Playing to Lose: How Competitive Tetris Players Approach An Unwinnable Game

http://chrishiggins.com/w/2013/02/03/playing-to-lose/

by digitalmud • 13 years ago

60 29 13 years ago

Xcelerate2• 13 years ago

Enjoyable article! I don't play NES Tetris so much but I do play Nullpomino. I only do the 40-line clear race. 38 seconds is my best so far but I'm a long way from the WR.

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).

edanm• 13 years ago

Hi Xcelerate,

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?

chrishiggins4• 13 years ago

Check out TetrisConcept and Hard Drop.

hfantods• 13 years ago

38 seconds! I play nullpomino 40 line too and have been stuck at the 1minute mark forever.

Xcelerate2• 13 years ago

My top 10 times are all between 38 and 39 so I've been stuck here forever too!

MechaJDI• 13 years ago

Wow, the writing of this article is superb. I never quite got into the super competitiveness of gaming myself (for record breaking and etc) but the story alone has intrigued me as well as let me take a glance inside the lives of the players. I don't really know what else to say but the way the article is written was truly engaging.

chrishiggins4• 13 years ago

Thank you! Writing the article, I was struck by a few constant themes: everyone in this community is VERY NICE, they are VERY COMPETITIVE, and the game is BRUTAL. The game itself is punishingly hard.

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.

scholia• 13 years ago

Many thanks for the piece, Chris. I enjoyed it.

thoughtcriminal• 13 years ago

Just downloaded The Magazine app. This is the kind of stuff I love to read.

That sly Marco may have another hit on his hands.

dasil003• 13 years ago

When I play too much tetris I start thinking about the blocks all the time and find it maddening. I wonder if these guys can ever stop thinking about the blocks or if it just becomes so hard-wired in their brain that they lose consciousness of it.

chrishiggins4• 13 years ago

There is a well documented thing called the Tetris Effect, where you see the blocks in dreams or when your eyes close. There's been some neuro research on it. When I asked these guys about it, they said they got past it after a while. They all say, yes, I have experienced Tetris Effect stuff, but at some point the brain seems to filter it out.

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.

wikwocket• 13 years ago

I think this extends to any video game or virtual world you spend a lot of time in. There have been periods in my life when I dreamed about healing party members, and when I catch myself instinctively checking nearby rooftops for snipers.

Either that, or I have officially lost it. (Or both; they are not mutually exclusive...)

mistercow• 13 years ago

>When I asked these guys about it, they said they got past it after a while. They all say, yes, I have experienced Tetris Effect stuff, but at some point the brain seems to filter it out.

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.

capisce• 13 years ago

There's even a song and music video about it (albeit in german): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lWQGNSqZ8o

mattmaroon• 13 years ago

I have the same problem with Mario Kart!

BSousa• 13 years ago

I can't say much about Tetris Effect, but I think this happens in various fields.

- 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.

ineedtosleep• 13 years ago

A slightly more modern anecdote: I've played most of Konami's music arcade and console games regularly (e.g. Beatmania IIDX, Drummania) ever since I started middle school. The learning curve was relatively huge for me and it took a while to have build up enough dexterity and speed for the hardest difficulties. Fast forwarding to the present time, it's hard for me to consciously _think_ about the notes anymore. Doing so just causes my accuracy to drop drastically and/or cause me to lose all focus.

vl• 13 years ago

When I was playing Doom as a kid, I typically played in the evening. Next morning after the night of sleep I felt like I was playing all night, at the moment I woke up I could swear I was just shooting at monsters a moment ago.

martinced• 13 years ago

I used to play TwinTris on the Amiga a lot: one the best version of Twintris ever (there are several videos on YouTube showing it). Very smooth 50 frames per second "pixel perfect" animation (but that doesn't translate very well in a YouTube video) and an amazing soundtrack.

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.

: )

T-hawk• 13 years ago

This article doesn't go at all into the details of why NES Tetris is unwinnable and doomed to fail. Let me plug that gap.

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.

Evbn2• 13 years ago

Gameboy always felt cleaner to play, too.

ballard• 13 years ago

A strange game.

Evbn2• 13 years ago

Seems this whole sport exists almost entirely for the generation of people who were exactly 8 years old when Tetris came out.

And the sport will die when we run out of functioning NES consoles and CRTs.

joezydeco• 13 years ago

You need to read up on American Revolutionary War and Civil War reenactors.

broken_symlink• 13 years ago

I wonder what the people in the article think about tetris friends and if any of them play on there. I used to play that a lot, but hit a barrier and was never able to get past my high score of 728,514.

wr1472• 13 years ago

Related Tetris god video on YouTube. This still amazes me every time I watch it http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=eQOswiAGLU4&desktop_uri=%...

snarfy• 13 years ago

"I never played for score, only for meditation. :)

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.

chrishiggins4• 13 years ago

The subject of Level 30 is discussed in great depth in "Ecstasy of Order." Without spoiling anything, let's just say Thor is the guy to watch. There is a bonus feature on the DVD that might interest you.

Playing to Lose: How Competitive Tetris Players Approach An Unwinnable Game

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