Opinion
I turned to Tetris after my father died – then something strange started happening
Tom Gurn
WriterWhen I was 15, about the time my dad died, I became addicted to Tetris.
I stumbled across Tetris after all other gaming sites had been blocked by our school, and a friend sent me a scrambled URL that bypassed the firewall. Desperate to do anything other than schoolwork, I started playing the stripped-back Tetris game relentlessly. I’d play in class. I’d play at home. I’d play while simultaneously watching movies and scrolling on my phone in the opposite hand.
Illustration by Dionne Gain
After months, something changed. I started to notice cubic patterns everywhere. I’d organise my desk so that the pencils lined up with the edge of my laptop. I’d be distracted in conversation, picturing how I could throw a Ritz cracker to land perfectly between the other person’s lips. The two-bit music started running constantly in my head. Everything became squares tumbling towards the earth.
Scared for my sanity, I quit cold turkey.
The rudimentary, hyper-coloured video game was invented by a Soviet software engineer in 1985. It soon swept over the globe, and through myriad iterations, it is today considered the best-selling video game franchise of all-time, with more than 1 billion people estimated to have rotated the plummeting blocks.
World championships are held annually, but it wasn’t until 2023 that the first person finally “finished” the game – a 13-year-old in his Oklahoma bedroom.
Tetris swept the world after being invented by a Soviet engineer in 1985.
Years after my addiction began, I came across the Tetris effect. What I experienced after gawking at falling squares all day happens to others, too. The real world can become Tetris. Researchers have studied what’s called Game Transfer Phenomena and found that it’s surprisingly common. It even cropped up in an episode of The Simpsons.
The phenomenon is characterised by sensory, perceptual and cognitive intrusions. It often involves involuntary hallucinations, recurring thoughts, and unique unexplainable behaviours, which can occur after playing almost any video game.
It’s generally understood to be the result of a misfire in our brain’s pattern-recognition – a glitch in the controlled hallucination that is ordinary visual and spatial processing. Game Transfer Phenomena doesn’t usually occur as an overwhelming graphic distortion. It’s often more subtle, like reliving in-game experiences during the hypnagogic state between wake and sleep, or a lapse in perception wherein the world resembles the game for a fleeting moment. While it has been linked to problematic video game use, it isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Many even report the experience as pleasurable and actively seek it out.
While fixated on Game Transfer Phenomena, I stumbled across another curious tetromino-related happening. It seems to go both ways. Not only can video games seep into real life, but they can also stop the past from rudely intruding on the present.
Intrusive trauma memories, otherwise known as flashbacks, are the most pervasive problem stemming from post-traumatic stress disorder. Once you’ve seen something unsettling, evil, or abject, it can be difficult to unsee it. And some scientists think Tetris can help.
A number of studies have looked at how Tetris can get in the way of the brain’s tendency to replay horrible experiences. In a 2017 publication from the Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, researchers showed people some “aversive films” and found that those playing a significant amount of Tetris in the days following experienced fewer flashbacks than those who did nothing. Researchers at the University of Oxford went as far as declaring Tetris may be a “cognitive vaccine” for PTSD in a 2009 study.
The brain has a limited amount of processing capacity at any one time, and some research suggests there is a six-hour window after an event where memory-formation can be disrupted. Video games like Tetris can occupy the mind to such an extent that the traumatic events don’t solidify. The game has even been suggested as a treatment for returning combat veterans. A study from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in 2020 found that players’ hippocampal volumes increased, which was correlated with decreased PTSD symptoms.
That said, therapeutic uses for Tetris have not always replicated. A recent multi-lab study from the Groningen University found that while short-term effects on PTSD symptoms were consistent, longer-term impacts could not be replicated.
My own Tetris addiction manifested immediately after the death of my dad. I’ve never felt myself to have PTSD or been diagnosed as such. While I do experience something akin to flashbacks, generally provoked by very specific environmental triggers, I wouldn’t say they intrude on my daily life or come along at unexplainable moments. It’s just a straight-up memory.
Whether or not games like Tetris can help protect trauma victims from their own brains long term remains to be seen, but there are labs around the world using video game therapy for different types of mental health maladies, from ADHD, to traumatic brain injuries, and good-old fashioned cognitive decline. From Minecraft to World of Warcraft, and no matter our opinions on the matter, it seems every year, the real and virtual worlds become a rotated block or two closer to meeting in the middle.
Tom Gurn is a writer and science journalist from Port Adelaide.
The Opinion newsletter is a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up here.