Tetris

Wednesday, 1 April 2009.

---

Tetris is a strange game.

Your successes are merely instantaneous: if you get a Tetris, the screen flashes white and your score jumps. Your failures, however, are eternal: they are ever present before your eyes; indeed, the entire playfield is a representation of how near the end is. Every block on the screen is another step on the road to the inevitable Game Over.

The more I think about life, the more like Tetris it seems. Every success is fleeting, either a brief note of internal joy or an audible “good job;” empty, and disappearing as quickly as it arrived. Every mistake, though, wears on the mind and the heart and each one piles up, showing how ever-near death or nihilism is.

This is not why Tetris is strange, however.

Tetris is strange because it is not depressing to play. It is entertaining and addicting; you want to correct your failures, learn from them, improve upon them, build a high score. Past Game Overs do not deter you, they urge you on to do better, to do more: to top the leaderboard, to play for an hour on a single quarter, or to just hear Korobeiniki for a little longer. Once again, the more I think about life, the more like Tetris it seems.

And that is an encouraging thought.