Fun Inc. by Tom Chatfield Read Free Book Online Page A

invent Tetris as discover it. The game is based on an ancient Roman puzzle involving pieces composed of five squares (known as pentominos ), itself based on Greek and other more ancient forms of play. Crucially, though, Tetris translated a sophisticated mathematical recreation into real time and into the tiny universe of a computer, where score can be kept and pieces thrown at the player in an endless stream. It’s a perfect demonstration of the ability of digital media to give an unprecedented form to a very ancient human fascination; and to generate the kind of complexity that in the days before computers could only come from locking horns with another person.
    Why, though, is Tetris’s brand of complexity quite so enjoyable? Part of the answer lies, once again, in its combination of great sophistication with immaculate simplicity. You can work out how to play Tetris in seconds. But the challenge it represents is not just hard, but fiendish. Mathematically speaking, it’s known as an NP-hard problem (which stands for a ‘non-deterministic polynomial hard’ problem). In practice this means that there is no way of ‘solving’ Tetris in any conceivable amount of time by generalising from a set of rules. The optimum way to play can only be understood by an exhaustive analysis of every possible move available at any particular moment in time. The significance of presenting such a complex problem so accessibly is in the degree to which it raises the boredom threshold of a player (the free game Minesweeper , which comes bundled with copies of Microsoft Windows, is also an NP-hard problem). Playing Tetris is a mathematically endless undertaking. You can never say you have mastered it in terms of exhausting its possibilities: you can only improve your tactics. Moreover, it is a mathematical inevitability that even the greatest player is eventually doomed to lose.
    Here, in its simplest form, is gaming’s most fundamental point: what satisfies us most may be easy to grasp, but it must not be easy to master or complete. And the perfect way to produce this moment-by-moment level of complexity is the constant feedback and interaction that a game environment can give; something that is almost like a living thing in its shifting, ceaseless demands on our attention.
    Complexity is only part of the Tetris equation. There’s also what Pajitnov himself called the ‘emotional dynamic’ of the game – the rhythmic, visual pleasure that arises, with practice, as you successfully slot piece after piece into place. It’s a sensation lodged somewhere between auto-hypnosis and an almost preternaturally satisfying kind of comprehension, a state combining immersion and responsiveness that was given a name in the 1970s by the Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi that’s used to this day. He called it ‘flow’.
    Flow, Csikszentmihalyi argued, was the kind of mental state that was experienced by a top athlete executing a perfect sequence of manoeuvres or a musician losing themselves completely in the performance of a piece; a way of acting in response to constant, shifting stimuli that represented ‘optimal experience’. It’s a state of harmony to which most forms of play aspire, and in many ways provides a perfect metaphor for the balance of rules, actions and consequences that all video game designers hope to build into their virtual worlds – a state that itself evidences our absorption and pleasure.
    All of which may begin to sound more than a little mystical – and more than a little odd too, in the context of a medium whose every component is demonstrably either a zero or a one lodged somewhere in the matrix of a machine’s memory. And yet, if you actually talk to anyone about why they play video games, it won’t be long before notions of escape, wonder, self-expression and narrative immersion begin to float to the surface. As I discovered in my very first encounter with the text-based world of the most primitive