Showing posts with label tetris. Show all posts

Monday, June 08, 2009

happy birthday tetris!

25 and still counting

25 Years of Tetris: From Russia With Fun!
By Scott Olstad
Sputnik burned up in the atmosphere, Berlin is now one city, but 25 years later, the Soviet-designed Tetris remains one of the most popular and ubiquitous video games ever created. It has sold over 125 million copies, been released for nearly every video-game platform of the past two decades and even been played on the side of a skyscraper. Yet creator Alexey Pajitnov almost never saw a ruble for his creation. While studying at the Soviet Union's Academy of Science in 1984, the 29-year-old Pajitnov designed a bare-bones version of the game in his free time for the Elektronika 60, a Soviet terminal computer.................

pic:

The puzzle video game Tetris is played at a barcade in Brooklyn, New York.

Mark Lennihan / AP

Friday, January 09, 2009

i've done many tetris postings

here and at the reformed pirate

but this one is REALLY good and REALLY amazing as well (oh, and i always mention cv rick in my tetris postings)

Cognitive vaccine: using Tetris to fight PTSD

By Jonathan M. Gitlin

Exposure to traumatic events can often come back to haunt people. Violent crime, car crashes, warfare: all of these bring with them the specter of long term psychiatric issues due to post-traumatic stress. Now a new study suggests that Tetris—yes, that Tetris—might be able to help with that problem.

On the face of it, Tetris seems like such a simple game. You move blocks around on a screen to complete lines, all to a catchy Russian-inspired MIDI melody. But the game's simple appearance belies the complexity within; playing Tetris is an involved visuospatial task that utilises the pathways in the brain associated with visual memory. It's strong stuff too; I'm sure many of you are familiar with the sensation of seeing tetrominos in your head after a long Tetris session. Indeed, this phenomenon has been clinically documented!

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has an incidence in the US of around eight percent, although this figure is significantly higher among returning combat veterans and those who live in violent neighborhoods. As the name suggests, it stems from experiencing or viewing traumatic stress, such as that involving death or violent injury, and manifests, among other symptoms, as vivid flashbacks, putting the sufferer back at the scene.............