Playing to Lose: How Competitive Tetris Players Approach An Unwinnable Game
chrishiggins.com
chrishiggins.com
The brick wall limitation comes at level 29, after 290 lines. At that time, the pieces drop so fast that they cannot reach the sides of the well before locking into place. The code rate-limits sideways moves of a piece to about 250 ms intervals, so if the game is running fast enough that the piece reaches bottom in less than a second, it's impossible to translate the piece five columns over to the edge. It's not a human limitation; it's literally impossible to keep playing even going frame-by-frame on an emulator. To go beyond 290 lines (or 293 if the 290th was the first of a Tetris), you'd have to stack up pieces on the sides ahead of time, and the absolute limit is about 310.
Modern Tetris games are very carefully designed to avoid such limitations. Modern Tetris games always allow at least a half second after a piece lands before locking it, allowing further moves and rotations. http://tetris.wikia.com/wiki/Tetris_Guideline
So the game of NES Tetris becomes not how long you can survive, but how many points per line you can score in that fixed duration of 290 lines. If every single line of the 290 was a Tetris, the total would come to about 1,500,000. So to reach the game's score cap of 999,999, about two-thirds of your lines must be achieved as Tetrises.
Gameboy Tetris has no such impassable speed tier. You can play Gameboy Tetris forever and many players have scored 400+ lines and 999,999 there.
To me, the central revelation was that the game was so fatalistic that only nice people could survive it. And when those people get together to play each other, it's a huge party. I wanted to tell a human story about people who just happen to be extremely good at Tetris.
My impression is that these players are spending a lot of their conscious energy on the next-piece box, constructing the stack, and just staying calm. I think the majority of what they're doing is near instinct at this point, since they play so much, they just kinda "know" the right move for any given situation. Or at least, most of them. A max out game is a combination of random luck and extreme skill/practice.
The documentary "Ecstasy of Order: The Tetris Masters" (steaming free on Hulu) has more on all of this. Disclosure: I wrote parts of that film. Ben Mullen is one of the main subjects of the film.
Either that, or I have officially lost it. (Or both; they are not mutually exclusive...)
That corresponds with my experience with the Tetris Effect from other games. I used to play a ton of DDR, and initially experienced the same phenomenon (as I've mentioned in a past comment, I took the SAT the day after buying and playing it all night, resulting in the fascinating experience of seeing DDR arrows superimposed over an SAT scantron). I was pretty heavily addicted to the game for a long time, but eventually the phantom arrows simply went away.
- When I studied Descriptive Geometry I started seems projections everywhere I looked.
- When I was doing research and development on procedural buildings, shapes appeared whenever I looked at real buildings.
- When I was studying graph theory (and I basically drawn everything to help me remember) I could see blobs appearing on the tv screen for random shapes.
Holy cow, I just looked up the current record, and it was actually set today! MicroBlizz says in this video description (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzUUKKuye24) that he finished a game in 20.28 seconds. It will be neat to see who is the first sub 20! (MicroBlizz or Lapsilap).
I understand you're in the "Tetris world". I'm also interested in starting to play Tetris more seriously, but am not sure where on the internet all the Tetris people hang out. Got any pointers for me?
I remember passing level 29 on two or three occasions, always a freak happening. I can't find a video online of anyone doing this without tool-assist though." - a friend of mine, who is really, really rainman-good at NES Tetris.
But I was "too good" at it: there were vertical bars showing how many of each piece got randomly selected and these bars would grow higher and higher as you were playing.
I was playing for so long, even when the game reached crazy speed, that the bar would arrive at the top of the screen and then come back down, a bit shifted. A major video memory corruption would follow and it was only getting worse and worse.
At one point it became impossible to correctly see the screen and you had "lost" to the display bug.
: )
And the sport will die when we run out of functioning NES consoles and CRTs.
That sly Marco may have another hit on his hands.