‘The Tetris Effect’ is a meditative salve for this savage world

Here’s how software engineer Garth Kidd defined the “Tetris effect” in his 1996 paper, “Possible future risk of virtual reality,” for The Risks Digest.

“Many people, after playing Tetris for more than an hour straight, report being plagued by after-images of the game for up to days afterwards, an ability to play the game in their head, and a tendency to identify everything in the world as being made of four squares and attempt to determine ‘where it fits in.'”

In the more than two decades since that term started kicking around (it was actually first coined a couple years earlier, in a Wired story), the game of Tetris has existed in many different shapes and sizes. But not one of those games has ever tried to capture the feeling that Kidd described. Until now. Read more…

More about Entertainment, Gaming, Tetris, The Tetris Effect, and Gaming Review