Slashdot Mirror
Playing Tetris Is Good For You
An anonymous reader writes "Some UK researchers found out that playing Tetris is actually good for people with post-traumatic stress disorder, by interfering with memory. I wonder if playing Minesweeper is effective against boss-inflicted stress."
I knew those 14232 hours spent playing Tetris were good for something.
was brought on by being hit repeatedly by blocks of various geometric shapes each divided into 4 equal sections?
Monstar L
it is an Australian site - it's been "Conroyed"
I am not stubborn. I am right!
So, what does playing tetris do when you're trying to store normal memories, like where you put your glasses?
I didn't catch it in TFA, does someone know about the time scale?
It makes sense that Tetris competes with brain resources WHILE you are playing...it would be hard to have a flashback during a game. But did it have any long-term impact?
As in, therapeutic value? I know COD4 helps me by competing for my brain resources against homework. Without it, I'd be like Col. Kurtz from Apocalypse Now...."the horror, the horror".
THL phish sticks
No, but Mine-layer is...
Really, all they did was show people something disturbing then immediately distract them with Tetris afterwards. I'm positive they could have districted them with anything and it would make a difference.
It is common knowledge that the best way to remember something is to put it in your brain then recall it over increasingly long periods of time. If you don't recall it (what they call "flashback" in the article) then the memory will naturally fade. It is at the beginning of a memory when it is weakest so it makes sense that if you distract someone and prevent them from recalling the memory then it will quickly fade.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
But MegaMan is better.
From what I've seen people do primarily play Tetris to decompress and reduce stress. No won says Tetris is super fun or exciting. It's just something to absorb your attention after a hard day. I don't know if the effect it has on traumatic stress is an extension of that, but I tend to think it is.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
I wonder if playing Minesweeper is effective against boss-inflicted stress.
I don't know where the poster works, but in most workplaces, boss-inflicted stress is caused by playing Minesweeper on the job. But then I suppose getting a pink slip is one sure way of never being stressed out by the boss ever again...
Once you get up past level 20 the game just starts creating traumatic stress.
I know I still have flashbacks and nightmares about the time I passed the level 70 mark on TetrisDS. Why didn't I just use the 'T' block? Why?! Oh no...it's happening again
can be very therapeutic. The trick is to be able to regulate just how distracted you become. It's not going to help some one if they have PTSD and then get hooked on Tetris to the point where you can't live without it. Yes, that is an extreme.
My point is actually that Tetris is just the distraction and you can probably get similar results with any sort of simple mind stimulating puzzle like sudoku. Heck, I'm willing to bet any video game would help as long as, say, your PTSD was triggered by almost getting run down by six 18-wheelers and you sit down for a session of Big Mutha Truckers. Course... if you don't have PTSD before playing that game you will after the fact...
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
Will accidental exposure to Tetris after treatment have similar effects to Beethoven's Ninth?
When I've played Tetris too much before going to bed, all I could think about, tossing and turning in the sheets, is blocks forever falling and falling, and trying to fit them all in, essentially playing the game in my head. I can easily see that business pushing out other thoughts.
Talk about replacing memories. Now whenever I hear a song, I'm not thinking about where I was when I first heard it. I'm thinking about hitting those damn color buttons on time.
Finally, a need for QuantumG's code!
I wish all those doing-nerdy-stuff-is-good-for-your-brain-somehow stories would cease to be made up by "some researcher" or editors!
not having RTFA but assuming it to be the usual bullshit
0 001 11 1
Dunno, I find that game to be a stress-inducing process in and of itself. I wouldn't be lining up to recommend it to PTSD patients either for obvious reasons (even though in Vista you can optionally swap them out for flowers.
Last year I was in an airport waiting for a delayed flight during a kidney stone attack. I bought Internet access at through Boingo for the day and it helped me get through the attack.
Maybe just getting your mind off things would have been a better test.
... it always seemed to aggravate my carpal tunnel syndrome which has the effect of inducing new stresses to offset those that it supposedly alleviated. Go figure.
