Until last winter, I haven’t played video games since my parents let me combine pocket money and birthday money to buy an original Nintendo Entertainment System, an old 8-bit home video game console with two buttons and gray flip cover. Back then, I could take or give up Mario and his demonized brother, but I would trade my allowance for uninterrupted time to lose myself Tetris.
The premise of the game is simple: arrange geometric pieces called Tetriminos as they fall on the screen. The completed lines are gone. My spell? Always build with Tetris, be aware of the ability to maximize the concurrency of four lines at once. The game soothes me, especially after a breakup or the appearance of a particularly severe dent in the chin.
Lying in bed at night, I often stare at the dark shapes in my bedroom, mind moving the dresser or nightstand left or right to fit, Tetris-styles, with adjacent shapes. When I was bored at school, my eyes wandered over rectangular doorways and exit signs, all begging to be reinstated, jostling each other, not taking their eyes off their partners, and vanishing. “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies” by Tchaikovsky, one of the game’s wonderfully compressed theme songs, played over and over in my mind.
When I graduated from high school, I left my Nintendo behind, stowed away in my parents’ family room next to my VHS tapes. Happy home. The only time I play Tetris after high school was to fly. And even then, only when the game was pre-installed in the seat in front of me. There’s nothing like Tetris to distract from the chaos that causes stress. In addition to flights, I do not play.
Until 2020.
When the pandemic and anxiety and worry hit, I curled up, turned around, and yelled at my kids more often than I should have. Even though I wanted to, I couldn’t control my emotions. I tried to organize my wardrobe to distract myself. Finally, no more shirts to sort by color, no more hoodies that are too small to load in the donation bin. I need another way out.
Sometime before Christmas, while browsing for a new game to add to my kids’ Nintendo Switch game library (Mario Kart), I came across Tetris 99. Immediately, I yearned for the game of my youth.
“When we seek to soothe ourselves, we often use the version of something that has worked in the past, even the distant past,” says Dana Dorfman, a psychotherapist in New York, talks about my intuition to continue the game after all these years. “It’s like the music of the olden days — it can almost capture our emotions,” she says.
Baby day Tetris 99 When the ink cartridges arrived, I curled up on the floor in our lobby closet so my kids wouldn’t find me for a few minutes and fell right into my old rhythm of flipping and stacking.
According to Dorfman, when your emotions are in turmoil, intentionally doing something that gives you a sense of control, something you can control, gives you confidence. “The game allows you to arrange the puzzle pieces, just like in life, to come to you faster and upside down, in such a way that they will literally leave the screen. It’s like a microcosm of the universe. what you’re trying to do in life, except you’re doing it on screen in a more tangible and concrete way,” she said.
