People from ALL walks of life find themselves magnetized to this game.
Parents, children, business men, school teachers
Even Steve Wozniak was a HUGE Tetris maniac back in the day.
So much so that he was featured in Nintendo Power.
He actually topped the high score charts for SO long that they just stopped accepting his scores.
So as a joke, he started spelling his name backwards when he sent his scores in
to see if they'd publish it.
They did.
What are some of the big factors that make Tetris so compelling,
and are there any factors that often go overlooked?
What secrets do these blocks hold and... how do we unlock them?
[intro music]
Since Tetris has been ported to every system, phone, and egg beater imaginable, it's hard to speak to EVERY SINGLE version of the game.
So one or two of the things I cover might not apply as well to certain versions as it does to others.
However, MOST of these concepts I point out WILL carry over,
...but DO give me some wiggle room.
So, an ordinary round of Tetris follows a pretty predictable arc.
Each game starts out slow and tranquil. You got this.
But it quite literally begins to gain speed and you have to keep up with it.
What begins is a slow and soothing exercise that enables obsessive-compulsive behavior
SOON BECOMES A FRANTIC AND FRENETIC MATCH OF FIVE-FINGER-FILET!
BAH!
That's quite a contrast;
And there's so much pressure and suspense at the end of the game because you've been working at this task for a while.
You've become INVESTED.
So when the speed finally sneaks up on you, you ACTUALLY feel like you have something to lose.
This game makes ordinary people like you and me become emotionally invested in tessellated stacks of squares.
That's ridiculous!
(And Amazigoodawondatastafulbulous.)
What helps this along is that it's execution barriers almost always exactly where it needs to be
because it increases proportionally and dynamically to your skill level.
"Was that even English?"
The only time it's difficulty amps up is when you do well enough to MAKE IT amp up.
It's perpetually JUST DIFFICULT ENOUGH.
In a well-designed port of Tetris, you're not suddenly thrown a STUPID spike in difficulty, or it doesn't stay too easy for too long.
The difficulty curve is a gradual slope and sometimes, before you know it, you find you've climbed further up a slope than you ever thought possible.
And once you've climbed that slope,
You often find that a game over doesn't necessarily equate to failure in this game.
Even the very best Tetris players in the world eventually game over.
It's not about hitting a mark or getting to the end of a level -- it's about finding and surpassing your own limits.
Once you finally get to level 20, you don't sit down and pop a brewski. You giggle to yourself and try to get to level 21, right?
And the next time you play, the experience is a little bit different.
And NOT ONLY is your experience different from play session to play session,
but, as I mentioned earlier, a single play session DRASTICALLY changes in dynamic over the course of one sitting due to the game speeding up.
This can actually have a HUGE effect on the choices a player might make moment-to-moment as they play the game.
As an example, here's one strategy that many intermediate Tetris addicts often employ.
The game gets the most difficult with the more lines you clear, so you want to get the most points out of the fewest lines.
Since you're awarded point bonuses per line you clear at once,
this piece becomes the most valuable, since it's the only one that's able to clear four rows at once and give you the maximum point bonus.
A "Tetris."
So that means, to maximize your score and minimize the speed of the game,
You're gonna want to try and set up situations where you can clear four lines at a time.
Ideally, getting a tetris would be the only way you'd ever want to score, ever,
In order to score the maximum amount of points before the game gets too fast for you.
But as the speed of the game increases, setting up these situations becomes a far more difficult challenge.
So players often shift their strategy and only go for one or two rows at a time when they feel the game is finally getting too fast for them.
Even though this yields less points per line, it's much easier to manage at higher speeds,
and it makes mistakes and mishaps much less devastating.
So shifting to a less-powerful strategy on paper is often better in the long run when you account for the player's current skill level.
And the point at which players make this shift varies.
As the player gets better and better, the shifting point is pushed back farther and farther.
However, the shifting point is also pushed by the player's previous missteps.
