Falling Blocks as a Visual Language

The shapes became shorthand for computers, the eighties, and the idea of fitting things together.

Four decades of ubiquity turned seven simple shapes into a visual vocabulary that communicates without explanation.

As shorthand

A monitor in the background of a film scene shows falling blocks and the audience instantly reads: computer, probably the eighties, this character has time on their hands. No dialogue required.

It joined a small set of images — a spinning radar sweep, a wall of scrolling green text — that convey a whole idea in a fraction of a second. Very few games have achieved this. Most cannot be recognised from a still frame.

In architecture and installation

Building facades with individually lit windows have repeatedly been used to play the game at enormous scale, usually by students, usually without permission. There is a whole informal tradition of it.

The appeal is obvious: a grid of windows is already the right shape, and the game is legible at any resolution down to almost nothing. Try that with anything else and you get an unreadable smear.

In graphic design

The interlocking-shapes motif turns up constantly in logos and illustration when the idea is fitting together, efficiency or organisation. It reads as "components that combine" without needing a caption.

Which is a slightly odd afterlife for shapes whose actual meaning in the game is closer to "problem arriving at speed".

Why these shapes travel so well

They are legible at any size. Four squares in an arrangement survives being rendered in windows, pixels, LEDs or bricks.

They are colour-coded consistently. The standard palette means a cyan bar reads as the long piece even out of context.

Everybody knows them. Ubiquity is self-reinforcing: because the reference is universally understood, it keeps being used, which keeps it universal.

The strange part

Most people who recognise the shapes instantly could not name the mathematical term for them, and a good number have never played more than a few minutes. The imagery outran the game.

Read next

• 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.
• Counting the Bag: Knowing What Is ComingThe randomiser guarantees each shape once per seven, which makes the unseen pieces deducible rather than merely probable.
• Two Players, One KeyboardSplit-screen has a texture online play cannot reproduce, and a couple of practical quirks.