Summary and Analysis of The Tetris Effect: The Game that Hypnotized the World: Based on the Book by Dan Ackerman
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Summary and Analysis of The Tetris Effect: The Game that Hypnotized the World: Based on the Book by Dan Ackerman
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Overview
Crafted and edited with care, Worth Books set the standard for quality and give you the tools you need to be a well-informed reader.
This short summary and analysis of The Tetris Effect includes:
- Historical context
- Chapter-by-chapter summaries
- Profiles of the main characters
- Detailed timeline of key events
- Important quotes
- Fascinating trivia
- Glossary of terms
- Supporting material to enhance your understanding of the original work
In his book The Tetris Effect, Dan Ackerman provides an informative, intriguing account of the history of one of the world’s most popular video games.
The surprising story begins in Soviet Russia, where computer researcher Alexey Pajitnov programmed the first version of Tetris using outdated software—before it spread westward and went viral. As the addictive game grew in popularity around the world, so did the fight for its ownership.
Learn about the early days of Cold War–era computer programming, the people and companies who sought control of the intellectual property, and how playing Tetris physically impacts our brains.
The summary and analysis in this ebook are intended to complement your reading experience and bring you closer to a great work of nonfiction.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504008716 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Worth Books |
| Publication date: | 04/25/2017 |
| Series: | Smart Summaries |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 30 |
| File size: | 927 KB |
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Summary and Analysis of The Tetris Effect: The Game that Hypnotized the World
Based on the Book by Dan Ackerman
By Worth Books
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 2017 Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-0871-6
CHAPTER 1
Summary
Part I
1. The Great Race
Five years after Tetris was first programmed by a computer scientist in the Soviet Union, it escaped the confines of the Iron Curtain and achieved unpredicted international popularity. It was clear that there was money to be made from the geometry-based video game, but it was uncertain to whom it should be paid.
In February of 1989, three men from the Western world each set out to make a deal in Moscow: Henk Rogers, Kevin Maxwell, and Robert Stein would ultimately meet with Electronorgtechnica (ELORG), the Soviet office responsible for licensing software and technology. Alexey Pajitnov, Tetris's creator, would have no official say in the decision or profit from the outcome — as a Russian citizen, his intellectual property was owned by the state.
Henk Rogers, an American programmer who had been living in Japan and working for Nintendo, was at a distinct disadvantage in the race to acquire game rights: he had entered the USSR on a sketchy tourist visa, and, unlike his two competitors, he had not been invited to ELORG — he didn't even know where its office was. By meeting up with a group players of the strategy game Go, he found a guide who pointed him in the direction of the Ministry of Trade offices.
Need to Know: By the late 1980s, the Soviet Union was on the decline. Many of its citizens were poor and frustrated, and the communist government was struggling to maintain its ideological control while attempting to increase foreign revenue. Tetris, with its international cult following, was a rare opportunity for the USSR to enter the international technological trade and potentially reap large profits in the process.
2. Alexey Leonidovich Pajitnov
Alexey Pajitnov turned over the rights to Tetris to the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS), where he first began working in the early 1980s. The math whiz joined RAS because he wanted to to have access to state-of-the art computer technology. The first computer he actually got to use there was an outdated mainframe that employees had to stand in line for in order to access its punch card interface.
After a few years of diligent work, Pajitnov was rewarded with an Electronica 60 — a chunky Soviet desktop computer that was still behind the times, but afforded him the private access and programming ability to create his famous game.
Pajitnov was neither a political rebel nor a computer prodigy, but a combination of cultural resistance and scientific fascination propelled him toward computers. Pajitnov's mother, a writer whose work focused on cinema, took him to the annual Moscow International Film Festival to see whatever foreign films the USSR censors would allow on their screens. One of Alexey's favorite characters was James Bond, not just for his action-filled exploits, but for his gadgets.
