PLAY A STUPID GAME FREE

Despite its obvious futility, somehow we can’t make ourselves stop rotating blocks.

PLAY A STUPID GAME FREE

And the game’s final insult is that it annihilates free will. It is bureaucracy in pure form, busywork with no aim or end, impossible to avoid or escape. The enemy in Tetris is not some identifiable villain (Donkey Kong, Mike Tyson, Carmen Sandiego) but a faceless, ceaseless, reasonless force that threatens constantly to overwhelm you, a churning production of blocks against which your only defense is a repetitive, meaningless sorting. Tetris was invented exactly when and where you would expect - in a Soviet computer lab in 1984 - and its game play reflects this origin. Twister is the translation, onto a game board, of the mid-1960s sexual revolution. Risk, released in the 1950s, is a stunningly literal expression of cold-war realpolitik. Monopoly, for instance, makes perfect sense as a product of the 1930s - it allowed anyone, in the middle of the Depression, to play at being a tycoon. Game-studies scholars (there are such things) like to point out that games tend to reflect the societies in which they are created and played. The pairing went on to sell more than 70 million copies, spreading the freedom of compulsive wall-building into every breakfast nook and bank line in the country.

Tetris’s graphics were simple enough to work on the Game Boy’s small gray-scale screen its motion was slow enough not to blur its action was a repetitive, storyless puzzle that could be picked up, with no loss of potency, at any moment, in any situation. You were both building walls and not building walls if you built them right, the walls disappeared, thereby ceasing to be walls.) This turned out to be a perfect symbiosis of game and platform. The unit came bundled with a single cartridge: Tetris, a simple but addictive puzzle game whose goal was to rotate falling blocks - over and over and over and over and over and over and over - in order to build the most efficient possible walls.

The new product was the Game Boy - a hand-held, battery-powered plastic slab that promised to set gamers loose, after all those decades of sweaty bondage, from the tyranny of rec rooms and pizza parlors and arcades. In 1989, as communism was beginning to crumble across Eastern Europe, just a few months before protesters started pecking away at the Berlin Wall, the Japanese game-making giant Nintendo reached across the world to unleash upon America its own version of freedom.

Play a stupid game