screen, they have less and less space in which to manipulate their pieces. When players
accidentally drop a piece in the wrong location, that piece may block rows below from
being completed, and will make it harder to maneuver subsequent pieces around that
ill-placed piece. When players try to hold out for an “I”-shaped piece to fill a narrow col-
umn of empty spots, players will have to keep placing other pieces in perhaps
less-than-perfect locations until that piece randomly arrives. In all these ways,Tetris
penalizes players for failure. Instead of giving players a chance to catch up as some com-
puter games do,Tetrisjust punishes them, making it even harder to come back from
errors made previously. Further complicating matters are the bonus points players
receive for removing four rows all at once with an “I” piece. With this tactic, the game
tempts players into taking potentially game-ending risks.
Simplicity and Symmetry..........................
Tetris, as has been discussed, is a very simple game. A big part of its success is due
to its simplicity and that it is so easy to learn while being so relentlessly challenging.
Players do not need to learn any special moves in order to play the game. There are a
very small number of keys used by the game, and those keys produce very obvious
results on the screen. It is interesting to look at the pieces used inTetris. They are all
composed of four squares, and, in fact, the seven different types of pieces used in the
game represent every possible combination of four squares, where each square must
share a side with another square in its group. Since players can rotate the pieces to
whatever orientation they want, there are only seven truly unique combinations of
squares possible.
It has been reported that Pajitnov, in creatingTetris, originally considered using
pieces consisting of five squares combined into twelve unique pieces. Indeed, the
pentomino game from which Pajitnov drew his inspiration used twelve five-square
pieces. Pajitnov soon realized that this was too many different pieces to have to manipu-
late inTetris’s high-pressure setting, where players have a limited amount of time to
Chapter 8: Game Analysis:Tetris 149
All of the pieces inTetris
are composed of
four squares, each of
which shares at least
one side with another
square. This gives the
game an inherent
consistency and balance.