Alexey, born in 1956, had watched the excitement of the Space Race as he grew up, and felt the Soviet push for schoolchildren to become scientists and engineers. At age 15, he took a fateful fall that led to a broken ankle and several months of bed rest. To pass the time during this period of convalenscence, he spent hours solving math puzzles and playing with pentominoes a set — the analog precursor to the game he would later invent.
Need to Know: Pentomino sets, popular among Soviet youth during Alexey Pajitnov's childhood, are made up of twelve blocks constructed of five square cells (one more than tetrominoes, the falling "tiles" in Tetris). Typically made from wood or plastic, the blocks present the challenge of finding different ways to fit them inside a box without gaps or overlap.
3. Coming to America
At age 11, Henk Rogers moved from his birthplace in Amsterdam to Queens, New York, where he became fluent in English within a year by immersing himself in American cartoons on TV. As a teenager, he attended the prestigious Stuyvesant High School, one of the few public schools to have its own mainframe computer in the 1960s. The same type of punch card computer system that Pajitnov used in the early 1980s frustrated Rogers with its slow trial-and-error process, which was compounded by having to wait his turn. He cleverly sneaked more of his punch cards into the rotation so he could fix his programming errors more quickly than anyone else.
When Rogers was 19, his family moved to Japan to grow their gem business, while he stopped off in Hawaii to pursue surfing. After a year, he enrolled at the University of Hawaii and took all the classes he could that would give him computer access.
By 1976, his improvised computer science program at the university had run out, and his love interest, Akemi, had moved back to her native Japan; Henk decided to follow her and his own family, leaving the United States behind.
Need to Know: Henk Rogers grew up playing tabletop games like Monopoly and Go. While he was in college, Dungeons & Dragons became popular; due to its strategic but free-form gameplay, there was overlap between those who played and those who were interested in computer programming and science. Among Dungeons & Dragons players, Henk found a community of people who would become the first video game programmers and designers.
4. The First Blocks
In 1979, Alexey Pajitnov took a research job at Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre, an institute within the RAS. There, he spent long hours in a small room using outdated technology. But he knew that even the slow computers held exciting capabilities.
Alexey used archaic hardware with a cathode-ray tube monitor to investigate speech recognition and artificial intelligence projects for work, while comparitively advanced computers — such as those used in Pac-Man machines — were already wildly popular in the United States by 1980.
Despite the ongoing space race between nations, Pajitnov was thinking about applying programming principles to strategy games instead of purely Soviet interests. A pentominoes set became the touchstone for his first game; instead of plastic or wood, his blocks were made of punctuation marks (his computer lacked even basic graphic abilities). His first prototype was a digital pentominoes game called "Genetic Engineering." Deemed too boring, he iterated and innovated and developed a falling-block version with a key addictive element: Once a row of blocks was completely filled, it disappeared.
Soon, the game had become popular entertainment for the RAS employees, but there was no guarantee that its audience would grow. It was designed for a computer whose programming was incompatible with the MSDOS machines that were starting to become common around the world, and Russia was a country where most people didn't have access to any computer at all. It was not immediately clear whether Tetris had much of a future.
Need to Know: While Alexey Pajitnov was crafting his own game, he had colleagues who were trying to figure out how to understand how the few video games Soviets had access to were made, such as Pac-Man. They did this by reverse-engineering programs — that is to say, one would try to copy the programming and, in the process, create an almost mirror image game. Before the Internet or other means of transferring data between computers, this is how games were copied and shared, peer to peer.
5. The Black Onyx
In 1977, Henk Rogers married his sweetheart, Akemi, and started working for his family's gemstone business. But by 1982, he still found himself at the beck and call of his stepfather, being sent to work for long stretches in Thailand, away from his family.
Henk decided it was time to quit and start his own programming business, but first, he needed experience. After two freelancing stints gone wrong at Hitachi — first, he was asked to hack a rival division's program; then, he was asked to turn over his own work to the powers that be at Hitachi — he shunned corporate tech giants and bought his own computer, an NEC PC-8801. With it, he programmed his first video game, and the first fantasy role-playing game (RPG) to hit Japan: The Black Onyx.
