One year ago today, a 13-year-old kid from Oklahoma did what was widely considered impossible.
He beat Tetris.
“I’m going to pass out, I can’t feel my fingers,” said Willis Gibson after conquering the mythical level 157 of the best-selling video game in history.
Tetris, to put it mildly, can be habit-forming. It’s been described by Arcade Games as “by far, the most addictive game ever.” Electronic Gaming Monthly went still farther, declaring it to be the “Greatest Game of All Time.”
If you’ve ever succumbed to those colorful shapes falling like rain, you might be thinking, “It sure would be fun to be playing Tetris right now.”
The game was the digital brainchild of Alexey Pajitnov, a 28-year-old artificial intelligence researcher working at the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow. He chose “Tetris” because it combines the Greek prefix tetra (“four-sided”) and tennis, which happened to be his favorite sport.
From its debut in June 1984, the game spread like wildfire from Moscow to Eastern Europe, and then to the rest of the world.
Social critic and author Orson Scott Card jokes that Tetris “proves that Russia still wants to bury us.” Noting that Pajitnov, amazingly, never copyrighted his creation, he wrote, “Obviously the game is meant to find its way onto every American machine,” after which productivity would “drop to zero.”
What makes Tetris so fun and addicting?
The game is like a jigsaw puzzle or game of dominoes that never stops moving.
The challenge is anticipating how to click into place the next available piece – which “falls” into view from the top of the screen – before it lands on some random spot (one that probably won’t help your score).
According to researchers like Dr. Richard Haier, playing Tetris can boost brain activity. Experiments have shown that playing a half-hour a day for three months helps those at risk of Alzheimer’s Disease, since the game strengthens “critical thinking, reasoning, language, and processing.”
Experience in the workplace has also shown playing a half-hour a day leads to playing many hours a day, which quickly leads to unemployment.
What happens if you get really good at Tetris? What’s the reward for playing well?
The game goes faster. The pieces suddenly begin to descend more quickly. Here they come. Even the music speeds up. Can you handle the pressure?
Tetris, when you think about it, feels quite a bit like real life.
What happens if you get really good at your job? What if your family grows? What if a whole new set of responsibilities is suddenly thrust upon you?
Your “reward” is that life goes faster. You’re given more opportunities. There’s more to think about and more to do.
And now success is defined as how quickly you can fit in all the pieces at a pace that once would have seemed insane.
We can’t always adjust how quickly life comes at us. But we can definitely make adjustments in how we think and feel in the midst of rapid change.
Studies show that people who are great at Tetris are “non-anxious players.” They don’t freak out just because they have no idea which Tetris shape is about to appear. Precisely because they know that they cannot know, they relax, enjoy the game, and often end up making superb decisions.
And how about real life?
We also know that we cannot know what relational curveball, what workplace crisis, what 3 am phone call, what surprising chest pain is about to come of the blue and change everything.
But God knows.
And we can know why we trust God – this God who will not be surprised, intimidated, or thwarted by anything that happens to us.
“Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:6-7).
You may not be a non-anxious player. But by God’s grace you can learn to be a non-anxious pray-er in 2025.
And that just happens to be the only way to win the game that really matters.
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