Snooker, or pool if you are non-British, is a good example. Many human games are basically ritualised tidying up. My conclusion? It’s to do with a deep-seated psychological drive to tidy up. Recently, I started thinking about why games like Tetris are so compelling. I had my own Tetris phase, when I was a teenager, and spent more hours than I should have trying to align the falling blocks in rows. Such is its mental pull, there’s even been the suggestion that the game might be able to prevent flashbacks in people with PTSD.
Some people say that after playing the game for hours they see falling blocks in their dreams or buildings move together in the street – a phenomenon known as the Tetris Effect. The writer Jeffrey Goldsmith was so obsessed with Tetris that he wrote a famous article asking if the game’s creator Alexey Pajitnov had invented “ a pharmatronic?” – a video game with the potency of an addictive drug. Yet block and puzzle games like Tetris still have a special place in our hearts.
Since then, we’ve seen games consoles grow in power, and with it the appearance of everything from Call of Duty to World of Warcraft. Since Tetris was launched on the world in the 1980s, millions of hours have been lost through playing this simple game. A simple premise, but add an annoyingly addictive electronica soundtrack (based on a Russian folk tune called Korobeiniki, apparently) and you have a revolution in entertainment. Shapes fall from the sky, all you have to do is to control how they fall and fit within each other.
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