Culture and science

The Tetris effect, the sleep-lab studies, the folk song everybody knows, and why a game about falling rectangles has outlived nearly everything released alongside it.

12 articles

• The Tetris Effect: Seeing Blocks With Your Eyes ClosedPlay long enough and the shapes follow you into sleep. It has a name, a literature, and a fairly mundane explanation.
• The Research on Blocks and Intrusive MemoriesSeveral groups have tested whether playing a visuospatial game after a distressing event reduces later flashbacks. The findings are interesting and preliminary.
• The Song Everyone Associates With Falling BlocksA nineteenth-century Russian folk tune about a pedlar, and how it became the most recognisable video game music ever written.
• Why This Particular Puzzle Is So Hard to Put DownClear feedback, a failure you can always attribute to yourself, and no ending. A design that keeps offering one more attempt.
• Does Playing Improve Spatial Reasoning?Some evidence, some overstatement, and a reasonable position between the two.
• The Mathematics Behind the Seven ShapesWhy exactly seven, what happens with five squares, and the tiling problems that follow.
• Score Chasing, Speedrunning and Community RecordsA game with no ending produces a different competitive culture to one with a finish line.
• Falling Blocks as a Visual LanguageThe shapes became shorthand for computers, the eighties, and the idea of fitting things together.
• Puzzle Games and the Flow StateAbsorbed, time-distorted play requires difficulty to track ability closely. This genre does that automatically.
• Accessibility in Puzzle Games, and Where It Runs OutSome barriers in this genre are removable. One of them, so far, is not.
• Why the Simplest Games Outlive Everything Around ThemForty years of hardware generations have discarded nearly everything. A few rectangles survived all of them.
• The Genre Forty Years OnWhere falling-block games have ended up: competitive scenes, browser tabs, and a design nobody has improved.