You must be new here. There's a little checkbox right next to "Post Anonymously," just above the text area where you write. When we troll and flame the site, we always tick that, so that it won't affect our karma, the way I just did.
Sincerely,
The uncle that raped you when you were four years old
not so!
As a control, the researchers should have given another test group access to an "Internet full of Porn" (IFOP).
If you RTFA, the researchers showed "distressing pictures" to the subjects, and then they played Tetris. Afterward, they had little memory of the "distressing pictures".
They should do this again, but instead of playing Tetris, let them surf the IFOP.
Afterward, they will have NO memory of the "distressing pictures".
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Either this is a misleading title or the anonymous poster assumes we all suffer from post traumatic stress syndrome.
I know Ibogaine has helped people kick off of heroin, methadon and alcohol; it is also sometimes used by people to reintegrate their memories and life. Maybe it would be more effective than Tetris? It's illegal in the U.S. unfortunately, but there are treatment centers across the world who do it carefully (medical checks first etcetera). Might be worth a Google or two to those who are looking for an alternative to living in a personal hell. I intend to try it out myself for depression treatment.
Or maybe the other way around. I've noticed that when performing an activity that requires your unconscious/autonomic part of your brain to take over, memory recall will actively interfere with your ability to carry out that activity. We usually think of it as confidence or the ability to overcome distraction but I think it really comes down to clearing your mind of conscious thought/memories and allowing your other brain to take over.
Think about what it felt like to learn to type. At first, you had to think about which finger to put where to get the letter you wanted. But at some point, you had to start taking little leaps of faith and stop thinking about it. The same goes for sight reading on the piano. You don't have time to stop and think about what the notes mean and where you have to move your fingers. You have to just /do/ it. And if you start getting plagued with conscious thoughts and memories while you're in a performance, it will cause a distraction and lead to a memory slip, totally derailing the performance. The same goes for carrying a cup of hot coffee up the stairs. If you concentrate on the task of which foot to put on which step and making sure the cup doesn't tilt, you're sure to trip or spill it.
So I don't think it should be any surprise that performing a tetris-like activity supresses memory. Or rather, it requires the suppression of memory to do it well (or at least try to do it well).
The only thing more pathetic than a first post troll is one that can't even do it correctly. Dumbass.
http://code.gosu.pl/dl/JsTetris/demo/JsTetris.html
Frozen Bubble rules.
Tetris was especially good to me back in the late 1980s when I was at university at Sheffield in the UK. There were a few Tetris Payout machines around the city that could hold up to £60 of cash.
The premise of this version was that you scored more points for lines cleared higher up the screen and you had to get as many points as possible in a fixed time limit. The payout was based on how many points you got on a sliding scale. As I recall the maximum payout was £12.
The engineers who built the machine programmed it to get easier each time you failed to win money in a game and it got harder each time you did win. They made a mistake though because a good enough Tetris player could beat the machine on its hardest setting.
There were about 3 or 4 students in the town that could empty these machines. Amazingly at the Student Union bar they came around once a week and filled the machine with cash. Those of us that could empty the machine would race to get to the machine first in order to empty it!
I kept records of what I made and it was over £1000 which is not a lot of money now but it bought a lot of beer for me when I was 19 years old and skint! And I still managed to find enough time to get a degree!
Eventually these machines disappeared no doubt because the people in charge realised that the only people making money were the people playing them!
Cinderella could have told you that. In her traumatic state, she sorted the ashes and embers in the fireplace. It's a therapeutic practice; it's getting down to the details, sorting, sifting, engrossing oneself in very small things. Tetris is the same. The player sorts block, putting them into their perfect place, not leaving any holes. It's more than a distraction. Changing the subject, you ever consider the existential implications of Tetris? An endless stream of blocks requiring your total concentration, no way to win, only postpoing losing? Now I'm depressed. I need... Tetris.