Despite his years away from programming, Henk mastered the newer technology and designed a game to his liking, had it translated into Japanese, and went in search of a publisher. He ended up with SoftBank, whose talk was bigger than its game.
The Black Onyx, finished and launched by Christmas 1983, sold a disturbingly low number of copies until the spring of 1984. Henk roused his inner salesman and went to the offices of five Japanese computer magazines to offer gameplay demos, and the game received enthusiastic reviews.
The Black Onyx began selling ten thousand copies per month. By the end of 1984, The Black Onyx was the bestselling game in Japan, and Henk was attracting attention as a foreign, independent programmer making a name for himself in the gaming industry.
Need to Know: Henk Rogers made waves in Japan by introducing the digital RPG, which had been virtually unheard of outside of the United States, but his reign over the genre was to be short-lived. Japanese companies soon introduced games like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy, which would overtake The Black Onyx and come to define the genre.
6. Going Viral
During the earliest stage of Tetris's creation, Alexey Pajitnov's colleague Dmitry Pavlovsky introduced him to Vadim Gerasimov, a bright high school student with a gift for programming. Pavlovsky had tested Gerasimov's ability to translate code from one platform to another using one of his own early games written for mainframe computers; Gerasimov had a playable version of the game written for MS-DOS only a day later. The three started honing their game-making skills by creating copies of Western games together.
Alexey shared an early version of Tetris with Gerasimov, but the teenager was not particularly impressed until Pajitnov had further developed his pet project to include a key element: falling blocks. This made the game intriguing enough that Gerasimov took on the task of translating Tetris's code from the Electronica 60 platform to Pascal, a programming language that could be used across IBM platforms and clones.
The trio subsequently improved the game day by day, adding important features like scoring and colored blocks until they reached and deployed version 3.12. This version, Alexey decided, was sufficiently complete to begin sharing on 5.25-inch floppy disks, which were hand-delivered to trusted friends.
Moscow went wild for it, at least among those who had access to computers. The game made its way to other cities in Russia — an encouraging sign for Alexey, who had latent dreams of commercializing the game.
Need to Know: It wasn't just the gameplay that made Tetris popular and helped it spread to so many people so quickly; though too young to work for the RAS, Gerasimov's unofficial programming was instrumental in the refinement of the game. He included timers that allowed Tetris to work on different versions of MS-DOS computers, even newer ones with faster processors that would normally speed up games.
BONUS LEVEL 1
7. This Is Your Brain on Tetris
On the surface, Tetris was a fun and engaging distraction, but it was more than that: The people who played it found themselves doing so constantly. Vladimir Pokhilko, a clinical psychologist, received an early version of Tetris and was one of the first to note that it had clinically addictive properties. It kept him and other employees from doing their work. Pokhilko would go on to conduct psychological research using Tetris, examining how its use of procedural and spatial memory began to shape the brain and bleed its effects into the world of biology, far away from the computer screen.
In 1992, psychologist Richard Haier also used Tetris during his experiments monitoring brain energy efficiency. Because Tetris was still relatively new, Haier was able to find a test group of students who had never played the game, test their brain energy usage during their first half-hour of game play, train them over a tenweek period, and then test them again. He found a negative correlation between game-playing skill and energy use; students who had developed expertise used much less energy to play the game. He called this the "Tetris learning effect."
Writer Jeffrey Goldsmith had experienced both the addictiveness of Tetris and the increasing ease of playing it with skill. In 1994, he interviewed Pajitnov, Haier, and Pokhilko for Wired magazine in which he coined the term "Tetris Effect." Not just a popular catchphrase, the usage persists in medical literature to describe how simple repetitive activities can shape the brain in such a way that the brain imposes the effects of that activity on other parts of life (e.g. the compulsion to arrange items in a shopping bag in a particular way).
