A Brief Overview of the Tetris Effect

mooreacorrigan
5 days ago
2 min read

Curiosity #8

Reposted from Substack August 18, 2025

This week, my husband has been playing Tetris Effect1 on the Nintendo Switch. I did not grow up playing video games, but even I have played a few rounds of Tetris at childhood arcades.

He switched to playing Squeakross2 after a bit, and my brain could not cope. The shift from moving boxes to static ones totally blew my mind, and my husband then mentioned the real-life Tetris Effect (aka Tetris Syndrome). I squirreled the subject away for a good curiosity post!

Tetris was invented by Alexey Pajitnov in 1984 in the Soviet Union, but it gained popularity worldwide by 1988. There was a lot of legal controversy surrounding the game in the late 80s, but by the time I was playing in arcades in the late-90s and early -2000s, Tetris was synonymous with video games3.

The Tetris Effect occurs after extended exposure to repetitive games. The brain starts to see the same patterns outside of their original context4. In 1994, Jeffrey Goldsmith published an article5 that suggested that Tetris is a “pharmatronic, or a video game with the potency of an addictive drug6.”

When my husband told me about the Tetris Effect, I immediately thought of the episode of the Seinfeld where George gets obsessed with preserving his high score on an old Frogger arcade machine. Now I know that this episode was, in fact, playing with the idea of the Tetris Effect. To think, pop culture introduced a psychological phenomena twenty-plus years before I ever even heard of the term!