The Tetris Effect | Hacker News Reader

The Tetris Effect

nonzerosum.games

122 pointsKiro84 comments

Hey everyone, I'm James, the writer of the linked blog post with the 3D Tetris experiment and I just today discovered this thread! Which explains the bump in traffic I had for a couple of days back in August.

One of the moderators has kindly let me jump back in to say thanks to everyone that read the blog and had a play, it was most exciting to see people talking about it and I was especially amused by everyone bagging on the unreadable font - you'll be relieved that it has been changed, as of a few weeks ago.

So, a huge thanks, you've all made my day. And if you were looking for a mobile version, here it is... https://nonzerosum.games/tetrings_mobile.html

I'm looking forward to being part of this community too.

> this time I was fixated on how to create a three-dimensional version of Tetris.

I remember playing a 3D Tetris-like game called Blockout back in the day. Some shapes were odd and non-4-block, key mappings for rotations were mind bending.

https://www.mobygames.com/game/498/blockout/

As for the Tetris effect, at some point I played a lot of Tetris and seeing falling tetrominos when falling asleep was only the beginning of it: my brain built some heavy pattern recognition for pieces, so much so that I was basically daydreaming tetrominos everywhere, as in seeing a tetromino shape first, then realising what the thing actually was (e.g a bunch of buildings, a bunch of cars parked in a certain way, in books where rivers lined up a certain way, or words were even vaguely tetromino-shaped), or seeing stacks ("I could fit a T in there" and stuff).

The scariest version of that mental Tetris Effect I ever got was from Katamari Damacy. I'd be driving along a road, and start judging items like mailboxes and signs as to whether my car was big enough to roll them up if I drove into them.

A few weeks after starting playing Breath of the Wild on the Switch when it first came out, I remember looking out my apartment window down the street at store I needed to go to and thinking "Oh, that won't take much time at all, I can just glide down most of the way there" and only a moment later remembering that the paraglider wasn't something I had in real life.

Not the same thing but ..

Our housing complex had a large entrance gate for cars and a smaller gate used by pedestrians (and two wheelers mostly just because they fit and people are lazy to wait for the security guard to open the large gate which used to be closed by default)

I used to drive a two wheeler regularly. Enter and exit through the smaller gate (3-4 feet wide).

One day I took my car to office. While coming back home, I almost ... mentally ... drove through the small gate and crashed. Some part of my brain took over at last moment and steered my car away from turning into that smaller entrance. Phew.

When I was in 6th grade I got really into Rubik's Cubes/twisty puzzles, and was playing with them all the time.

I remember at one point I'd see a traffic light change and my brain would get confused cause somehow it translated what I was seeing into a physically impossible move on a Rubik's Cube.

https://xkcd.com/161/

Yes, the main keys were Q/A, W/S, E/D for rotations around the major axes, arrows for moving in the XY plane (assuming the Z axis is "down") and SPACE was a force drop I think?

You can learn a lot of Group Theory trying to make a mental model of how the rotations work, since you get not just equations like QQQ = A but also (from memory so maybe wrong) something like QWQ = D. Shapes with symmetry axes generate subgroups, some (like the I block) even commutative ones. So technically you could live with only three of the rotation keys if you're the kind of person who rotates left three times when you want to rotate right.

And of course, the 3D versions of the S/Z pieces can screw up your game even worse than the 2D ones.

> You can learn a lot of Group Theory trying to make a mental model of how the rotations work

I didn't have a clue what group theory was back then (I was 10yo or something), but I clearly remember discovering these. Pretty sure it ended up become formative for my surprisingly quick group theory understanding in later maths class.

One of the earliest "too soon?" jokes I saw on the internet was a 2002 or so animated GIF of a game of Tetris being played around and between the World Trade Center towers: https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/172830-september-11th-2001-a...

Can be played here: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Blockout_1989

There is a version for XWindow. Has been for many years: xbl.

Ubuntu doesn't seem to have a package in any default repository.

I played that a lot, too! Usually with the simplest block set, which was just 3D versions of the usual Tetris blocks. After that, playing “normal” 2D tetris suddenly became harder, because there are some rotations that cannot be done when you have only one axis! In 3D, you can flip an S into a Z, but in 2D, you can’t!

> In 3D, you can flip an S into a Z, but in 2D, you can’t!

Haha I did that a lot! the sequence became hardwired in muscle memory, like when you learn to solve a Rubik's cube and moving this to that becomes second nature.

