First-Person Tetris

 Posted by (Visited 8536 times)  Game talk
Jan 142010
 

First-Person Tetris. Basically, as you play, you rotate blocks. But when you rotate the block, the screen rotates. It is very cool to see how much this single difference in the feedback and controls changes the game — practically a game grammar example! 🙂

  11 Responses to “First-Person Tetris”

  1. […] Pro Tweets New blog post: First-Person Tetris https://www.raphkoster.com/2010/01/14/first-person-tetris/ raphkoster – Fri 15 Jan 6:42 0 votes All Things […]

  2. I actually found it to be no harder than regular Tetris…not that Tetris is hard or anything…

  3. I had to stop because I was about to throw up. Flipping the screen at the time really made me sick over time.

  4. To be honest, I didn’t find the game too striking 🙂 To me it was difficult to control and I understood better why the designer of the original Tetris game had not chosen to build the game this way… But that is only my opinion as a gamer. Maybe I just should have tried a bit harder 🙂

    From a different perspective, the chance to compare Tetris witn Tetris 3-D is wonderful (for reasons I will explain below):

    First, the game gave me the chance to think deeper on how game space is constructed. Not that this game uses more building material than the original Tetris game, but the way it configures the game space brings a radical difference to the experience. Our whole feeling in regard to dimensionality and virtual sensation changes. It’s a very simple but great lesson in understanding game aesthetics.

    Second, it gave me a chance to consider once more the relation between control and types of motion in games. A switch from primary motion (static frame, only objects are moving) to secondary motion (a moving camera) brings a completely difference challenge to the game. The challenge feels dramatically increased since using secondary motion is an unusual choice when we consider the historical development of the optic reservoir in this genre. In cinema for example, people have learned over the decades to deal with quite unusual narrative codes like flashbacks, parallel cuts, close ups or types of lighting; but in games, it looks like there is still a lot to go to increase the tolerance of gamers for unusual ways of aesthetic coding and unusual game controls.

    Which brings me to a third point: In film studies there is the concept of “cinema of pleasure”, the mode of production that aims at products that feel seamless, that maintain a type of continuity which fosters identification and immersion in the relation between product (film) and consumer (spectator). Providing such pleasure to make the spectator to come back over and over again to consume more of this kind of cinema is first and foremost a commercial principle. It cannot be sepereated from the goal of making a profit. The overall goal is the “naturalization” of a specific type of coding as the “right” and “preferrable” one, so that anything that does not conform to it is seen as “strange”, “unaesthetic” etc… One of the goals of art cinema has been to deliberately break this process of naturalization in order to defamiliarize the spectator and make her question the rhetoric and conventions of mainstream cinema. I ask myself what we can learn from games like Tetris 3-D about the present “gaming of pleasure” and what does its rather awkward gameplay experience contribute towards a notion of the (defamiliarizing) art game?

  5. […] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Raph Koster and Jorma, Jason Pineo. Jason Pineo said: RT @raphkoster: New blog post: First-Person Tetris https://www.raphkoster.com/2010/01/14/first-person-tetris/ […]

  6. First-Person Tetris? More like Moving Camera Tetris. Although, that isn’t as catchy.

    First-Person Tetris would be fun to try(for about 10 seconds), as you experience the perspective of the Tetris block.

  7. I never thought that I would have to warn about vertigo when giving someone a game of Tetris. 😛

  8. Sounds almost as cool as human tetris 😀

  9. I had to look away from the screen for a while. That one gave me mild vertigo and I’m not one to get sick playing games.

  10. Very disorientating but very unique, A+ to the idea.

  11. perfynact.co

    First-Person Tetris | Raph’s Website

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