
Playing to Lose: How Competitive Tetris Players Approach An Unwinnable Game - digitalmud
http://chrishiggins.com/w/2013/02/03/playing-to-lose/
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T-hawk
This article doesn't go at all into the details of why NES Tetris is
unwinnable and doomed to fail. Let me plug that gap.

The brick wall limitation comes at level 29, after 290 lines. At that time,
the pieces drop so fast that they cannot reach the sides of the well before
locking into place. The code rate-limits sideways moves of a piece to about
250 ms intervals, so if the game is running fast enough that the piece reaches
bottom in less than a second, it's impossible to translate the piece five
columns over to the edge. It's not a human limitation; it's literally
impossible to keep playing even going frame-by-frame on an emulator. To go
beyond 290 lines (or 293 if the 290th was the first of a Tetris), you'd have
to stack up pieces on the sides ahead of time, and the absolute limit is about
310.

Modern Tetris games are very carefully designed to avoid such limitations.
Modern Tetris games always allow at least a half second after a piece lands
before locking it, allowing further moves and rotations.
<http://tetris.wikia.com/wiki/Tetris_Guideline>

So the game of NES Tetris becomes not how long you can survive, but how many
points per line you can score in that fixed duration of 290 lines. If every
single line of the 290 was a Tetris, the total would come to about 1,500,000.
So to reach the game's score cap of 999,999, about two-thirds of your lines
must be achieved as Tetrises.

Gameboy Tetris has no such impassable speed tier. You can play Gameboy Tetris
forever and many players have scored 400+ lines and 999,999 there.

~~~
Evbn
Gameboy always felt cleaner to play, too.

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MechaJDI
Wow, the writing of this article is superb. I never quite got into the super
competitiveness of gaming myself (for record breaking and etc) but the story
alone has intrigued me as well as let me take a glance inside the lives of the
players. I don't really know what else to say but the way the article is
written was truly engaging.

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chrishiggins
Thank you! Writing the article, I was struck by a few constant themes:
everyone in this community is VERY NICE, they are VERY COMPETITIVE, and the
game is BRUTAL. The game itself is punishingly hard.

To me, the central revelation was that the game was so fatalistic that only
nice people could survive it. And when those people get together to play each
other, it's a huge party. I wanted to tell a human story about people who just
happen to be extremely good at Tetris.

~~~
scholia
Many thanks for the piece, Chris. I enjoyed it.

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dasil003
When I play too much tetris I start thinking about the blocks all the time and
find it maddening. I wonder if these guys can ever stop thinking about the
blocks or if it just becomes so hard-wired in their brain that they lose
consciousness of it.

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chrishiggins
There is a well documented thing called the Tetris Effect, where you see the
blocks in dreams or when your eyes close. There's been some neuro research on
it. When I asked these guys about it, they said they got past it after a
while. They all say, yes, I have experienced Tetris Effect stuff, but at some
point the brain seems to filter it out.

My impression is that these players are spending a lot of their conscious
energy on the next-piece box, constructing the stack, and just staying calm. I
think the majority of what they're doing is near instinct at this point, since
they play so much, they just kinda "know" the right move for any given
situation. Or at least, most of them. A max out game is a combination of
random luck and extreme skill/practice.

The documentary "Ecstasy of Order: The Tetris Masters" (steaming free on Hulu)
has more on all of this. Disclosure: I wrote parts of that film. Ben Mullen is
one of the main subjects of the film.

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wikwocket
I think this extends to any video game or virtual world you spend a lot of
time in. There have been periods in my life when I dreamed about healing party
members, and when I catch myself instinctively checking nearby rooftops for
snipers.

Either that, or I have officially lost it. (Or both; they are not mutually
exclusive...)

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vadman
I didn't check the roof for snipers, but I had nightmares of heavy cavalry
charging at me in the open field while I was one of the poor underequipped
peasants. That's what Total War games can do to you :) BTW - a heavy cavalry
charge is very scary, I don't recommend standing in its way.

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Xcelerate
Enjoyable article! I don't play NES Tetris so much but I do play Nullpomino. I
only do the 40-line clear race. 38 seconds is my best so far but I'm a long
way from the WR.

Holy cow, I just looked up the current record, and it was actually set today!
MicroBlizz says in this video description
(<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzUUKKuye24>) that he finished a game in
20.28 seconds. It will be neat to see who is the first sub 20! (MicroBlizz or
Lapsilap).

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hfantods
38 seconds! I play nullpomino 40 line too and have been stuck at the 1minute
mark forever.

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Xcelerate
My top 10 times are all between 38 and 39 so I've been stuck here forever too!

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snarfy
"I never played for score, only for meditation. :)

I remember passing level 29 on two or three occasions, always a freak
happening. I can't find a video online of anyone doing this without tool-
assist though." - a friend of mine, who is really, really rainman-good at NES
Tetris.

~~~
chrishiggins
The subject of Level 30 is discussed in great depth in "Ecstasy of Order."
Without spoiling anything, let's just say Thor is the guy to watch. There is a
bonus feature on the DVD that might interest you.

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wr1472
Related Tetris god video on YouTube. This still amazes me every time I watch
it
[http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=eQOswiAGLU4&desktop_uri=%...](http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=eQOswiAGLU4&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DeQOswiAGLU4)

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broken_symlink
I wonder what the people in the article think about tetris friends and if any
of them play on there. I used to play that a lot, but hit a barrier and was
never able to get past my high score of 728,514.

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ballard
A strange game.

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martinced
I used to play TwinTris on the Amiga a lot: one the best version of Twintris
ever (there are several videos on YouTube showing it). Very smooth 50 frames
per second "pixel perfect" animation (but that doesn't translate very well in
a YouTube video) and an amazing soundtrack.

But I was "too good" at it: there were vertical bars showing how many of each
piece got randomly selected and these bars would grow higher and higher as you
were playing.

I was playing for so long, even when the game reached crazy speed, that the
bar would arrive at the top of the screen and then come back down, a bit
shifted. A major video memory corruption would follow and it was only getting
worse and worse.

At one point it became impossible to correctly see the screen and you had
"lost" to the display bug.

: )

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Evbn
Seems this whole sport exists almost entirely for the generation of people who
were exactly 8 years old when Tetris came out.

And the sport will die when we run out of functioning NES consoles and CRTs.

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joezydeco
You need to read up on American Revolutionary War and Civil War reenactors.

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thoughtcriminal
Just downloaded The Magazine app. This is the kind of stuff I love to read.

That sly Marco may have another hit on his hands.