My 3D Tetris of choice is Tetrisphere; partly because it was the first game that really got me into Tetris.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrisphere

I had a nintendo64 and had 6 games for it. Mario64, zelda64, majora's mask, kart64, goldeneye, and tetrisphere. If it were possible to wear out a n64 cart i would have worn out tetrisphere. Several generations later I still had the 64 hooked up with tetrisphere still stuffed into it. It wasn't until the xbox one that I finally packed it away and switched to emulation.

Welltris was the 3d-ish variant all my cohorts played. although it's really fairly 2D in truth.

https://www.mobygames.com/game/2121/welltris/

I've never experienced this with Tetris, but there was a stretch of time, decades ago, where when I was driving through cities I'd see the various sections of the landscape tinged with the green, blue, and yellow matching SimCity zoning colors.

One more who loved that game.

Friend and I used to get stoned and one of us would do translation and the other rotation. I forget who controlled the drop.

Achieving fluent hive-mind sufficient to beat higher levels in flow state was quite a thing.

Did not know about Blockout! Came here to post a link to a 3D Tetris I played a lot way back, can be seen in action here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pjG2R14VCU

OMG Blockout. I can hear the intro in my head now! If I remember correctly, it was on a very early PC (8086?) and would actually run too fast on later PCs. Pretty impressive game for the time.

Blockout was the first game we had on our 286. So many memories. Thanks.

Frac was the one I had as a kid: https://archive.org/details/Frac_1020

Loved me some Frac!

I remember playing this as well. Fuck, life is so short.

I think the rings are a fantastic innovation. It would help me even further if the z-layers were colour coded too.

I appreciate the colours currently reflect different blocks like in the original tetris, but I'd find it easier to process the "board state" if each ring size also had a colour associated with it. It would be easier to "scan" the board state for where best to place the piece.

That said, this is a fantastic demonstration of innovation. It very neatly demonstrates the pros and cons of this particular 2d visualisation scheme.

The game itself is awkward, and requires 3 hands to properly play. Also for anyone else who grew up playing a particular windows port of tetris (from the BOWEP pack?), having space jam down the page instead of the block takes some getting used to.

Thanks! I take your point that colours would help distinguish the different z-layers - it's pretty easy to confuse the two larger rings I found. I was also thinking that making it stereoscopic might help. I've done this before where you have two running side by side, responding to the same controls, but you offset the z-axis a little. Then you basically match up the two by going cross-eyed! And voilà, more 3D information in the brain.

Concerning the controls I had to factor in simplifying them to create the mobile version - https://nonzerosum.games/tetrings_mobile.html because it was just not possible to distinguish between so many different gesture controls on a touch screen. So, in the mobile version, on a couple of axes you can only rotate in one direction, given this limitation I could definitely limit the keyboard controls for people with only 2 hands.

Thanks again, finding comments like these has been really enjoyable.

Came to find Tetrisphere and really surprised it’s not come up in the thread already.

I thoroughly enjoyed this game back in the day, and it has some really novel ideas about how to approach 3D tetrominoes.

https://youtu.be/VLSKnVJMvHg

Ha I came to say the same thing and ctrl-F'd and found you. That was a fun game.

Alexey Pajitnov actually designed his own 3D version called Welltris. It might be even less known than BlockOut, even though it's a more elegant solution.

https://www.mobygames.com/game/2121/welltris/

Welltris isn't really 3d. The viewport is, but the gameplay is 2d. It's on (five of the six sides of) the interior surface of a cube, but that's the same as if those sides were folded out flat into a 2d plane. Each cell has only four adjacencies, not the six degrees of freedom that would exist in a fully 3d volume.

Another tangent to the overall topic: There's a game called Tetris Effect that renders the 2D playing field in 3D with subtle 3D effects to have fun with the immersion of it and intentionally trying to build the Tetris effect in the player even while you play. It was originally designed for VR immersion though you can play it on a regular screen. It's from Enhance the studio that inherited the designers from Rez, Lumines, Child of Eden (the weird, under-rated Kinect game), and more where highly immersive (music/rumble/design details focused towards synesthesia) games are their passion. If you've ever played Lumines and wondered what that team would do with Tetris itself, Tetris Effect is a must play.

There is a real study that shows that Tetris can help prevent PTSD:

https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2017-03-28-post-traumatic-stress-s...

I haven't read about this thoroughly but I think the theory is that the Tetris Effect that we all hate literally blocks the formation of traumatic memories.

That makes total sense, if Tetris is something your brain prioritises when consolidating memory during sleep then it will take up bandwidth from the traumatic event and block it from being consolidated.

I wonder if there's something in that, where people try to distract themselves in their every day life with these games, perhaps it's an instinctive way of reducing trauma.

