Video games get blamed for a lot of bad things in our society. Addiction, unemployment, obesity, violence. You name it, some wackadoo politician has tried to ban video games because of it. But causation doesn’t equal correlation, dog. A lot of people play video games. Like, virtually everyone–from Warzone to Wordle. You, your kids, parents, and friends all find little moments of escape through digital gaming. And that little morsel of happiness does a hell of a lot more help than harm.
Take Tetris, for example. The easy-to-learn but hard-to-master block stacking game was introduced in 1984 and quickly took the world by storm. You could play Tetris at the arcade, you could play Tetris at home. You could play it with your friends or family. You could play casually or competitively. Anyone could play it, anywhere and anytime. Tetris was (and is) for the people – in more ways than we ever could have imagined back then.
Multiple studies have shown the iconic puzzle game can help us heal from trauma. According to research by Emily Holmes and her team at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, Tetris can reduce the harmful effects of PTSD, depression, and anxiety by limiting the traumatic memories and thoughts that keep us in a cycle of despair.
“Our hypothesis was that after a trauma, patients would have fewer intrusive memories if they got to play Tetris as part of a short behavioural intervention while waiting in the hospital Emergency Department,” says Professor Holmes. “Since the game is visually demanding, we wanted to see if it could prevent the intrusive aspects of the traumatic memories from becoming established i.e. by disrupting a process known as memory consolidation.”
You can read through the entire study – and you should, because it’s utterly fascinating – but spoiler alert: it worked incredibly well. And not just in the immediate aftermath, but also long-term. Playing Tetris helped heal these PTSD patients who would have otherwise struggled so much more with their depression, anxiety, and other symptoms of trauma.
That first study looked at victims of car accidents, while another round of research took place a few years later and focused on combat-based PTSD. Dr. Simone Kühn and a team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Center for Lifespan Psychology in Berlin, Germany, found that playing Tetris for 60 minutes after receiving EMDR therapy raised hippocampal volume in patients, which correlated with reductions in depression and anxiety even six months later.
In regular person speak, playing Tetris amplifies the effects of psychotherapy for these PTSD patients and helps maintain the therapy’s gains in the brain long-term. Plus, they acknowledged Tetris is an extremely helpful tool because of its accessibility.
“Tetris provides a promising therapeutic intervention for a number of practical reasons. The video-gaming consoles required are inexpensive and mobile, and they can be reused multiple times. Tetris does not require a clinician to administer; it can even be self-administered. Tetris does not produce adverse effects and is enjoyable to play, so adherence is likely to be high. Tetris is also adaptive; as a person continues to play, the difficulty level (the speed at which the blocks fall) automatically increases until the game ends (the blocks fill the screen), at which point the game restarts at the lowest difficulty. As such, by adapting the level of difficulty to the skill of the player, it is possible to minimize frustration that the game is too difficult and boredom that the game is too easy, and the player should remain engaged in the game.”
But you don’t have to have extreme PTSD for Tetris to help with your mental health. You don’t need a peer-reviewed clinical study to know that sitting down and stacking blocks for a few minutes can help make life just a little bit less stressful. It’s fun, and useful, for all of us.
One of the main benefits of playing Tetris is making friends, which also helps with your mental well-being. Tetris has been bringing us together for 40 years, bridging the gap between people from every background, continent, and generation. My dad taught me how to play Tetris, and I’ll teach my future kid how to play one day. They’ll play with their friends like I did, and my dad before me. This same story echoes throughout the globe, with this seemingly simple game making complex connections between players from every walk of life.
I spoke with Vince Clemente, a documentary filmmaker and founder of the Classic Tetris World Championships, about the strength of the Tetris community. CTWC is the premier Tetris eSports competition in the world, and Clemente started it in 2010 while making a movie about Tetris competitions. Vince has seen it all and played it all when it comes to Tetris, so there was nobody better to speak to the game’s immense impact.
“I meet a lot of players who say that Tetris saved their lives,” Clemente told me over the phone while planning some upcoming CTWC events. “And this community is a big part of that.”
Tens of thousands of people attend these national and regional CTWC events every year, making friends and learning new techniques while celebrating the game they love.
“Everyone here speaks the same language: Tetris. We bond that way and people find their little groups within the community and stick together, help each other out.”
What makes competitive Tetris stand out from other games dominating the eSports and streaming world is it’s played on the original Nintendo Entertainment System from the 80s. There are championship-level players in their 40s or 50s, and then some of the best players in the world are teenagers, or even younger.
Tetris was recently in the news when a high schooler named “Dog” grabbed headlines by achieving “rebirth” in the game, which happens when you beat all levels and the game resets back to the beginning. The feat had never been accomplished before, by human or AI players. Dog is a Tetris superstar, but others are hot on the trail, always chasing another never-been-done-before moment. Thousands watch live online or in-person to see the records shatter because even though the game is “retro” and played on a decades-old system, innovations are happening all the time.
“Dog and those guys are using that ‘rolling’ play-style,” Vince tells a confused interviewer who wasn’t aware there are superior techniques that probably could have gotten him past level 15. “Now, they’re doing this thing where they kind of prop the controller with one hand and then underneath they hover their finger over the D-pad left or right. [Rolls fingers like he’s playing the guitar] So every time one of your fingers hits the bottom, it pushes the controller into the D-pad.”
Seeing the amount of focus and concentration it takes to master even a fairly straightforward game like Tetris makes it clear why the game can be used to destress and relax, quieting the outside world while you solve problems within the matrix of the game.
“When I want to settle or calm down a little bit, I’ll sit down and play for a little while,” Clemente said. “It’s pretty relaxing, and it gets my mind moving in the right way. And now I have friends in like every country. There is a group of guys from Ghana who want to start a tournament in Africa, which is really cool.”
People coming together and doing something that makes them happier. That’s a community, and that’s healing, and that’s what we need more of in this world today.
“It’s not really a game of me versus you,” Clemente explains. “It’s a game of you versus yourself. So, everyone cheers each other on, which is a cool sight to see.”
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