![]() ![]() Satisfaction can be rooted in challenge, we feel it more acutely the more difficult the tension was to resolve. As the difficulty ramps up, the player is challenged, the tension grows, and resolution becomes sweeter and more gratifying, because it is harder to achieve. Like a beautiful dance, they must keep their feet steady as they are tested by an ever increasing tempo. This increasing speed is a natural barrier for the player to overcome. There is some extra time to analyze the tension and resolve it, but as the player clears more lines, they have less and less time to think, only time to act. At the start of the game things meander, go quite slowly. A beautiful thing about Tetris’s rhythm is that its tempo is always speeding up. To play Tetris is to be engrossed in its satisfying rhythm, to anticipate the next note and plan ahead while also living in the moment of your current decision. But like every song, when one melody is resolved another picks up needing resolution. Like a pretty melody, the board slowly grows larger and more discordant until a line is cleared, resolving some tension. ![]() The rhythm of Tetris is simple, each time a block is placed on the board, a new block appears to be placed. Musical melodies are satisfying because they create tension in their notes and then resolve them in a beautiful way, rhythm is the way that we get from point A to point B. Tetris is a deeply rhythmic game, and rhythm, like decision making, is innately satisfying. We feel like our success was truly our own, because the decisions made were unique to us. ![]() We grow satisfied playing Tetris because our decisions, and no one elses, satisfy the tension of the falling blocks, resolve the stress of the game by removing lines. We could have placed the block somewhere else, whether for better or worse. Tetris is satisfying because we make hundreds, thousands, of choices over a single session, and each one feels like it matters, because it could have been different. We live much of our lives not having choices about things, which isn’t necessarily bad, but games are a space where choice and consequence reign supreme. You can’t take back any block once placed. Every decision is lasting, whether it adds to the pile or removes from it. Games are a often a collection of different states, and fundamentally every decision the player makes in Tetris changes the state of the game. This is because the Tetris board is a changing chimera. The thing is, we LIKE making decisions, we like taking meaningful action, and every action in Tetris is meaningful. The clock keeps ticking, blocks keep dropping. Thus, there is no natural rest for the Tetris player, no cutscenes to behold, no moment to let up. The falling blocks are a natural timer to these decisions, and each time a block is placed another decision looms. It is easy to get sucked into the many possible outcomes Tetris generates. My wife, who doesn’t consider herself even good at Tetris, will often try to tell me where to place pieces while I’m playing. Tetris has so many decisions it naturally attracts backseat gaming. From the moment the player starts up a round, they must make decisions on where to place the tetronimos given to them. For many, decisions are the defining feature of games, and perhaps no game illustrates this better than Tetris. The first way that Tetris generates this satisfaction is through its constant decision making. Tetris is innately satisfying because it is a game of constant stress and resolution that is never fully relieved until the player loses. When one is satisfied, they have experienced something leaving them pleased and content on the other side, but in order to be gratified in such a way, one must first have some tension or stress to be resolved. ![]() So satisfaction is, in many ways, the resolution of tension. Hunger is a tension that is resolved when we eat. I’ll start by way of metaphor: satisfaction is eating a big meal and feeling full at the end of it, a sense of being complete, having all that you need. Satisfaction is what this video is about, I’m going to try to explain every way I find Tetris to be gratifying, and through its falling blocks, show how games generate satisfying experiences.įirst, lets define satisfaction. Though, to be honest, I’m a little ambivalent to Tetris’s perfection, because the word “perfect” does not describe how I feel when I play Tetris, the joyful satisfaction that comes through its dynamic and interesting play. It has an easy to understand premise and its interlocking pieces all work together to create its fantastic experience, remove any piece and the tower falls apart. One such voice is MatthewMatosis (), who argues Tetris is a perfect game because it is both simple and irreducible. Tetris, perhaps more than another other game, is described as “perfect” by video game critics. ![]()
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