[HN Gopher] The Tetris Effect
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The Tetris Effect
Author : Kiro
Score : 113 points
Date : 2023-08-09 09:13 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (nonzerosum.games)
(TXT) w3m dump (nonzerosum.games)
| samyar wrote:
| The bro couldn't find an uglier font than this ?
| dvh wrote:
| In style.css: p { font-size: 400%; }
|
| Please don't!
| beeburrt wrote:
| That font is terrible for reading. Maybe for like headings it's
| ok, but long paragraphs, no.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I had a real problem reading this. Luckily reader mode seemed
| to work fine and stripped all the style from the document.
| [deleted]
| antupis wrote:
| Somebody should make Tetris game where speed does not increase
| but dimensions do.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| It exists, it is called deep learning
| monstertank wrote:
| Pretty sure that LSD is illegal :P
| gargablegar wrote:
| Blockout (1989) was amazing https://youtu.be/ZpeSH6pbio4
| luxuryballs wrote:
| 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
| WorldMaker wrote:
| That's pretty close to what Tetrisphere did.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >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
| jmiskovic wrote:
| 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!
| plank wrote:
| 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?
| jszymborski wrote:
| 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?
| WorldMaker wrote:
| 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.
| boredhedgehog wrote:
| 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/
| vikingerik wrote:
| 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.
| whalesalad wrote:
| 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!
| lloeki wrote:
| > 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).
| efdee wrote:
| Blockout was the first game we had on our 286. So many
| memories. Thanks.
| ygra wrote:
| Can be played here:
| https://archive.org/details/msdos_Blockout_1989
| JohnFen wrote:
| 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.
| vikingerik wrote:
| 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.
| hbn wrote:
| 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.
| saghm wrote:
| 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.
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/161/
| albert_e wrote:
| 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.
| hsjqllzlfkf wrote:
| I remember playing this as well. Fuck, life is so short.
| johanmagnusson wrote:
| 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
| wkjagt wrote:
| 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.
| aaroninsf wrote:
| 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.
| red_admiral wrote:
| 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.
| lloeki wrote:
| > 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.
| NikkiA wrote:
| 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/
| Pinus wrote:
| 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!
| lloeki wrote:
| > 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.
| lkbm wrote:
| Frac was the one I had as a kid:
| https://archive.org/details/Frac_1020
| utexaspunk wrote:
| Loved me some Frac!
| [deleted]
| mmh0000 wrote:
| 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
| sleepybrett wrote:
| 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.
| bitwize wrote:
| 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...
| 11Spades wrote:
| 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.
| aaroninsf wrote:
| https://archive.org/details/msdos_Blockout_1989
| khamisiyah wrote:
| 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?
| wycy wrote:
| 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.
| anothermoron wrote:
| I get this on other genres as well, mainly SHMUPS and Rhythm
| games!
| sleepybrett wrote:
| Not really a 3d tetris but certainly tetris adjacent
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/554870/SUPERHYPERCUBE/
| ambyra wrote:
| I love the font on this page!
| brynbryn wrote:
| [flagged]
| feintruled wrote:
| 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
| xnorswap wrote:
| 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.
| tinytoon wrote:
| 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
| sleepybrett wrote:
| Not really tetris, but certainly adjacent
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/554870/SUPERHYPERCUBE/
| GasolinePC wrote:
| Dirty hack to make it readable: $('script,style,link,img,canvas,#
| menu').remove();$('body').attr('style',null);
| noduerme wrote:
| 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.
| knorker wrote:
| 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.
| Misdicorl wrote:
| 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
| sainez wrote:
| 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.
| fasterik wrote:
| 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
| Misdicorl wrote:
| Fair enough and I also agree. Got sloppy towards the end
| there
| CleanCoder wrote:
| > 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.
| Misdicorl wrote:
| 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.
| sainez wrote:
| 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_Humaniti
| es_B...
| Etherlord87 wrote:
| > 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.
| philote wrote:
| 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.
| pimlottc wrote:
| The first part of the article, at least, works in reader mode.
| intrasight wrote:
| 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.
| b3lvedere wrote:
| "If Tetris has taught me anything, it's that errors pile up and
| accomplishments disappear."
|
| https://imgur.com/v1QA0AZ
| highwaylights wrote:
| 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
| jram930 wrote:
| Ha I came to say the same thing and ctrl-F'd and found you.
| That was a fun game.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Would it be as addictive, no because the simplicity of Tetris is
| gone
| [deleted]
| badcppdev wrote:
| 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.
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(page generated 2023-08-10 23:02 UTC)