Tetris Attack Teaches a Lesson
After an intense session of Tetris Attack, I'm always left feeling completely mentally drained, as if I'd spent a long night studying the finer points of quantum physics or working out complicated trig problems. If you've ever had your heart touched by such fine gamery as the ever colorful, ever adorable, ever cutthroat Tetris Attack, you probably understand the feeling. If you've got the m4d sk1llz and can totally pwn n00bs and h4x0rs alike, then you know how addictive such games can be. Which is why I wondered to myself tonight as I aligned boxes of like shapes and colors into stacks and chains faster than I can read printed words, am I really getting anything out of this?
I mean, I'm getting the satisfaction of being better than most people at something, and I'm definitely gaining rapier sharp trashtalking skills, of which I am immensely proud. Well, I did a little research, and aside from teaching very young children about shape recognition and patterns and the like, I couldn't find anything significant to someone like me. So I decided to look at it from a different perspective: my life before tetris attack, and my life after. What I concluded is this: Since becoming totally awesome at Tetris Attack, I've become an fairly devoted game player, be it computer games, board games, card games, hitting games, you name it, if there's a loser and a winner, I'm there.
I think competition is important in these times when we are so detatched from one another. Don't get me wrong, I was about to punch the lady who kept brushing against me at the restaurant tonight. I'm not always the biggest fan of people. But if you're not much of a sports player, then you probably aren't getting your fill of competition. It feels good to go up against another person in something. It feels good to win at something once in awhile. It connects you with other people. (remember hanging out with other people? Remember when the internet wasn't your number one sorce of entertainment?) I've become better friends with a lot of people just from playing games, and I'll tell you why. Because games are good for you. So close your laptop, call up a friend or get the friend sitting next to you with his laptop in his lap to play a game. I promise, it's more fun than you remember.
Or maybe Tetris Attack is just an awesome game, and that's it.
Comments
Yeah, Tetris Attack is fun. Except for when you play against me. No one has fun on Tetris Attack when they play against me because I always kick so much ass.
Posted by: Stephen | March 12, 2006 2:10 PM
Wow, that was a really really good article. You make a lot of very good points about the lack of live human interaction among online gamers, the benefit of competitive games, and lots more stuff i can't enumerate.
I feel the same way about fighting games. There's just something exciting about competition that you can't get anywhere else. It's hard to describe to someone who does nothing but play single-player games like RPGs or whatever, and it's even hard to describe to people who only play over the internet without ever meeting people in person. But there's definately a strong social aspect to competitive games that makes them beneficial.
You should read through the comments people posted here:
http://lowfierce.blogspot.com/2006/03/five-fighting-games-part-1.html
Kids are damn inventive when they're inspired.
Posted by: Maj | March 22, 2006 1:27 AM