RISKS-LIST: RISKS-FORUM Digest  Monday 13 June 1994  Volume 16 : Issue 14

There are indeed deep psychological forces that draw women to the game of Tetris. I've been a Tetris junky, and I can give my testament to the risks of this particular addiction. First, I admit that I am, by nature, susceptible. I've been through several 12 step programs to rid myself of addictions in the past: adventure, pacman, rogue, hack. Yes, I've been there, and in several other autotelic hells as well: elisp, C++, interrupt handler bugs, and more recently I've been developing a WWW browsing problem. It started in childhood with a Revell model of a "car of the future" (lime-green with huge tailfins and clear bubbles over the occupants in their bucket seats) and continued with more plastic cars, battleships, airplanes, then those chests of little steel girders, then calligraphy, ..., OK, OK, I'm autotelic, I'm a woman, and I'm going to tell my Tetris tale.

First, let me establish my credentials as a Tetris hard-core. I found it while on vacation in Maui. I dragged my family in our Aloha clothing to a video games den every evening after we cleaned up from a day on the beach. The clientele was young, local, kind of tough. Ordinarily I'd feel uncomfortable spending 5 minutes in such a place. But with a stack of quarters and a Tetris machine, I was transported. The locals would sit behind me sneering and asking if they could "PLEASE" use the machines. At first, I'd let them.

But things changed when we got back home to Los Angeles. I found a video parlor in Marina Del Rey with Tetris. The clientele was even more disturbing, but again, the game presented a world of its own. One afternoon, a woman with two small children attempted to take the machine away from me. While I was concentrating on the play, she informed me that her kids wanted to use the machine. Without looking up, I told her that I'd only yield if it was management policy to impose a time limit. After a moment of shock she began screaming insults at me and dragged the children away. Though I didn't ever look up to see what kind of person she was, it did pretty much ruin my timing for that level. I got busy with various home and work projects shortly after that, and I haven't played much since.

For a while I tried using xtetris on my workstation, but it wasn't the same. And I've never actually used a GameBoy, because it's hard to get the little kids to share them, and even if they do they won't let you play for more than a few minutes before they start whining. So I'm going to talk only about my experiences with the big machines in the video arcades.

So what is it exactly that draws women to Tetris? I think it's refrigerators. At first I thought it was cabinets, but I've been over this in my mind a lot, and I'm convinced that refrigerators are the key. The psychologist who mentioned women's "natural sense of order" seemed way off base, she'd obviously never been within a mile of a teenage girl's room, but still, that's the key to it. Women spend a lot of time trying to get things into refrigerators. The point is, they don't have a natural sense of order, but they've got to get the damn stuff into the fridge so it doesn't fall out, and that requires ingenuity. Cabinets are similar, but they require different reasoning skills than refrigerators. For example, it's OK to push something to the back of a cabinet and lose it for a year. And things that go into cabinets nest --- you've got to be careful with those graduated bowls if they're from different sets, because if you put one inside the other you'll need a screwdriver and pliers to get it out.

Now refrigerators and Tetris are much the same thing. The Tetris shapes are like Tupperware boxes and milk cartons and packages of cheese. But unlike real household items, they remain sparkling and attractive no matter how long you leave them there. And if you pack them very carefully along the bottom, instead of rotting and giving off foul odors, they are conveniently whisked away, while more continue falling. This is sort of like having your husband help unload the groceries --- there you are trying to get the vegetables packed carefully into the bottom bins, and there he is stuffing soft drink cans into the dairy products section.

As you move through the various difficulty levels of Tetris, it's even more like a refrigerator --- you don't get to start with a clean space, but instead have what looks like piles of debris from unknown previous users. Women know that these unseen entities are teenagers and you've got to be very resourceful and controlled to work around them.

But what's the payoff in this contest? Well, mainly it's being able to exercise a skill that women already have, but with lots more positive feedback than real life. And for me, the video arcade games have two really important features. One is a cute little Slavic dance tune that plays in the background and helps with the timing. But the real clincher is that as you get proceed through the difficulty levels, there's entertainment. Little Russian men come out onto the screen and dance in that style where they fold their arms and bend their knees and kick straight out. Yes, that's the real thing about Tetris for some of us older ladies, it's the dancing men. In all my years of cleaning out the refrigerator, I've never had a man dance a jig for me. Well, that's why I play Tetris; I'm not sure about anyone else.