Need to Know: Jeffrey Goldsmith's article also featured an early use of the term pharmatronic, a combination of "pharmaceutical" and "electronic" that suggests that electronic games or devices can act like a drug.
Part II
8. From Behind the Iron Curtain
By 1986, everyone in Russia with access to a computer had played Tetris. Hoping to find a larger audience for the game, Alexey Pajitnov's manager, Victor Brjabrin, sent the game to a friend at the SZKI Institute of Computer Science in Budapest, Hungary. Unsurprisingly, the Hungarian researchers loved the game, and they quickly reverse-engineered copies that were compatible with their Apple II and Commodore 64 computers.
In the early 1980s, Robert Stein, a Hungarian immigrant in the United Kingdom, was selling Commodore computers. While he did well selling the hardware, he found that in order to get repeat customers, he needed to sell software as well. Seeking original programs and cheaper licensing fees, he started traveling back to his native Hungary to source talent for his new company, Andromeda Software.
On one of his trips, Stein found the Hungarian programmers obsessed with a new video game: Tetris. It strayed from his more typical business software, but Stein recognized its mass appeal and decided he wanted it. Unfortunately, he found it wasn't as easy as signing off with the Hungarian programmer who had developed the game for Commodore: the original code had been delivered from Soviet Russia.
Discouraged but not put off completely, Stein sent a telex message to the RAS, reaching Pajitnov and beginning the slow, ambiguous process of trying to negotiate intellectual property rights through the muddled bureaucracy of the Soviet Union.
Need to Know: Hungary was a key step in Tetris's journey to reach an international audience. Its programmers had access to newer technology than Alexey Pajitnov had access to and, perhaps more importantly, Hungary was a former Soviet bloc nation that had already started undergoing economic and political reforms; it could act as a middle ground between the East and West.
9. Into the Mirror
As Robert Stein was trying to obtain the official Tetris rights from the Soviets, he already had in mind the person he wanted to sell them to: Robert Maxwell. Maxwell was a UK publishing mogul who, after escaping Czechoslovakia in WWII, had created a powerful, aggressive reputation for himself in the British Army, English Parliament, and the media industry. Maxwell was the founder of Mirror Group, which, in addition to encompassing many newspapers and book publishing houses, also contained subsidiaries Mirrorsoft and Spectrum Holobyte — software publishing companies based in the United Kingdom and United States, respectively.
Stein met with Jim Mackonochie, the cofounder and president of Mirrorsoft, to propose a licensing deal, but he was initially unimpressed. It took Phil Adam and Gilman Louie of Spectrum to convince Mackonochie that the game was worth the investment. As Adam pointed out, the novelty of a Soviet-born game was just as great a reason as the addictive gameplay itself.
Spectrum and Mirrorsoft ended up cutting a deal with Stein that gave them the rights to produce Tetris for computers and other gaming consoles in the United States and Japan, and Mirrorsoft would have the license for the United Kingdom and Europe — or so they thought.
Need to Know: When Stein signed the contract licensing Tetris to Mirrorsoft and Spectrum, he didn't actually own the rights to the game himself yet — he was still in the midst of communicating with Pajitnov's superiors at the Dorodnitsyn Computer Centre in the Soviet Union.
10. The Russians Are Coming
In November 1986, Robert Stein had sent his official offer to the USSR for Tetris: 75% of royalties (of what Andromeda retained after payments to publishers and distributors) and a $10,000 advance would go to Pajitnov, the creator of the game. Thinking the deal was as good as done, he waited ... and kept waiting. While he received seemingly positive responses from Pajitnov and his boss, they gave no definitive answers. That was because they couldn't. Not only were they working through interpretors and clueless about intellectual property deals, individual citizens were not allowed to make them.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Summary and Analysis of The Tetris Effect: The Game that Hypnotized the World by Worth Books. Copyright © 2017 Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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