Killspeak

Tetris, as a product, has a nasty history. Soon after Tetris spread beyond the Soviet Union, the rights to the game were ignored or sold by people who didn’t own them. Companies pumped out knock-offs like TETЯIS, which angered Nintendo, who believed it had exclusive rights to the game in the West. Lawsuits were filed, disks were taken off store shelves, and the Soviet organization which mediated electronic exports disintegrated. Tetris’ creator was allowed his reasonable right to profit from Tetris very belatedly, ten years after the game had become ubiquitous, when it was almost useless as intellectual property. The success in the West of one of the most emblematic, most imitated games left a knot of confused rights-holders and resentment. The wrong people got rich. The meek Russian who invented the game was left with little more than a 286 desktop computer to show for it.

Tetris, the game, has been a small part of my own personal history. I can remember playing it on my grandparents’ Commodore 64 as a kid; hogging my cousin’s GameBoy to play it; being impressed with my friend’s brother and his shareware success, Ultris; working with Paul on our own variant, Bombtris, in Visual Basic; arguing with my father that pausing every time a new piece showed up in order to plan where to put it was cheating. (I was frustrated that I could never beat his high scores—but it was still cheap.) I’ve copied Microsoft’s Tetris (the same version I’d played in Windows 3.0) onto each of my relatives’ computers time and time again, as recently as last year. Having been raised around computers, it’s always been somewhere near at hand, a constant, innocuous presence: on the 64, the various PCs, Palm handhelds, even on the graphing calculators at school.

So, since my laptop died and took my only working installation of Windows with it (my only foundation for playing the copy of Half-Life 2 that’s been temping me all summer long), my free time has been spent playing Tetris (not Tetris per se, but one of its many imitators: Gnometris).

And, for two non-consecutive nights, I’ve dreamt about it.

It’s not uncommon to have elements of your waking world intrude on your dreams, be they conversations, people, or falling tetrominoes. As with any activity you busy yourself with, video games affect your mind. Given that I indulge in a dozen-or-so rounds of Tetris a day, I shouldn’t have been surprised to see coloured blocks in my dreams. In fact, some psychologists at Harvard Medical School would say that my Tetris dreams are a good thing.

According to a summary article in SciAm, these dreams are a side effect of a two-stage learning process believed to be important in learning and associating important events and experiences. While asleep, the hippocampus (an area of the brain important for the formation of memories) communicates my recent experiences to the neocortex. This communication serves to store the experiences in the cortex, the area of the brain best at associating stimuli and memories. The cortex then sends signals back to the hippocampus, perhaps to request more information, or to release the memories it has just stored. The memories I create of playing Tetris stay in my hippocampus where, at night, they’re passed to and imprinted on the cortex. During sleep, the brain studies these memories and teaches itself how to deal with similar experiences. The cortex is also where sensory input is processed, so as the memories pass through, I experience them: I dream of Tetris.

Of course, despite the benefits of compiling my Tetris experiences during sleep, I should be wary of playing too much Tetris.

Update: BBC Four recently aired an excellent documentary on Tetris. (Link via Grand Text Auto.)