>The Tetris Effect can also invade people's waking lives with intrusive thoughts that interpret the real world through the lens of this particular cognitive pattern

So Tetris was a plot of USSR govt and KGB to control westerners minds? :D

I was in graduate school when Tetris exploded. One of the PhD students in our lab nearly failed out due to his Tetris addition. For me, that what "The Tetris Effect" refers to.

"If Tetris has taught me anything, it's that errors pile up and accomplishments disappear."

https://imgur.com/v1QA0AZ

Probing the conscious and subconscious mind, a novel mind-boggling 3D-to-2D visualization, working interactive demo, nice hand-drawn diagrams - this is my HN nugget of the day. Kudos!

Thanks - discovering these comments has been a real treat. It was fun working it all out. Turns out rotating these babies in code is easier than in your head, just swapping out relative x,y,z positions.

I used to work in the same building/floor as the Tetris company. My girlfriend was on the QA team. She was an absolute menace at this game. I remember back when Facebook games were a thing she would get on my account and play all of my friends and sweep the floor with them. It was so fun to watch.

The Tetris effect is absolutely a real thing. Gonna need to dust off the Switch and play a little today!

I think the addition of new pieces was incredibly clever.

When I started playing, I first just tried to play like it was regular Tetris on the furthest side of the board -- a strategy that was quickly foiled.

The implementation of an extra dimension is also pretty cool, but as a game design nerd, I think it's more awesome that you managed to force players to engage with the concept.

Thanks! I was actually going to make an algorithm to find all the possible variations, but I realised that the additional options were limited and immediately obvious, and hard coding them would give me more control of game balance.

The blog is really about sharing ideas, so yes "forcing" the read is part of it XD - hopefully some ventured into the rest of the blog, which is more "saving the world" sort of material. I really appreciate your comments here, I wish I'd found them straight away :)

Started reading the article, immediately thought of a relative simple solution:

- the most important thing is: is a bottom layer ‘solid’. So looking from above seems the most obvious

- you could use e.g. numbers to indicate height, so a 3 is ‘three up’, a ‘1’ is one up, and a ‘0’ is: you are at the bottom.

- and use colours to indicate ‘holes below’ (e.g. blue is one hole, green 2, and red 3).

The blocks that are falling could be shown in multiple views, e.g. from above, from the front and from the right (with e.g. again numbers saying how ‘high’ it is.

You would not see the complete picture, but surely when you play from the start you would get a good mental picture from where the holes are, certainly if you played it for some length?

Edit: A separate view of e.g. the bottom layer or perhaps the two lowest layers could make it completely playable?

That definitely sounds like some approaches that have been taken. Blockout and Welltris are workable. I was just trying to do something that gave access to all information in a consistent way, so that someone might develop an intuition for a space outside of their usual 3D vision.

Thanks for your feedback

Somebody should make Tetris game where speed does not increase but dimensions do.

Pretty sure that LSD is illegal :P

It exists, it is called deep learning

Would it be as addictive, no because the simplicity of Tetris is gone

Would this be a good game for a VR scenario ? A Player could youse hand or finger gestures to move and rotate the individual blocks and surrounding level/area

Not really tetris, but certainly adjacent https://store.steampowered.com/app/554870/SUPERHYPERCUBE/

I really can't even play Tetris anymore because of the Tetris Effect. Picturing falling blocks literally keeps me awake at night after I play.

I get this on other genres as well, mainly SHMUPS and Rhythm games!

Can't you just have one or two more camera angles on the screen at all times? Maybe even a stationary and a rotating view?

My intention was to have the simplest implementation with the most information, so having 2 cameras is a solution of sorts but it sort of fails on both my objectives adding the complication of a second camera and then perhaps having to implement controls for that as well as the 3D controls of the pieces... and even so there will still be some aspects obscured.

This was also much easier to code, an unspoken 3rd objective :)

Thanks for playing - if you'd like to try the mobile version it's at https://nonzerosum.games/tetrings_mobile.html

He might be on to something, but I couldn't grok the visualisation at all. I didn't spend long though.

I remember a game called Wetrix, that combined Tetris like gameplay with a 3D environment : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wetrix

As the developer I also haven't even developed the intuition required to grok the visualisation, so - it probably takes a considerable amount of time, but surely after some weeks of play...

