In my April 1992 column for "ST Applications" magazine I examined the addictive nature of Tetris and the effect that playing the game had on its many players. This phenomenon would later become known as the Tetris Effect (sometimes also referred to as the Tetris Syndrome). It has come under proper academic research in the past decade as part of investigations by Dr Angelica Ortiz de Gortari into Game Transfer Phenomena (see this BBC Bitesize article for an overview of GTP or read the in-depth papers on the researcher's own website).
Tetris remains popular to this day and is comfortably inside the Top 200 games list on iTunes for iOS devices. However I'm still far too scared to play it!
Tetris remains popular to this day and is comfortably inside the Top 200 games list on iTunes for iOS devices. However I'm still far too scared to play it!
TETRIS: More than just a game?
Forget Elite, Populous II or Lemmings, the most addictive game in existence is Tetris. William Hern investigates.
This is not going to be a typical Desktop Discussions column as it is a game review. In fact it's not even going to be a typical game review as I haven't played the game in question even once. This may seem like a gross dereliction of duty, but unusual measures are demanded for a game such as Tetris.
Tetris is easy to describe. Variously shaped blocks fall from the top of the screen into a well where they collect in a pile. The player can rotate and direct them as they fall so that they fit into gaps in the pile. When a row in the pit is completely filled, it disappears and all the blocks above move down a row. As the score increases, so does the rate at which the blocks fall. The game ends when the pile of bricks reaches the top of the screen.
It's certainly a very simple game and to those who haven't tried it, it probably sounds rather dull. Yet judging by the number of people who devote tens of hours to it every week for years on end, Tetris can make justified claim to being the most addictive game in existence. Over the past three months I've been trying to discover just what makes it so irresistible.
Tetris' appeal is not based on flash graphics or sound effects. It requires very little in the way of computer resources and thus has been ported to an amazing number of machines. I've seen it being played on systems as diverse as a text-only terminal and a Silicon Graphics workstation in sixteen million colours. Yet regardless of the implementation, the game seems to be able to bewitch any person unfortunate enough to give it a go.
I first encountered the game a couple of years ago when my flatmate received a public domain version of Tetris for his Archimedes computer. Within hours he was hooked and over the next couple of weeks spent all his spare time playing it, easily clocking up over forty hours a week on it. What really amazed me though was that when he returned home for Christmas he managed to get the rest of his family addicted as well, not one of whom had shown any interest in computer games previously.
Now aware of the game's existence, I noticed more and more people playing it around Edinburgh University. A tutor from the university estimated to me that fifty percent of M.Sc time within his department was devoted to playing Tetris. I knew then that it was no ordinary game!
To find out more about the habits of Tetris players, I decided to interview some of the players within the university. Talking to both novice and expert players, I found that the average time spent playing was four and a half hours per week, although some put in well over forty hours.
The most interesting result of the survey was that about two thirds of interviewees said that they thought about Tetris even when not playing it. For some this amounted to occasionally imagining falling shapes while others confessed to playing complete Tetris games in their head.
The most extreme case occurred to a player during one winter. She had been driving home late one night when suddenly it began to snow. The flakes falling on to the windscreen seemed, to her, just like Tetris blocks and she had great difficulty in concentrating on driving and not trying, futilely, to rotate the flakes as they fell. Indeed as the snow increased in intensity, she had to pull over to the side of the road and wait for the snowstorm to pass before continuing.
From my interviews, players seem to remain addicted to Tetris far longer than for other games (some of the players I interviewed had been playing for over four years). Where players do become bored, it is likely to be the implementation that they have grown weary of rather than the game itself. Of the ex-players that I spoke to, over half admitted that they would return to the game if they found a new version.
Only one player had made a conscious decision to quit playing. After realising that he was devoting more than fifty hours a week to the game, he threw out every floppy disk containing it, and deleted the game from his departmental workstation. He admits that he has to be careful, even now two years later, not to watch someone playing it, or else the familiar Tetris pangs return.
But just what is the secret of Tetris' addiction? Well, at its heart, Tetris is basically a game about creating order from chaos - untidy blocks fall from the sky and must be sorted into neat rows so that they disappear. Almost all of us have a subconscious craving for order and feel a sense of satisfaction and achievement when we have tidied up something. As very similar emotions are generated while playing Tetris, it's not difficult to see why the game should be attractive to so many people.
Am I over-reacting to what is, after all, merely a computer game? Maybe. Tetris is non-violent and provides a great deal of pleasure to its many players. Many find it a great way to relax at the end of a long day, much as others might settle down with a newspaper crossword puzzle. And in spite of all that I've written here, I don't think that it is part of a last-ditch KGB plot to ensnare the West, as has been speculated by some of the more radical members of the US computer press.
