In the year 1984, Soviet scientist Alexei Pajitnov created the best-selling game of all time. What he did not know is that, almost four decades later, not only is it still being sold in different technological formats, but it has also created its own obsession for the brain : the Tetris Effect. Because if; beyond its initial version, Tetris has also evolved with all the tools that appeared. However; for the brain it has also had repercussions, and in these cases not so favourably.
The 80’s were a very important decade for the world of video games. In those days, thousands of homes had the first game consoles of the time, and the first arcades even emerged where we could play numerous titles for a small price.
The tetris effect, beyond the game
Thus, in 1984, Alexey Pajitnov developed one of the most important games in history: Tetris . This title entered homes without making much noise, causing people of all ages to spend hours trying to fit geometric pieces to the rhythm of its peculiar song.
The objective was none other than to fit geometric pieces , made up of five squares, in a wooden box. While creating this game, Alexei imagined that his pieces fell into a glass and that players could move them to and fro and even rotate them to create complete shapes.
But the game ended up being very difficult, so he made the decision to simplify the pieces by figures of 4 squares , with the name of Tetrominos. The name of the game comes from the combination of Tetra in Greek, which is four, and apart from that Alexei’s favorite sport was tennis. However, what the Soviet scientist did not know was that his creation would become the best-selling game in history almost forty years later… and from which he would create his own obsession . This is what is known today as the ‘Tetris Effect’, of which it even has a psychological branch.
What is this effect?
It is not new that the human brain is still a mystery to science. Despite the fact that we are in a time of continuous development, even today we still do not know the organ that lives inside our head, exactly the same one that we must use to discover it.
When it was first described it was given a secondary role, with the weight of consciousness being placed in the heart. Today, however, it is known that the brain is the organic support of everything we are, and that it is even capable of changing its shape and function to adapt to what we do.
That could be a first introduction to the explanation of what this Tetris Effect, as it is known, has to do with. However, science has tried to discover how certain activities change the structure of the brain , and the truth is that Tetris has been, without a doubt, the game that has been used most frequently for this purpose.
Therefore, with it it has been shown that, if we try to play for many hours in a row, we will notice a strange sensation in our environment , as if wanting to order reality around us in blocks like in the game, as if we were playing in the real world in a way unconscious, as our mind rearranges what we see into geometric shapes for a few hours.
Of course, this pathology is not limited to the Tetris of a lifetime. This is indicated more by the world of video games, where it is very specifically related to being a playful activity to which we can spend a large number of hours.
A basic pleasure for our mind
We see this directly with research such as that of psychologist Tom Stafford, known for his website ‘Mind Hacks’, who deciphered what are the circumstances that make Tetris an irresistible game for our brain, and what produces that ‘obsession’ , known as the Tetris Effect.
In his opinion, the most important factor is that the game “takes advantage of the basic pleasure that our mind experiences when ordering things, and uses it against us”. The British discovered that what he is doing is creating infinite unfinished tasks that inevitably capture our attention.
Each action of the game, explains the psychologist, allows us to solve a part of the puzzle, filling row after row so that they disappear, but it continues to generate new problems that can take us hours. “The same satisfaction that comes from scratching,” says Stafford. It is true that there are other games that exploit the same human tendency to order things, such as billiards, but only Tetris makes this task endless and partial. And hence its effect.
