INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
across your vision What if you started to see them overlaid onto pavestones or buildings or, rendered in a wholemeal-and-white monochrome,
the loaves stacked on a supermarket shelfThis is the Tetris Effect, a psychological phenomenon first given name by Wired writer Jeffrey
A name that, here in late 2018, has been adopted by an official Tetris game hoping to encourage and enhance these symptoms in its
We wanted to double down on that, put all of our chips into that feeling
becomes intense, leads to a sense of ecstasy, a sense of clarity: you know exactly what you want to do from one moment to the other; you get
You know that what you need to do is possible to do, even though difficult, and sense of time disappears, you forget yourself, you feel part
Over 300 college students were told they were about to be evaluated on their attractiveness, just to stress them out, then given a version
of the game to play while they waited
Squeeze a trigger and everything slows down, the music and particle effects fading away so you can concentrate on putting everything in its
players experience Tetris all the time, it seems
After a three-month period, the girls who had been playing Tetris on a regular basis showed significantly thicker cortexes than those who
play the game in their head during quiet moments, or sorting real-world objects into those four-tile patterns
2000 study at Harvard Medical School found that over 60% of players reported Tetris invading their dreams
I personally have experienced it after lengthy sessions of Guitar Hero, those five coloured lines still racing towards me as I drifted
off.These all, notably, have something in common with Tetris
As you rotate blocks and clear lines, the game surrounds you with glittering spectacle
You might find yourself on a beach at dusk, or soaring above a forest in the rain, or dashing through a minimalist cityscape
The last one in particular, with the hard right angles of its tower blocks and glittering grids of an overlaid subway map, is an effective
illustration of the kind of Tetris-like patterns you might see in the real world.Downtown Jazz closes the gap between the game and the real
Image credit: Author.As you play, each stage reacts in a unique way
Rotating a block will trigger a sound effect relevant to the world you currently find yourself in
glittering ocean below you
Keep clearing, and the stage itself will start to change, revealing new aspects or transporting you to somewhere different.And under it all
For me, Tetris is some song which you sing and sing inside yourself and can't stop."For all the science underpinning Tetris Effect, this
quote is the perfect summary of what the game achieves
It takes the most perfectly simple game and shows how it can be as catchy, magical and brain-chemistry-altering as a great pop song
