Your Life Is Tetris. Stop Playing It Like Chess

was posted 3 weeks ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10890548

> 1. In life, your only opponent is yourself.

Or, you know, people who actually want to kill you. Or a state that wants to disenfranchise you. Or abusive peers and parents. Or...

> In life, things don’t get harder — they just get faster.

Until you reach middle age - and your back starts going, your hearing fades, your glasses prescription gets stronger...

> In life, you can’t control the board.

Unless you look at likely outcomes for your socio-economic class. Sure, you don't know what's coming next - but you know that a higher degree usually leads to better employment prospect. Saving for a pension now will set you up for retirement.

> In life, no one tells you when you’ve won.

Really? You don't think society places great emphasis on milestone achievements like marriage, reproduction, employment success, sporting prowess, etc? Only you know what will make you truly happy - but everyone will be very keen to tell you if you're a winner or a loser.

It's neither. Life is like poker, combining skill, random chance, and the need to understand and anticipate the behavior of other human beings while they do the same with you.

Each of the games mentioned has only two of these three elements.

Also in poker people start with different amounts of money and that matters.

Neither Tetris nor Chess, but Dwarf Fortress.

http://www.pcgamer.com/into-the-deep-its-time-to-learn-how-t...

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/magazine/the-brilliance-of...

Life is Calvin Ball[1]. Any rules we may identify are subject to abrupt, arbitrary, and often incomprehensible, change. Best to just enjoy the insanity.

1.http://calvinandhobbes.wikia.com/wiki/Calvinball

Personally I think life is like Backgammon: there are no absolute certainties, just probabilities, and due to this an expectiminimax-like approach with good heuristics is more effective than trying to peer far into the future.

This article got the necessary treatment from /r/chess weeks ago:

https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/418pcl/life_chess_an....

I'm leaning towards our lives are more like Chess but more. Of course our biases create the framework of our reality.

Yeah, I've already heard something like: "Life is just like Tetris: there's no way to win, you can just stay alive for longer or shorter time"

I enjoyed the read, thank you.

Comparing `life' to chess or Tetris or anything really just shows how much you haven't lived long enough yet.

I liked this but vehemently disagree based on a few of the reasons others have mentioned. I will say my old chess teacher had an excellent quote about life that also applies to Tetris. "There's only ever three moves, a good move, a bad move, and the right move." I still say that to myself all the time when things get hard.

This is the second time I am seeing and since the time I saw it first, I have begun thinking that life is an analogy to whatever game you make it, whether that be candy crush, bejeweled, chess, hearts, poker, ... tetris, etc.

My own view on chess and life is that you shouldn't play it by planning 10 steps to hit just one target, but as one of 10 targets. Transform that concept to whatever game you wish.

These statements serve as analogies we use to communicate what life is like or how we understand it. For that reason, I feel the title should have been "How life is a Tetris game and opponentless."

Fun piece but it lacks any realistic depth.

For example the claim that "your score can increase to infinity, if you just push yourself harder" is a concept that is untrue and obsolete.

http://www.monbiot.com/2011/11/07/the-self-attribution-falla...

Further, the realities of privilege, oppression and discrimination are completely ignored.

I think the series "No Game No Life" covered this best -

"There’s no way to know the rules or the goal, yet there are 7 billion people making whatever moves they want. If you lose too much, or win too much, there are penalties. You can’t pass your turn, and if you talk too much, you’ll be ostracized. There are no parameters and no way to even know the genre. This world is just a crappy game."

- Perhaps a tad melodramatic, but still...

I couldn't find any record of this guy playing chess in either USCF or FIDE.

More life advice from a 20 something? Oh Medium.

Life is totalistic. It depends only on the total value of you and your neighbors. [1]

[1] http://mathworld.wolfram.com/TotalisticCellularAutomaton.htm...

Really enjoyed this article (most of it). Especially the part about life not being a zero sum game & a mindset like that being a disadvantage and life being essentially a race against time knowing that "losing" is inevitable.

I'd just like to play the old tetris on my new android. The new tetris is a POS.

A short, elegant piece of writing with some real insight.

The present is like Tetris, the future is like chess.

Your life is neither Tetris nor Chess. It's Go.

Or maybe life is like chess with timed turns.

people get way too hung up on analogies