Video Game Collecting

The website never announced who the winner was of the Classic Tetris World Championship was, so if you are wondering here it is…

This was pretty exciting to say the least, but wouldn’t it make sense that both players receive the same blocks in the same order? Or am I crazy. I mean, I know its purely random and each are using a different NES, but still…

This is the first in a three-part post…

So I’ve been doing plenty of research on Tetris.  Although its been debated for many years there are clearly some benefits of playing video games that go beyond just hand-eye coordination and critical thinking.

Dr. Richard J Haier did a report (http://www.biomedcentral.com/1756-0500/2/174) entitled: MRI assessment of cortical thickness and functional activity changes in adolescent girls following three months of practice on a visual-spatial task.  Whereby ‘visual-spatial task’ was Tetris.

Basically using two sets of children half played Tetris and the other half did not.  The findings were as follows:

Using a 3 T MRI, we obtained structural and functional images in adolescent girls before and after practice on a visual-spatial problem-solving computer game, Tetris. After three months of practice, compared to the structural scans of controls, the group with Tetris practice showed thicker cortex, primarily in two areas: left BAs 6 and 22/38. Based on fMRI BOLD signals, the Tetris group showed cortical activations throughout the brain while playing Tetris, but significant BOLD decreases, mostly in frontal areas, were observed after practice. None of these BOLD decreases, however, overlapped with the cortical thickness changes.

So what exactly does this mean?  I have no idea.  But I don’t believe it necessarily means you are smarter.  The fact that this kind of study was done is particularly interesting because it shows there are some doctors, scientists, or what-have-you that are looking for correlations between video games and intelligence.

Tetris is a good game to do ‘mental’ tests with.  The rules are simple and the anxiety of instant death found in other games is not present.  With the exception of the randomness of the pieces the player has 100% control over the outcome of the game.

Two things contribute to how fast the ‘Tetris well’ grows from the bottom of the screen to the top.    The first one is obviously mistakes.  If you drop a piece where you didn’t want it you’ll end up making a gap that you cannot fit another piece into and therfore must ‘fix’ the area above it before you can clear the mistake.  The other contributing factor is hunting for long pieces to earn a ‘Tetris’.  Sometimes you’ll build and build and build and that long piece is elusive.  Eventually you reach a critical point where you can no longer wait for the long piece and you must over-lap the long column you’ve made to start pushing the ‘well’ down.  This brings up an interesting topic… how often does that long piece appear?  In a perfect world you should receive a long piece 14.28% of the time (1 out of 7 pieces on average).  But it never seems like it comes that frequently does it?  Good thing the Nintendo NES version of Tetris keeps track:

In this screen shot it appears that the long piece has appeared 2nd most frequently behind the “backwards-L”.  This is a small data set and its possible there are other contributing factors to this.  For example, does the level dictate how frequently the long piece appears?  This in itself could dictate what strategy to use.  So in part two of this post we’re going to run some numbers and see just how frequently the long piece appears in the NES version…

Click the article to enlarge.

I’ve been doing some extensive research on Tetris as of lat and stumbled upon this article from The Palm Beach Post data Jan 22 1988.  Its neat to see the hysteria over this game (“horribly gripping”).

In a few days we’re going to learn about the Tetris Effect, and Tetris’ true effect on the brain.

I’ll also share this story and video about a Tetris World Record holder.

I’m not sure if this commercial inspired the Simpsons Tetris Skit or Vice Versa. It’s still cool either way.