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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."
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
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.
No won says Tetris is super fun or exciting.
I do, when I win.
Seriously though, I find tetris to be a whole lot of fun. And if you just start at level 9 every time, it can be pretty exciting, too. It doesn't quite have the clench factor of CMR3 or anything (slide slide slide CRASH - you can see how long it's been since I bought a new game though) but it can be quite engaging. Proof positive that graphics aren't everything - tetris works fine when drawn in text characters.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Did you ever roll your score through the signed int maximum, 32,767 points? Did you ever roll it back through zero? Did you know that there's a graphical display glitch in the score display: the old score is erased by writing the new score on top, so if the new score has fewer digits (-9,999 as opposed to -10,000, for example) the last digit will stay visible?
My current high score is -256, but that's not counting the time I rolled it through zero (the game didn't think that was a high score).
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
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!