Getting my Tetris addiction into shape

Words by Mali Lung

It all started one fateful February night. After several long weeks in the hellish depths of SUDS’ Cellar Theatre, I sat in one of its dark corners scrolling through the App Store to find my virtual escape. That’s when I saw her; her beautiful, angular frame. She lured me in with her bold, bright colours, and siren song. Her name? Tetris.

And I haven’t looked back since.

I know nothing of Tetris’ creation and its many iterations, my knowledge of this game is contained within the navy blue background of the mobile app. What I consider, its purest, most undiluted form. No history — just her, and me.

Picture this: you’re walking across campus with the grey sky weighing down your plans to conquer university one lecture at a time. That is, until that vast expanse of Eastern Avenue begins to look an awful lot like the perfect grounds for a large-scale game of Tetris. As Tetriminos rain down from the sky in their pseudo-eight-bit glory, your world gains colour again, the sky is bluer and the campus is camper.

This is what Tetris is all about; you get far more than you bargain for when you download your newest geometrical escape. Any and all situations — parties, tutorials, lectures, work — I am playing a mental game of Tetris. Kind of like those videos of Reddit

AITAs being read out by text to speech AI accompanied by the world’s worst game of Subway Surfers, it gives you the kind of passive satisfaction you can’t help but crave on and offline.

Or perhaps these are just the long-term effects of me being raised an iPad kid.

“Mali, that’s kinda fucked up.” My friend sits across from me, her silhouette a rotated S-block.

I know. But if this is wrong, I don’t want to be right.

An I-block stares at me as it stands at the edge of my imagined Tetris game. “Maybe you have Tetris syndrome,” it suggests. A quick Google search, and indeed I am one of the afflicted, the phenomenon of the Tetris effect has taken hold of me and I am defenceless to the wiles of her Euclidean Tetriminos.

“Stop playing!” I hear you scream at the page. But that’s the trouble with the Tetris effect, even when I’ve deleted the app, multicoloured Tetriminos come to haunt me, a cheap imitation of the satisfaction the real game gives. So, I redownload it after a taste of what I’m craving. It’s an unbreakable cycle.

As unrelentingly present as this game is in my life, it hardly impedes on my day to day function. Life has become but a podcast in the background of my endless Tetris games.

Truthfully, my mental games of Tetris are hardly as proficient at satiating my desire for a perfect clear as the real thing (for the Tetris virgins, a perfect clear is when the Tetriminos are arranged in such a way that all existing Tetris blocks are cleared, leaving the board empty). My imagined perfect clears aren’t in a real game of Tetris; every supposedly random Tetrimino is a creation of my own — making the mental game predictable and ultimately devoid of purpose.

Supposedly, according to a brief Google search, the probability of getting a perfect clear is 84.64% in a game of Tetris, but I assume there are different statistics for the mobile game. I also might just suck at it.

So, I continue to play. I chase the feeling. Tetris is a pragmatic, digital beauty, and in an overly complex 3D world of rounded edges and circles, she just makes sense. I look for her everywhere I go.