Tetris: The Tetris Effect, Flow States, Pattern Recognition, and the Beauty of Trance

Intro

Tetris was developed in 1985 by Russian software engineer Alexey Pajitnov. The premise is extremely simple: you have a play area where blocks of specific shapes (O, L, J, Z, S, I) drop from the ceiling in a random order. The player must organize these pieces into a pile with as few gaps as possible; when a complete horizontal line is formed with no gaps, the line is eliminated. This allows higher blocks to fall down, lowering the height of the pile of blocks. If the blocks touch the top of the screen, the game is over. Traditionally, Tetris had 20 levels where the block fall speed increased per level. Clear x number of lines and the level increases by 1. However, in modern Tetris, this is just one of several game modes. The most popular and common game modes these days are the following:

Marathon: The game mode described above. The player plays through 20 levels, each level increasing the speed at which the blocks fall. Once the player finishes all 20 levels, the game is over and their high score is recorded. This high score is the skill metric (from here on, I will use "skill metric" to describe the result, grading, or score that signifies the level of mastery of the game mode).
Sprint: This game mode is a speed-based game mode, as the name implies. The player starts with an empty screen and must clear 40 lines as fast as possible. The skill metric for this game is the clear time, and some players have absurd times for this!
Endless: This one is also obvious. It literally goes forever. This is sometimes called "Zen" or "Infinite" or something else, but the premise is the same. This is my preferred way to play because I enjoy getting locked into a flow state and playing for long periods of time while dissociating. We'll talk more about this phenomenon later, so stay tuned!
Blitz/Ultra: This one goes by tons of different names, but the idea is instead of clearing 40 lines as fast as you can, you instead get a time limit of two minutes to get as many points as possible. For this reason, the skill metric for this game mode is the score.
Multiplayer: Arguably the most popular game mode and the one with the most amount of clout attached I think. It plays similar to Puyo Pop. You clear lines like in normal Tetris, but when you clear either double, triple, Tetris, or a combo, you generate "trash" that is sent over to your opponent. Usually the trash raises from the bottom, pushing the pile upward towards the top of the screen. Higher combos/scores/moves send more trash. The trash can be cleared as if they were normal Tetris blocks, but are randomized, and contain random gaps or spaces in the lines. This mode is definitely stressful and for sweaty types haha.

The Tetris Effect and Flow States

The Tetris Effect video above is a trailer for a PS4 game called "Tetris Effect". It's a modern Tetris that focuses on creating an audio/visual experience that emulates a phenomenon observed in psychiatry and other medical fields. Essentially, as the trailer explains, players of Tetris found themselves experiencing a unique symptom, where upon closing their eyes, sleeping/dreaming, or even day-dreaming, players would report seeing "blocks" falling in front of their eyes. They weren't even placing them, the blocks were just falling. In the words of this Wiki article about The Tetris Effect: "People who have played Tetris for a prolonged amount of time can find themselves thinking about ways different shapes in the real world can fit together, such as the boxes on a supermarket shelf or the buildings on a street. They may see colored images of pieces falling into place on an invisible layout at the edges of their visual fields or when they close their eyes. They may see such colored, moving images when they are falling asleep, a form of hypnagogic imagery. For some, this creative urge to visually fit shapes together by organising and building shapes can be extremely addictive."

What's especially fascinating about this mental state or condition is the real world benefits that accompany it. "A study by Haier et al. found that after three months of playing Tetris, participants showed relatively thicker cortexes in the Brodmann area 6 which plays a role in the planning of complex, coordinated movements; demonstrating how the brain undergoes plastic changes to accommodate the demands of the task," (Wikipedia, The Tetris Effect). Another awesome Wiki quote/study: "Stickgold et al. (2000) have proposed that Tetris effect imagery is a separate form of memory, likely related to procedural memory. This is from their research in which they showed that people with anterograde amnesia, unable to form new declarative memories, reported dreaming of falling shapes after playing Tetris during the day, despite not being able to remember playing the game at all." This is huge, and absolutely unexpected for a cheeky 1985 Soviet program. Something about Tetris itself taps into the core physiology of our brains and how they work.

It's possible that I, too, have been affected by The Tetris Effect. I have distinct childhood memories playing Tetris on my TI-83+ (it's still on my work desk) during chemistry and algebra, and then more memories of laying on my bed at 1am on a school night playing Tetris DS on my 3DSlite. I remember unlocking Endless Mode for the first time and playing one game for literally hours at a time. This continued through college when Tetris Friends came out - one of the first social Tetris experiences I played. It. Was. Awesome.

There was Facebook integration (back when people were excited about using Facebook), and it had its own website you could link with Facebook. You could literally compare scores with friends, you'd get coins to unlock cosmetics or game options (like being able to tweak sensitivity and response time, etc), there was the mainstream introduction of the above game modes...it had everything. And I spent so much of my time listening to trance music on iTunes and playing Tetris for, again, literally hours. What was it about Tetris? Why did this happen? Wouldn't it get boring? Well...it's time to explore probably our last theme of the "psychology" section here: Flow States.

"Flow" is a more scientific term which is commonly known as being "in the zone" or "locked in." It's a unique mental state that occurs under certain conditions, specifically when activites are not boring, but not super engaging; not incredibly hard, but not completely uninteresting; not incredibly stressful, but not stress-free. It's a sweet balance along several different axis and traits. Once again, Wikipedia has a great summary of this: "However, when one is in the flow state, they are completely engrossed with the one task at hand and, without making the conscious decision to do so, lose awareness of all other things: time, people, distractions, and even basic bodily needs. According to Csikszentmihályi, this event occurs because all of the attention of the person in the flow state is on the task at hand; there is no more attention to be allocated." Similarly, "...The flow state has been described by Csikszentmihályi as the "optimal experience" in that one gets to a level of high gratification from the experience.[20] Achieving this experience is considered to be personal and "depends on the ability" of the individual." It's important to note that a state of Flow can be observed during non-Tetris related tasks, haha. I sometimes enter flow states while writing music, or playing video games, or listening to music, or even sitting alone and thinking to myself. It's surprisingly common, but the most important thing (to me) about flow is the level of enjoyment I receive from it. There's really something magical about being in those periods of hyperfocus.

Over the years, I've come to realize how Tetris is a safe space for me, where I can zone out and mindlessly demolish lines ad infinitum while thinking about life. I'd do it during breakups, during periods of heavy depression (definitely cried the first time I played the first level in Tetris Effect), during stressful periods where I needed escapism, etc. It's a monumental game for me, and I strongly recommend people try it out. Because outside of just the mental part of it, there's tons of tech, skill, talent, and more when it comes to mastering the game in its modern state.

-teig