More news on health and exercise related video games:
http://www.healthygaming.com/blog/
You're obviously not talking about the NES version, so which one are you referring to?
Microsoft's ancient port of Tetris to Windows 3.1 used a type equivalent to int16_t for the player's score. Certainly Tetramino for NES can track up to 6.5 million points, and Lockjaw can track up to 2 billion.
Then after time as it fades and becomes more manageable then you don't have to play Tetris as much. And perhaps except for getting flashbacks of War you get one where those blocks are moving to fast for you.
When you're as good as the players in this video (TGM3 Shirase S13) or this video (TGM3 Master GM), what does "to fast for you" mean?
How does one "win" at Tetris?
First you have to get so good you can almost play with your eyes shut. Then you have to beat this guy.
Between Minesweeper and Tetris, I can see why Tetris helps with Post Traumatic Stress better than Minesweeper.
Fail-wise I'd say you're on par with the real first post
And What about the Tetris Effect?,it's happen when a person plays a lot hours the game...
1010011010
Somebody, obviously, plays a lot of tetris.
If you actually RTFA
Now how did that get turned around to "Playing Tetris is good for you"?
Only on /.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
I think it's the same cure as the eye movement desensitization and reprocessing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_Movement_Desensitization_and_Reprocessing
It's meant to resolve the development of trauma-related disorders as resulting from exposure to a traumatic or distressing event.
Tetris seems to require constantly moving your eyes.
Games requiring concentrating your vision on one point should not be as much efficient.
ecstasy
I'm currently getting My Master's in Social Work...
According to the DSM-IV PTSD isn't even diagnosable for 3 MONTHS after the event. Obviously, asking people after a week how many times they remembered a movie isn't really related to PTSD. Traumatic Memories are laid down differently, more sensory in nature- than a mere 'thought'. (No source on that, sorry. There are debates about changes in brain structure and things with PTSD)
They loosely define flashbacks. In PTSD, flashbacks can include feeling injuries, getting lost in the traumatic event, not being able to distinguish them from the present. And simply, I bet that the people who remembered less or more didn't feel like they were still in that room being subjected to awful images, as much as thoughts of those images like 'eww, that was gross' or 'those poor people'.
So, distracting yourself right after taking in information makes things harder to remember. But, making the correlation straight to PTSD, is off base.
Dear Uncle Joe,
Thank you for the information about slashdot. Sometimes I post anonymously, but sometimes I like to earn credit for getting first post so the the internet has a record of my eliteness.
Love,
Reikk
PS. Thank you for having such a small cock. That rape could have really hurt if you weren't hung like a gorilla.
Maybe you didn't notice, but his name is a keyboard cipher of "Troll".
You just got Reikk-rolled.
I'm not insane! My mother had me tested.
I'll have tetris ready now, whenever I surf 4chan, just in case I see something horrible that I don't want scarring my memory forever...
My wife has serious, clinical depression and playing these kinds of games really does help. It does kinda seem OCD when you're watching her do it, but it seems to help her get by until she can get some rest and start fresh the next day.
One should do that as a rule here, since many of the dumb kids mod you down when ever they don't agree with your opinion.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
...when your machine can play it for you?
In today's modern lifestyle, it's hard to find the time to do everything. But now with SweeperBot, there's no need to give up minesweeper!
SweeperBot plays mineseeper for you! It's free, it's efficient, and it's open source! Simply download and double-click, and then spend your time doing more productive things... like playing freecell.
The second link was supposed to be Invisible Tetris.
how /.ers will fight to the death saying that playing video games doesn't cause violence, yet leap all over the Tetris Effect
I used to play a lot tetris while recovering after I saw my bones in an accident. This might have helped...
Heroes die once, cowards live longer.
http://www.koreus.com/video/simpsons-tetris.html
I know that since I started playing tetris long ago, I've had an easier time packing up trucks with varied shaped boxes. :)
Getting a little tired of the non-informative posts on Slashdot. I expected to actually learn something, not see someone's random musings on a subject.