DeMizio's Journal

Tetris

Tetris, in my view, can be looked at as a metaphor for life.

I'm not joking; I mean this seriously, to semi-seriously. I don't mean for it to be taken as a new-wave religion or a cult or anything, but hear me out.

You can tell a lot about a person by the way that they play Tetris. The best way to observe them is by hooking them up to an old-school, 8-bit Nintendo and watching them. Tetris creates a lot of stress - the constant barrage of new bricks, the speed increasing every ten lines...its a lot like life.

Think about it - life hands you bricks all the time, all differently shaped and all fit differently into your "game board," but, you have to make them fit anyhow. There's no way to reject a certain block at a certain time, or hold it off until later. You can try and set up a system, waiting for the long straight pieces to get the big bonuses, but there's no guarentee that the system will work out over time. You just keep having to take it and take it and take it, and make the best of it.

So many times people give up in the end of Tetris, when their stack reaches the top of the screen, and the music goes on hyperdrive. That's not the time to panic; thats the time to tune out the music and just sort faster. You have fewer places to go with blocks, but ingenuity really shines here and people try new and different things.

I mean thats the way I've always looked at it. Completely non-seriously of course, but realize that the blocks one hits in life can be made to fit in even though it seems impossible at first.

So thats what I mean when I say that Tetris stands as a metaphor for life.

I've been playing a lot of Tetris lately, since Scott bought Graham and old-school Nintendo for his birthday a week ago. Went to see "Lost in Translation on Friday night. Fantastic movie; I'm still pretty much in awe of a lot of the cinematography. It was a really, really interesting picture of a random friendship, and possibly one of the truest pictures of a friendship between a man and a woman that I've seen on film. Bill Murray is understated, and the humor of theof the situations he's in finds him more than anything else.

So yeah, this all feels vaguely unfinished, but there's a lot of other, better stuff to be done.