover what you're actually doing. Yeah, you've made that method memory, but but you don't have a direct recall of the event. Right. So this study the experiences ob the mnesics here's suggests that Tetris syndrome is as much a matter of implicit memory as anything else, and that the brain is extracting

memories from our experience, even subconsciously. Um. And then furthermore, the as memory consolidation uh takes place during sleep, Tetris divisions may stand out as a manifestation of that process. So yeah, I think this is taken as evidence in favor of the hypothesis. I don't know if of what degree it's a hypothesis or a widely accepted theory, but the idea at least that memory consolidation is what dreaming is largely about in sleep. Do you know how accepted

that idea is? I mean, is that pretty solid or is that so it's pretty solid based on an episode recorded earlier in the year where I was researching the power of naps and the importance of naps, ethisodic memory formation came up a lot in that, So I think it's pretty accepted. Huh. Okay, Well, that's interesting because the idea that memory consolidation takes place during dreams and sleeping is going to come into play in a paper that I'm going to reference in the next episode, which will

also be Tetris themed. So this science is fascinating because, uh, it explains something that is disturbingly common. I mean, one of it would be one thing if every now and then some weirdo said, well, I I hallucinated Tetris blocks. But this seems be completely normal, completely widespread for people who play the game. It takes over their brain in this way and sticks with them, and they hallucinate the

blocks later. So I decided, as I said earlier, to search around and see if this happened with other games. Like I mentioned, there are people talking about Minecraft hallucinations, and there are people who talk about hallucinations related to other games, So that the principle of seeing the world in terms of visuospatial game elements, or even experiencing hallucinations of auditory and visual elements from games, is not unique to Tetris, though with Tetris it might be stronger than average,

or maybe even much stronger than average. But anyway, that leads some experts to want to group what we're calling the Tetris effect under the broader category of what's called game transfer phenomenon. So there has been some research on this, but essentially it's been based on interviews and interacting with people who play video games and cataloging their experience to see if they transfer elements of game content or game

interface into their real lives. I've seen accounts of individuals claiming to see health bars from playing World of Warcraft, and I definitely remember, like the only other game transfer um phenomenon that I can attest to my own life would be from playing way too much Grand Theft, Auto Vice City, and I can't, for the life of me, I can't exactly remember what I was seeing, but I would go from playing a lot of that too, then driving to work, which was stealing cars as well. No,

luckily I can go that far. But certainly, the the experience of driving the cars in the game was was was was impacting the way that I observed driving a car in real life, which was a little scary considering all the things you do with cars in that game. That is a little scary, and that figures big into how the media has covered this. Uh, this scientific recognition of video game of game transfer phenomenon. But there there

are much smaller, more innocuous versions of this. I mean, have you ever said, let's press pause or I just leveled up on something about a real world situation, or achievement unlocked or exactly yeah, somebody, somebody tweets achievement unlocked Swedish meatballs for breakfast. I mean, uh, that is that is an example of game transfer phenomenon. You're you're porting something about the game content or experience into your daily

life outside the game. It kind of goes back to our Techno Religionist episodes that we recorded where we talked about how you can't help but incorporate technology into your symbolic metaphorical understanding of reality. And so I often think of like in many different topics that apply to the human experience. I often think in terms of the health bar and some of the type of bar, whether you're

talking particularly. I remember in researching Willpower and how willpower our works and in its stated status, is this kind of depletable resource in the human mind you end up thinking about video games. It's the logical way to make sense of that and to picture it. Yeah, So some media coverage about exactly the kind of thing you're talking about, the intersection of of science and video games is of

course not so sensible. And and as we've said, this example is no exception in response to the game transfer phenomenon. I know, one UK newspaper ran the headline gamers can't tell real world from fantasy, and generally much coverage has focused on sensational, violent implications of this kind of faulty premise. The researchers themselves disowned that kind of coverage. They're like, no,

that's now what we're saying. Almost all of this is harmless, and they sort they compare it to the ways we incorporate other metaphors from other types of content and media we consume into our lives. I mean, it's just you could express things in terms of a TV show you watched or a book you read. When you participate with media, you you get some metaphors or some you know, cognitive

sticking points from it. Yeah, Like it's not that weird. Yeah, Like I think of any other phrases that we have, you know, fast forwarding through something again, pose on something, or let's put a pin in this, which of course indicates that the speaker likes to torture insects in the fair time, So keep that one in mind. Yeah, the

the malevolent lepidopterist of your office. Yeah. So while the using the phrase achievement un locked or something isn't all that weird, I do still think the Tetris effect is remarkable and strange the idea of these, uh, these consistent and nearly universal Tetris hallucinations and dreams, and that makes me wonder, well, does the Tetris effect belong in this category of game transfer phenomena or is it something unique? Is it something on a separate at a different level.

Pretty much, I feel like it might be. And in the next episode that we that we're doing on Tetris,

I think we'll see elements of that. Now. I've been thinking about it in terms of Tetris being the purest form of the drug, and you can, certainly and maybe you should, dilute the purity of that drug when you're applying it in certain scenarios, right, because, like spice, it may enable you to to have some precognition and to stand at the top of the dune of the universe of space time and see beyond what normal humans can.

But you've got to keep coming back. Oh, man, I wonder how spice would affect your ability to play Tetris, Like what would see the entire bag your preview screen would have hundreds of blocks in it. Oh and then what what the guild navigator? Of course would you would would make sure to pick the best block possible for the next turn, whatever the safest block choices. But as we've showed, there is no such thing. There is no optimal Tetris play. There there's better and worst Tetris play,

but there's no perfect Tetris play. So would you be able to find that golden path through Tetris? You couldn't. I guess it's an unresolved game. Yeah. Anyway, we are so excited about the science of Tetris that we're going to come back next time to talk about some very fascinating Tetris research, more about how Tetris interacts with our brains. We're going to talk about why Tetris feels so good to play, but we're also going to talk about tetraspace

therapies for the Tetris cure. Essentially. Yeah, so we're going to continue to dive into the power of Tetris. But then what can we do with that power? How can we utilize it? How can we harness Tetris and use it to improve our lives? In the meantime, if you haven't played Tetris in a while, I encourage you to

unlock that ancient secret yet again. Open the puzzle box, play a little bit of Tetris, and then come back and visit with us again next time, and and share in the deep mystery and wonder of the Platonic puzzle universe with us. So until next time, check out stuff

to blow your mind dot com. That's where we find all of our blog posts, are podcast episodes, are videos, and indeed the landing page for this episode will include links out in some related materials on the site as well as some of the resources we've been discussing here

with you today. And if you want to get in touch with us and let us know your personal Tetris history or your thoughts about cognition, human neurology and video gameplay, you can email us at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com for more on those and thousands of other topics. Is that how stuff works dot com. I don