The Tetris effect occurs when people devote sufficient time and attention to an activity that it begins to overshadow their thoughts, mental images, and dreams. It is named after the video game Tetris.
People who play Tetris for a prolonged amount of time may then find themselves thinking about ways different shapes in the real world can fit together, such as the boxes on a supermarket shelf or the buildings on a street.[1] In this sense, the Tetris effect is a form of habit. They might also dream about falling Tetris shapes when drifting off to sleep or see images of falling Tetris shapes at the edges of their visual fields or when they close their eyes.[1] In this sense, the Tetris effect is a form of hallucination or hypnagogic imagery.
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The Tetris effect can occur with other video games,[2] with any prolonged visual task (such as classifying cells on microscope slides, weeding, picking or sorting fruit, flipping burgers, driving long distances, or playing board games such as chess or go), and in other sensory modalities. In kinesthesis, a person newly on land after spending long periods at sea may move with an unbidden rocking motion, having become accustomed to the ship making such movements (known as sea legs or mal de debarquement). Computer programmers and developers sometimes have similar experiences, and report dreaming about code when they sleep at night. It also frequently occurs in the water-sport rowing.
Stickgold et al. (2000) have proposed that Tetris imagery is a separate form of memory, likely related to procedural memory. This is from their research in which they showed that people with anterograde amnesia, unable to form new declarative memories, reported dreaming of falling shapes after playing Tetris during the day, despite not being able to remember playing the game at all.[3] A 2009 Oxford study suggests that playing Tetris-like video games may help prevent the development of traumatic memories. If the video game treatment is played soon after the traumatic event, the preoccupation with Tetris shapes is enough to prevent the mental recitation of traumatic images, thereby decreasing the accuracy, intensity, and frequency of traumatic reminders. "We suggest it specifically interferes with the way sensory memories are laid down in the period after trauma and thus reduces the number of flashbacks that are experienced afterwards," summarizes Dr. Emily Holmes, who led the study.[4][5]
According to Earling (1996),[1] one of the first references to the term is by Garth Kidd in February, 1996.[6] Kidd described "after-images of the game for up to days afterwards" and "a tendency to identify everything in the world as being made of four squares and attempt to determine 'where it fits in'". Kidd attributed the origin of the term to computer-game players from Adelaide, Australia. The earliest description of the phenomenon is in the introduction to Neil Gaiman's SF poem "Virus"[7] (1987) in Digital Dreams. More recently, the term has been used in the book Tetris Mania, describing a seventeen year old named Jason suffering from this phenomenon.
L'effet Tetris (French: the Tetris effect) is a similarly named, but quite different phenomenon found in evolutionary AI systems related to the concept of bounded rationality. L'effet Tetris then, is the effect whereby a hasty, but imprecise course of action is better than calculating an optimal move where such a calculation would not be completed in time; in short, evolutionary systems often find local rather than global optima.
Modern term created after the thesis wrote by Angelica Ortiz de Gortari student, a student from the Nottingham Trent University. The Game Transfer Phenomena or GTP is the set of residual feelings, thoughts and/or images which remain after playing a videogame. A good example, other than the Tetris effect would be the awareness of the absence of a Head-up display in the natural human field of view after playing a First-person shooter or the urge to arrange (or command) little objects after playing a strategy game such as Starcraft.
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