At speed level 6, the board might look like this,
Or it could look like THIS:
So, even if this is the same player playing at the same speed level, the point at which they make the shift in strategy is affected by the current landscape,
...and the landscape is based on the player's previous successes and mistakes.
It's actually a super interesting choice to have to make as a player.
"Should I fall back now? Or am I feeling confident enough in my ability to keep pressing onward and going for four lines at a time?"
And this strategic shift is not the only interesting or complex choice that the game might ask the player to make.
Even placing a single piece can become a multi-faceted and complex question where there sometimes isn't an obvious right answer.
The optimal spot to place a piece is affected by the current speed of the game, and it's also affected by the piece that's coming up next.
It's also affected by the player's current skill level.
It's a far more complex problem-solving challenge than most people realize.
And whether consciously or unconsciously, a good player parses through all these ends of the question before they make their desicion and slot the block into place.
And then they have to do the whole thing AGAIN when the next block appears.
And now, a bunch of these factors are different as a result of their previous move.
It's [loss for words] COOL, isn't it?
Tetris is also a rare example where a player's mistakes actually make the game even more interesting.
I touched on this before, but mistakes in Tetris have a habit of compounding and building on top of each other.
Not only does a mistake affect a player in the moment,
but unless they mop it up quickly, it'll stay there and affect them down the road.
Leaving a bunch of junk on-screen can make later levels MUCH more difficult.
And for most players, making a mistake and recovering from it is often a VERY difficult task
because what needs to be done in order to recover is not always obvious.
And you don't know what pieces you're going to be given down the road, so it's a super dynamic problem-solving task.
The exact same mistake under the exact same conditions can affect two players in entirely different ways.
For some players, a mistake like this is a death blow, and they won't ever be able to recover from it.
But for a more skilled player, this isn't so bad. They can fix it and still go on to see another 8 lines.
And even though a better player will be able to mop up their mistakes more efficiently,
a better player will also make less mistakes, period, and spend less time mopping up,
which means that later levels have less junk on-screen, which allows a better player to go even further.
Improving ONE part of your Tetris skillset sort of recombines and reinforces all those other parts of your skillset.
And then once a player gets REALLY good, there are certain advanced things that players pick up.
Sometimes advanced players start stacking their pieces in a fashion that seems really odd or just wrong to lower level players.
But the advanced players are just looking farther ahead.
They're setting up combinations that just aren't obvious to lower-level players.
And advanced players can also learn advanced things like the "T-spin" or the "L-spin"
They intentionally create odd overhangs that they can clear out by rotating a piece at the last possible moment to slot it into place.
Seriously, watching advanced people play is almost SUPERHUMAN.
Tetris is all about topping yourself and improving your score, and improvement at Tetris is a multi-faceted endeavor.
Not only does it involve learning better piece placement in order to set up Tetris opportunities,
but it also means making fewer mistakes and becoming better at mopping up the mistakes you DO make.
It means learning to look ahead at the next piece in order to set up combinations, learning how to exploit the mechanics of piece spinning.
The more you learn, the more complex your decision-making process becomes,
So learning how to keep up at higher speeds means learning how to make these increasingly complex decisions even faster.
It all creates a perfect storm for interesting player improvement.
Even though it's a very accessible game, there's secretly a TON of depth that can be explored.
Its simple rule set gives way to a bunch of larger properties and strategies.
It's very similar to games like "Chess" and "Go" in that respect.
It's a neat game that's constantly asking the player to tackle new and interesting problems,
and even improving at the game is an interesting problem in and of itself.
So, the next time you find yourself clearing a few lines before work, don't feel guilty.
This game's a FREAKING MASTERPIECE, dude.
Hey guys, Ronnie Onnie Edwards, here!
Who?
You can check out some of my other videos here.
...or maybe you hate me and want to watch some Game Theory.
Oh, but I help out with that show, too!
So there's NO escaping me!
Mwahahahahahaha
[VIEWERS] "You know, I used to think your show was mediocre because of the intro,"
[VIEWERS] "Now I know it's just mediocre."
[RON] Hey...
...that's not nice.