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The Tetris Effect

nonzerosum.games

81–90 of 90 posts

Re: The Tetris Effect

#81
post #82

[belated stub for offtopicness] " Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The original article looks much better in "reader mode" which dumps the styling for a standardised page - no more need to read the folksy mock-handwriting font.

Re: The Tetris Effect

#83
Hey everyone, I'm James, the writer of the linked blog post with the 3D Tetris experiment and I just today discovered this thread! Which explains the bump in traffic I had for a couple of days back in August.

One of the moderators has kindly let me jump back in to say thanks to everyone that read the blog and had a play, it was most exciting to see people talking about it and I was especially amused by everyone bagging on the unreadable font - you'll be relieved that it has been changed, as of a few weeks ago.

So, a huge thanks, you've all made my day. And if you were looking for a mobile version, here it is... https://nonzerosum.games/tetrings_mobile.html

I'm looking forward to being part of this community too.

Re: The Tetris Effect

#84

Probing the conscious and subconscious mind, a novel mind-boggling 3D-to-2D visualization, working interactive demo, nice hand-drawn diagrams - this is my HN nugget of the day. Kudos!

Thanks - discovering these comments has been a real treat. It was fun working it all out. Turns out rotating these babies in code is easier than in your head, just swapping out relative x,y,z positions.

Re: The Tetris Effect

#85

I think the addition of new pieces was incredibly clever. When I started playing, I first just tried to play like it was regular Tetris on the furthest side of the board -- a strategy that was quickly foiled. The implementation of an extra dimension is also pretty cool, but as a game design nerd, I think it's more awesome that you managed to force players to engage with the concept.

Thanks! I was actually going to make an algorithm to find all the possible variations, but I realised that the additional options were limited and immediately obvious, and hard coding them would give me more control of game balance.

The blog is really about sharing ideas, so yes "forcing" the read is part of it XD - hopefully some ventured into the rest of the blog, which is more "saving the world" sort of material. I really appreciate your comments here, I wish I'd found them straight away :)

Re: The Tetris Effect

#86

I think the rings are a fantastic innovation. It would help me even further if the z-layers were colour coded too. I appreciate the colours currently reflect different blocks like in the original tetris, but I'd find it easier to process the "board state" if each ring size also had a colour associated with it. It would be easier to "scan" the board state for where best to place the piece. That said, this is a fantast…

Thanks! I take your point that colours would help distinguish the different z-layers - it's pretty easy to confuse the two larger rings I found. I was also thinking that making it stereoscopic might help. I've done this before where you have two running side by side, responding to the same controls, but you offset the z-axis a little. Then you basically match up the two by going cross-eyed! And voilà, more 3D information in the brain.

Concerning the controls I had to factor in simplifying them to create the mobile version - https://nonzerosum.games/tetrings_mobile.html because it was just not possible to distinguish between so many different gesture controls on a touch screen. So, in the mobile version, on a couple of axes you can only rotate in one direction, given this limitation I could definitely limit the keyboard controls for people with only 2 hands.

Thanks again, finding comments like these has been really enjoyable.

Re: The Tetris Effect

#87
post #34

Started reading the article, immediately thought of a relative simple solution: - the most important thing is: is a bottom layer ‘solid’. So looking from above seems the most obvious - you could use e.g. numbers to indicate height, so a 3 is ‘three up’, a ‘1’ is one up, and a ‘0’ is: you are at the bottom. - and use colours to indicate ‘holes below’ (e.g. blue is one hole, green 2, and red 3). The blocks that are fal…

That definitely sounds like some approaches that have been taken. Blockout and Welltris are workable. I was just trying to do something that gave access to all information in a consistent way, so that someone might develop an intuition for a space outside of their usual 3D vision.

Thanks for your feedback

Re: The Tetris Effect

#88

He might be on to something, but I couldn't grok the visualisation at all. I didn't spend long though. I remember a game called Wetrix, that combined Tetris like gameplay with a 3D environment : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wetrix

As the developer I also haven't even developed the intuition required to grok the visualisation, so - it probably takes a considerable amount of time, but surely after some weeks of play...

Re: The Tetris Effect

#89

Can't you just have one or two more camera angles on the screen at all times? Maybe even a stationary and a rotating view?

My intention was to have the simplest implementation with the most information, so having 2 cameras is a solution of sorts but it sort of fails on both my objectives adding the complication of a second camera and then perhaps having to implement controls for that as well as the 3D controls of the pieces... and even so there will still be some aspects obscured.

This was also much easier to code, an unspoken 3rd objective :)

Thanks for playing - if you'd like to try the mobile version it's at https://nonzerosum.games/tetrings_mobile.html

Re: The Tetris Effect

#90

There is a real study that shows that Tetris can help prevent PTSD: https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2017-03-28-post-traumatic-stress-s... I haven't read about this thoroughly but I think the theory is that the Tetris Effect that we all hate literally blocks the formation of traumatic memories.

That makes total sense, if Tetris is something your brain prioritises when consolidating memory during sleep then it will take up bandwidth from the traumatic event and block it from being consolidated.

I wonder if there's something in that, where people try to distract themselves in their every day life with these games, perhaps it's an instinctive way of reducing trauma.

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