However I am concerned for those who play for thirty hours or more a week, or who vividly imagine games in their head. This seems to me to be crossing over the line from relaxing pastime to true obsessive addiction, and such people need help.
Wandering around the shops just before Christmas, I noted that Nintendo's Gameboy hand-held games machine included a free Tetris cartridge. This is a significant escalation of the Tetris threat - whereas Tetris used to be tethered to the computer on your desktop, you can now buy a version from which there is no escape. The thought that millions worldwide woke up on Christmas morning to find a Gameboy plus Tetris in their stockings is more than a little frightening.
William Hern
Tetris is easy to describe. Variously shaped blocks fall from the top of the screen into a well where they collect in a pile. The player can rotate and direct them as they fall so that they fit into gaps in the pile. When a row in the pit is completely filled, it disappears and all the blocks above move down a row. As the score increases, so does the rate at which the blocks fall. The game ends when the pile of bricks reaches the top of the screen.
It's certainly a very simple game and to those who haven't tried it, it probably sounds rather dull. Yet judging by the number of people who devote tens of hours to it every week for years on end, Tetris can make justified claim to being the most addictive game in existence. Over the past three months I've been trying to discover just what makes it so irresistible.
Tetris' appeal is not based on flash graphics or sound effects. It requires very little in the way of computer resources and thus has been ported to an amazing number of machines. I've seen it being played on systems as diverse as a text-only terminal and a Silicon Graphics workstation in sixteen million colours. Yet regardless of the implementation, the game seems to be able to bewitch any person unfortunate enough to give it a go.
I first encountered the game a couple of years ago when my flatmate received a public domain version of Tetris for his Archimedes computer. Within hours he was hooked and over the next couple of weeks spent all his spare time playing it, easily clocking up over forty hours a week on it. What really amazed me though was that when he returned home for Christmas he managed to get the rest of his family addicted as well, not one of whom had shown any interest in computer games previously.
Now aware of the game's existence, I noticed more and more people playing it around Edinburgh University. A tutor from the university estimated to me that fifty percent of M.Sc time within his department was devoted to playing Tetris. I knew then that it was no ordinary game!
To find out more about the habits of Tetris players, I decided to interview some of the players within the university. Talking to both novice and expert players, I found that the average time spent playing was four and a half hours per week, although some put in well over forty hours.
The most interesting result of the survey was that about two thirds of interviewees said that they thought about Tetris even when not playing it. For some this amounted to occasionally imagining falling shapes while others confessed to playing complete Tetris games in their head.
The most extreme case occurred to a player during one winter. She had been driving home late one night when suddenly it began to snow. The flakes falling on to the windscreen seemed, to her, just like Tetris blocks and she had great difficulty in concentrating on driving and not trying, futilely, to rotate the flakes as they fell. Indeed as the snow increased in intensity, she had to pull over to the side of the road and wait for the snowstorm to pass before continuing.
From my interviews, players seem to remain addicted to Tetris far longer than for other games (some of the players I interviewed had been playing for over four years). Where players do become bored, it is likely to be the implementation that they have grown weary of rather than the game itself. Of the ex-players that I spoke to, over half admitted that they would return to the game if they found a new version.
Only one player had made a conscious decision to quit playing. After realising that he was devoting more than fifty hours a week to the game, he threw out every floppy disk containing it, and deleted the game from his departmental workstation. He admits that he has to be careful, even now two years later, not to watch someone playing it, or else the familiar Tetris pangs return.
But just what is the secret of Tetris' addiction? Well, at its heart, Tetris is basically a game about creating order from chaos - untidy blocks fall from the sky and must be sorted into neat rows so that they disappear. Almost all of us have a subconscious craving for order and feel a sense of satisfaction and achievement when we have tidied up something. As very similar emotions are generated while playing Tetris, it's not difficult to see why the game should be attractive to so many people.
Am I over-reacting to what is, after all, merely a computer game? Maybe. Tetris is non-violent and provides a great deal of pleasure to its many players. Many find it a great way to relax at the end of a long day, much as others might settle down with a newspaper crossword puzzle. And in spite of all that I've written here, I don't think that it is part of a last-ditch KGB plot to ensnare the West, as has been speculated by some of the more radical members of the US computer press.
However I am concerned for those who play for thirty hours or more a week, or who vividly imagine games in their head. This seems to me to be crossing over the line from relaxing pastime to true obsessive addiction, and such people need help.
Wandering around the shops just before Christmas, I noted that Nintendo's Gameboy hand-held games machine included a free Tetris cartridge. This is a significant escalation of the Tetris threat - whereas Tetris used to be tethered to the computer on your desktop, you can now buy a version from which there is no escape. The thought that millions worldwide woke up on Christmas morning to find a Gameboy plus Tetris in their stockings is more than a little frightening.
William Hern