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The Tetris Effect

nonzerosum.games

71–80 of 90 posts

Re: The Tetris Effect

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree so strongly even though I also found the font horrible. Design is used to communicate. Whether or not you want to communicate "in the clearest way possible" is a choice. There are many other choices to be made and some may conflict with that choice. Some choices will resonate with you and some will aggravate. But only the author/designer can speak to whether the design was successful in it's aims

> Whether or not you want to communicate "in the clearest way possible" is a choice. This is far from "clearest way possible", it's not even in the middle. This choice impedes communication which makes is less useful, by your definition. > But only the author/designer can speak to whether the design was successful in it's aims I find it difficult to believe that the author's aim was to share a story in such way that'…

Anti-design[1] is a movement which rejects the over-sanitation of design. Type a random query into Google and click through the first few links. What will you see? An endless sea of black-on-white, sans-serif, grids of text.

Anti-design is effective in making things memorable and engaging. When I attended Davis, I first thought the Social Sciences Building[2] was a bit of an eye sore. It was intentionally designed to be challenging. Now it is one of my most vivid memories of the campus.

1: https://99designs.com/blog/design-history-movements/anti-des...

2: https://localwiki.org/davis/Social_Sciences_and_Humanities_B...

Re: The Tetris Effect

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This could for all I know be the most brilliant solution to 3D Tetris ever, but the font is just so terrible that I find it hard to get past the first paragraph, which makes me doubt the validity of any further (possibly quite clever) design solutions that are being presented. Design serves a single purpose, which is to present information in the clearest possible way. Any design choices you make which don't serve th…

I disagree so strongly even though I also found the font horrible. Design is used to communicate. Whether or not you want to communicate "in the clearest way possible" is a choice. There are many other choices to be made and some may conflict with that choice. Some choices will resonate with you and some will aggravate. But only the author/designer can speak to whether the design was successful in it's aims

I don't think the designer is the authority on whether a design is good or not. Just like a novelist, director, or composer doesn't get to dictate whether their output was creatively successful.

Paul Graham's essay on taste sums it up pretty well:

http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html

Re: The Tetris Effect

#73
post #4

> this time I was fixated on how to create a three-dimensional version of Tetris. I remember playing a 3D Tetris-like game called Blockout back in the day. Some shapes were odd and non-4-block, key mappings for rotations were mind bending. https://www.mobygames.com/game/498/blockout/ As for the Tetris effect, at some point I played a lot of Tetris and seeing falling tetrominos when falling asleep was only the beginni…

OMG Blockout. I can hear the intro in my head now! If I remember correctly, it was on a very early PC (8086?) and would actually run too fast on later PCs. Pretty impressive game for the time.

Re: The Tetris Effect

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree so strongly even though I also found the font horrible. Design is used to communicate. Whether or not you want to communicate "in the clearest way possible" is a choice. There are many other choices to be made and some may conflict with that choice. Some choices will resonate with you and some will aggravate. But only the author/designer can speak to whether the design was successful in it's aims

I don't think the designer is the authority on whether a design is good or not. Just like a novelist, director, or composer doesn't get to dictate whether their output was creatively successful. Paul Graham's essay on taste sums it up pretty well: http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html

Fair enough and I also agree. Got sloppy towards the end there

Re: The Tetris Effect

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree so strongly even though I also found the font horrible. Design is used to communicate. Whether or not you want to communicate "in the clearest way possible" is a choice. There are many other choices to be made and some may conflict with that choice. Some choices will resonate with you and some will aggravate. But only the author/designer can speak to whether the design was successful in it's aims

> Whether or not you want to communicate "in the clearest way possible" is a choice. This is far from "clearest way possible", it's not even in the middle. This choice impedes communication which makes is less useful, by your definition. > But only the author/designer can speak to whether the design was successful in it's aims I find it difficult to believe that the author's aim was to share a story in such way that'…

You find it difficult to believe? The person clearly worked hard to achieve this aesthetic. The font even sort of matches the illustrations. This is clearly intentional from my pov. This aesthetic was more important to the author than ease of reading/consumption.

Re: The Tetris Effect

#76
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

This could for all I know be the most brilliant solution to 3D Tetris ever, but the font is just so terrible that I find it hard to get past the first paragraph, which makes me doubt the validity of any further (possibly quite clever) design solutions that are being presented. Design serves a single purpose, which is to present information in the clearest possible way. Any design choices you make which don't serve th…

> This could for all I know be the most brilliant solution to 3D Tetris ever

It isn't, the proposed 'solution' to the obscurity problem is at least as unreadable as the font.

Re: The Tetris Effect

#77
The "tetris effect" is why I had to stop playing Lumines on the PSP. My sleep was dominated by dreams of that infernal game. Incidentally though I'm wicked good at it.

Re: The Tetris Effect

#78
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 font makes this so difficult to read

Re: The Tetris Effect

#80
post #10
post #4

> this time I was fixated on how to create a three-dimensional version of Tetris. I remember playing a 3D Tetris-like game called Blockout back in the day. Some shapes were odd and non-4-block, key mappings for rotations were mind bending. https://www.mobygames.com/game/498/blockout/ As for the Tetris effect, at some point I played a lot of Tetris and seeing falling tetrominos when falling asleep was only the beginni…

Can be played here: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Blockout_1989

There is a version for XWindow. Has been for many years: xbl.

Ubuntu doesn't seem to have a package in any default repository.

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