In Praise of Tetris

It’s a comfort to think about nothing.

It’s a high art shibboleth that aesthetic form is aesthetic content. But in terms of form forming content, the snooty modernists like Joyce and Pound had nothing on one of the earliest computer games, that bastion of lowbrow distraction, Tetris.

In Tetris, the contentless is the point—and indeed the salve. Tetris has been found to help with recovery from PTSD, and I’ve been somewhat (or, you know, more than somewhat) obsessively playing it since we’ve descended (like falling blocks) into our most recent and intense fascist hellpit.

The comfort in Tetris is that there is no content but form. The game, as you almost certainly know, is a kind of puzzle in motion; blocky geometric shapes fall from the top of the screen, and you are supposed to rotate and move them so that they form unbroken lines at the bottom of the screen. When a line is filled in, it disappears. The goal is to keep your tower of blocks from reaching the top.

It's tempting to think of Tetris as a kind of building game, but it’s not really. Instead it’s an anti-building game; the goal is to erase your work as you go. The more successful you are, the less you can see any visible accomplishments. In that sense, the game’s truest form (or content) is an absence of form (or content). To win is to succeed in an ongoing cultivation of empty space. To be a true champion Tetris player is to build nothing and form nothing; it’s the continual creation of a perfect wall that isn’t.

Meditation on nothing sounds very Zen, and Tetris does feel like Zen, often, and/or like meditation. Playing requires focus, but it’s a focus on nothing, both in the sense that you can’t really get distracted by (for instance) whether the orange nightmare is going to rob your mother-in-law of her Social Security, and in the sense that your attention is on spaces and nothingness. You try to fill the bits that aren’t there so that the bits that are there will vanish. The blocks fall in endless, gentle waves of fitting and disintegrating. It’s a floating world in which everything passes and floats towards its own floating away.

If you play enough Tetris you can start to see blocks falling when you close your eyes; you can start to see blocks falling in your dreams. I used to find that disturbing. My brain was being hijacked by this pointless timewaster; my personality and ratiocination hijacked by trivial ambulatory puzzle pieces. Now though—if the choice is between a brain filled with Trump and a brain filled with trivial ambulatory puzzle pieces, I will take the puzzle pieces gladly, thank you. Let me turn into a meaningless vanishing grid. Let me gently spiral from chaos to order to nothing. That sounds a lot better than the alternatives.

Tetris can’t solve anything; it’s not a puzzle that can be solved. It falls and falls and disappears and eventually you lose, and can play at trying to disappear again. There is no content but the shapes you watch, which means the content is the emptiness of form. To the extent that Tetris means anything, it means that the purpose of building a meaning in space and time is a distraction from the inevitable, scrolling disappearance of space and time. The blocks fall and spin through the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Is that great art? Is it profound? Is it just a way to avoid having to listen to your brain spinning round and round the worries about a recession and government atrocities over which you ultimately have little control? Or is it just a waste of time? All of those, none of those, whichever seems to fit in the row before it disappears. Tetris keeps going, a form that can mean whatever you want since it doesn’t mean anything. That’s kept me going, too.