Not really a 3d tetris but certainly tetris adjacent https://store.steampowered.com/app/554870/SUPERHYPERCUBE/

Still very difficult to visualize the Z-layer (how far the blocks are into the screen). Maybe another way to make 3D tetris more viable would be to have a camera that automatically adjusts for the best viewing angle for the player?

just have some controls for shifting forward and backward and rotating the camera in 90 degree steps while bringing the piece with you, the falling piece still controls exactly like normal Tetris, but it rotates along with the camera rotating, it slides along the camera axis changes, and the camera plane always aligns with one row of the 3d stack, did I miss something or is this not the obvious approach? the adjacent block rows can become more translucent but maintain wireframe the further away from the focus row, etc

That's pretty close to what Tetrisphere did.

The "tetris effect" is why I had to stop playing Lumines on the PSP. My sleep was dominated by dreams of that infernal game. Incidentally though I'm wicked good at it.

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Blockout_1989

Blockout (1989) was amazing https://youtu.be/ZpeSH6pbio4

[belated stub for offtopicness]

"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

That font is terrible for reading. Maybe for like headings it’s ok, but long paragraphs, no.

I had a real problem reading this. Luckily reader mode seemed to work fine and stripped all the style from the document.

In style.css:

    p { font-size: 400%; }

Please don't!

The bro couldn't find an uglier font than this ?

The original article looks much better in "reader mode" which dumps the styling for a standardised page - no more need to read the folksy mock-handwriting font.

The font makes this so difficult to read

This could for all I know be the most brilliant solution to 3D Tetris ever, but the font is just so terrible that I find it hard to get past the first paragraph, which makes me doubt the validity of any further (possibly quite clever) design solutions that are being presented.

Design serves a single purpose, which is to present information in the clearest possible way. Any design choices you make which don't serve that purpose are hubris. (And yes, the conveyance of some information requires invoking emotional triggers via more complicated and hard-to-fathom design; this is not one of those exceptions. Clarity, please!) An article about reducing some immense design complexity to visual simplicity should strive to present itself as clearly as possible, not use a goddamn webfont from the 90s.

I disagree so strongly even though I also found the font horrible. Design is used to communicate. Whether or not you want to communicate "in the clearest way possible" is a choice. There are many other choices to be made and some may conflict with that choice. Some choices will resonate with you and some will aggravate. But only the author/designer can speak to whether the design was successful in it's aims

> Whether or not you want to communicate "in the clearest way possible" is a choice.

This is far from "clearest way possible", it's not even in the middle. This choice impedes communication which makes is less useful, by your definition.

> But only the author/designer can speak to whether the design was successful in it's aims

I find it difficult to believe that the author's aim was to share a story in such way that's unnecessarily harder to consume, by a large portion of people otherwise interested in their thoughts.

Anti-design[1] is a movement which rejects the over-sanitation of design. Type a random query into Google and click through the first few links. What will you see? An endless sea of black-on-white, sans-serif, grids of text.

Anti-design is effective in making things memorable and engaging. When I attended Davis, I first thought the Social Sciences Building[2] was a bit of an eye sore. It was intentionally designed to be challenging. Now it is one of my most vivid memories of the campus.

1: https://99designs.com/blog/design-history-movements/anti-des...

2: https://localwiki.org/davis/Social_Sciences_and_Humanities_B...

You find it difficult to believe? The person clearly worked hard to achieve this aesthetic. The font even sort of matches the illustrations. This is clearly intentional from my pov. This aesthetic was more important to the author than ease of reading/consumption.

I don't think the designer is the authority on whether a design is good or not. Just like a novelist, director, or composer doesn't get to dictate whether their output was creatively successful.

Paul Graham's essay on taste sums it up pretty well:

http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html

Fair enough and I also agree. Got sloppy towards the end there

Design is the process of bringing ideas into form. It is intentional creation. This process does not necessarily include intentional communication: it can be purely utilitarian. The form itself is what unavoidably communicates the values of the designer.

I do agree that clarity or efficiency are not necessarily the highest values to strive for.

Also, to title it "The Tetris Effect" and then ramble on about a 3d version of Tetris first seemed really odd. I only skimmed some of the article (due to the horrible font), but I'm not sure what the point of it was.

In chrome: Right click on the body, "inspect element" to open the debugger thingy, and see the terrible font as "font family" in the bottom right.

Uncheck the box next to "font-family".

There, now it's readable. You can close the chrome debugger thingy.

> This could for all I know be the most brilliant solution to 3D Tetris ever

It isn't, the proposed 'solution' to the obscurity problem is at least as unreadable as the font.

The first part of the article, at least, works in reader mode.

I love the font on this page!

Dirty hack to make it readable: $('script,style,link,img,canvas,#menu').remove();$('body').attr('style',null);

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