The Tetris Effect and Our Boundaryless Digital Future
The videogames of Tetsuya Mizuguchi have chased a singular, mystical effect—one the celebrated designer first experienced 30 years ago, in 1988, when he wandered into an arcade in Tokyo. A young college student at the time, Mizuguchi enjoyed the shooters and racing games but was mesmerized by a colorful, musical waterfall of 2-D blocks. “I put many coins into that machine,” Mizuguchi remembers. “It was such elegant perfection.”
Tetris would not only become one of the most enduring entertainments of the age, it would also inspire much of Mizuguchi’s career, leading to a trilogy of brain-entrancing games: 2001’s Rez sent players flying through spacey wireframe landscapes; his 2004 follow-up, Lumines, paired falling shapes with the time-based elements of a rhythm game; Child of Eden, which came out in 2011, turned players’ bodies into the controller. Each one owes a conceptual debt to Tetris, marrying geometry and sound in a delightful synesthesia—but none more so than Mizuguchi’s latest creation, his own spin on Tetris itself. Out for the PlayStation 4 in November, Tetris Effect is a sumptuous update of the classic. It’s also something more, an effort to leverage a scientific phenomenon that may ease our way into a boundaryless digital future.
The rules of Tetris are simple: Rotate and drop four-block shapes into place in order to create and clear unbroken lines. But from the time the game emerged from a Russian computer lab in 1984, people have reported a bizarre experience. After sustained play, they would see the tetrominoes in their mind’s eye, especially while falling asleep. Clinically that’s known as hypnagogic hallucination, but the term that stuck—and the title Mizuguchi would later choose for his game—was the “Tetris effect.” As Jeffrey Goldsmith, who coined the term in this very magazine in May 1994, described it:
That specific effect is part of a suite of ways Tetris seems to produce changes in the brain. Research has shown that playing the game routinely can decrease the rate at which cerebral glucose gets metabolized, making the brain more efficient. Another study found that the game’s visuospatial demands may help interrupt processes that would otherwise embed traumatic sights and experiences in a person’s memory.
What excites Mizuguchi, though, is something less clinical and more creative—the in-game state that heightens those cognitive aftereffects. He calls it the “zone”; his colleague Mark MacDonald calls it “getting out of your head.” You might call it a flow state, that enviable autopilot mode in which mastery feels effortless. That’s how “classic” Tetris fanatics—who play only the Nintendo version—manage to break a million points and how modern “sprint” players manage to clear 40 lines in less than 17 seconds.
Tetris Effect builds on Mizuguchi’s past work to get you as far out of your head—and as absorbed into the experience—as possible. Levels change colors like a chameleon wearing a mood ring. The backdrop, the pieces, the sound effects, the particle explosions that signal a successful block-clearing: It all constantly refreshes, reengaging your senses at every turn. There’s even a mechanic called the Zone. When activated, it slows the proceedings, allowing you to execute and plan moves that would otherwise be impossible for all but the game’s savants.
As a PS4 title, Tetris Effect can also be played using PlayStation’s VR headset. That doesn’t change the game itself; you don’t transform into a block or experience any other tacked-on VR effect. But it does intensify your relationship to the game. Enveloped by its sights and sounds, you sink even deeper into flow. When a competitive Tetris player tried Tetris Effect, he performed significantly better in a headset versus on a TV. So did I, in a way that collapsed my sense of time: During my first run-through, what I thought was 10 minutes turned out to be 45.
VR users know that atemporality well. By blocking out external distractions, headsets often induce an all-encompassing focus that feels like a blessed corrective to the multiscreen era and its attentional attenuation. Tetris Effect manages to compound that experience. Between the trancey electronic soundtrack and the ever-evolving aesthetic, the game doesn’t reward completion so much as it does focus. The longer you stay in the zone, the more you have to gain.
“VR and AR are not going away,” Mizuguchi tells me. “They’re going to expand.” As we migrate to those mediums—leaving behind conventional screens and making the world our monitor—a heightened focus becomes a significant advantage. Manipulating virtual artifacts in our real surroundings was once hallucination; soon, it will be quotidian. Take heart, Tetris fans. You’ve spent your whole lives with the building blocks of success.
Peter Rubin (@provenself), platforms editor and author of a book on virtual reality, Future Presence
This article appears in the November issue. Subscribe now.