The Tetris effect
People who play video puzzle games like this for a long
time may see moving images like this at the edges of their visual fields, when
they close their eyes, or when they are drifting off to sleep.
The Tetris effect (also known as Tetris Syndrome) occurs
when people devote sufficient time and attention to an activity that it begins
to overshadow their thoughts, mental images, and dreams. It is named after the
video game Tetris.
People who play Tetris for a prolonged amount of time may
then find themselves thinking about ways different shapes in the real world can
fit together, such as the boxes on a supermarket shelf or the buildings on a
street. In this sense, the Tetris effect is a form of habit. They might also
dream about falling Tetris shapes when drifting off to sleep or see images of
falling Tetris shapes at the edges of their visual fields or when they close
their eyes. In this sense, the Tetris effect is a form of hypnagogic imagery.
Other
examples
The Tetris effect can occur with other video games, with
any prolonged visual task (such as classifying cells on microscope slides,
weeding, picking or sorting fruit, flipping burgers, driving long distances, or
playing board games such as chess or go), and in other sensory
modalities.[citation needed] In kinesthesis, a person newly on land after
spending long periods at sea may move with an unbidden rocking motion, having
become accustomed to the ship making such movements (known as sea legs or mal
de debarquement). Computer programmers and developers sometimes have similar
experiences, and report dreaming about code when they sleep at night.
Similarly, students of mathematics may report dreaming of numbers or equations.
People who play a certain game constantly for a long period of time will
realize when they try to sleep their thoughts will be in a different fashion
than usual.
Place
in cognition
Stickgold et al. (2000) have proposed that Tetris imagery
is a separate form of memory, likely related to procedural memory. This is from
their research in which they showed that people with anterograde amnesia,
unable to form new declarative memories, reported dreaming of falling shapes
after playing Tetris during the day, despite not being able to remember playing
the game at all.
A study, conducted by Lynn Okagaki and Peter Frensch in
1994, showed that participants who played Tetris for twelve 30-minute sessions
(with no previous experience of the game) did much better than the control
group in both the paper-pencil test version of spatial skills as well as the
computerized version. The conclusions drawn from this experiments were that
video games such as Tetris had a positive effect on three areas of spatial
skills including mental rotation, spatial perception and spacial visualization
in those who played for a prolonged period continuously.
Another 2009 Oxford study suggests that playing
Tetris-like video games may help prevent the development of traumatic memories.
If the video game treatment is played soon after the traumatic event, the
preoccupation with Tetris shapes is enough to prevent the mental recitation of
traumatic images, thereby decreasing the accuracy, intensity, and frequency of
traumatic reminders. "We suggest it specifically interferes with the way
sensory memories are laid down in the period after trauma and thus reduces the
number of flashbacks that are experienced afterwards," summarizes Dr.
Emily Holmes, who led the study.
History
of the term
The earliest known reference to the term appears in
Jeffrey Goldsmith's article, "This is Your Brain on Tetris",
published in Wired in May 1994:
No home was
sweet without a Gameboy in 1990. That year, I stayed “for a week” with a friend
in Tokyo, and Tetris enslaved my brain. At night, geometric shapes fell in the
darkness as I lay on loaned tatami floor space. Days, I sat on a lavender suede
sofa and played Tetris furiously. During rare jaunts from the house, I visually
fit cars and trees and people together.
The Tetris
effect is a biochemical, reductionistic metaphor, if you will, for curiosity,
invention, the creative urge. To fit shapes together is to organize, to build,
to make deals, to fix, to understand, to fold sheets. All of our mental
activities are analogous, each as potentially addictive as the next.
The term was rediscovered by Earling (1996),[1] citing a
use of the term by Garth Kidd in February, 1996. Kidd described
"after-images of the game for up to days afterwards" and "a
tendency to identify everything in the world as being made of four squares and
attempt to determine 'where it fits in'". Kidd attributed the origin of
the term to computer-game players from Adelaide, Australia. An early
description of the general phenomenon appears in Neil Gaiman's SF poem
"Virus" (1987) in Digital Dreams.
L'effet
Tetris
L'effet Tetris (French: the Tetris effect) is a similarly
named, but quite different phenomenon found in evolutionary AI systems related
to the concept of bounded rationality. L'effet Tetris then, is the effect
whereby a hasty, but imprecise course of action is better than calculating an
optimal move where such a calculation would not be completed in time; in short,
evolutionary systems often find local rather than global optima.
Game
Transfer Phenomena
Game Transfer Phenomena (GTP) is a modern term created
after the thesis written by Angelica Ortiz de Gortari, a student from the
Nottingham Trent University. GTP is the set of residual feelings, thoughts
and/or images which remain after playing a videogame. Examples, other than the
Tetris effect, would be awareness of the absence of a head-up display in the
natural human field of view after playing a first-person shooter or the urge to
arrange (or command) little objects after playing a strategy game such as
Starcraft.
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