Philosophical gamer Iroquois Pliskin with an intriguing entry on what happens to his mind during games of Lumines over at the Versus CluClu Land blog:
There is that way that habituation causes us to internalize extremely ornate forms of reasoning, to the point that we are hardly able to make these inferences explicit. When we're apprehending a new rule-system we have to think about the rules in order to follow them. (“So, if I make a square of four blocks, then they will disappear when the time-line sweeps by” or, “If I press this button and strum with correct timing, then it'll play this note.”) But once you've trained yourself into practice of note-strumming and block-dropping all these explicit rules fall by the wayside, replaced by this kind of thoughtless mastery. That's why we call certain transcendent performances unconscious, or say that C.C. Sabathia was pitching out of his mind last Sunday.
Iroquois does an excellent job of encapsulating a feeling that's been on my mind recently and going over the philosophical implications and what it means to our broader sense of cognition. Of course I've been here, as I have felt my mind slip into this trance, where I'm no longer consciously dealing with the blocks, but rather, just seeing them fit together in my mind.
This feeling presents serious challenges to my free time when dealing with a game like Tetris DS which, through the incorporation of the moronic infinite spin guideline, is simply unable to defeat me once I find that automatic groove. The inherent progressive difficulty and the guarantee of eventual defeat is one of the things about Tetris that supports my argument that it's the best game of all time, but once I reach that level of "thoughtless awareness" this game doesn't stand a chance against me. I definitely know the feeling, and I've often taken advantage of it by multitasking while playing games which slip me into that trance. Whether this is good or bad for my gaming experiences is a valid question, but there's no question that I CAN do it. In this "trance," the game seems to take care of itself.
Iroquois refers to the state of mind that a gamer will fall into as a "phenomenon," but I've got to figure that there's something concrete at work here. I talked recently about the scientific basis behind the therapeutic feeling that Tetris and other geometric block-dropping puzzle games provide, so if you'll forgive me a short detour back into the realm of science, perhaps we can explain this one too, as I can't help but wonder where this feeling comes from.
A study by two psychology professors provides a good starting point. In the attempt to gauge the breadth of the skills developed in Tetris, professors Sims and Mayer conducted an experiment taking experienced Tetris players and subjecting them to spatial exercises using shapes not used in Tetris. The study found no meaningful correlation between someone who has developed serious skills at Tetris and broader spatial cognition, something I can most certainly support when looking back on my own experiences with Tetris 2, which often involves pieces made out of 5 or 6 blocks, as opposed to the strict 4 block pieces. The moment I see a block with a little extra junk my brain shorts out, even though the basic skills are the same.
I can also offer support in that beyond a conceptual understanding of the mechanic, I've had to develop mastery of every spinoff falling block game on its own, from Puzzle Fighter to Puyo Puyo to Lumines, with very little carryover of skill. To this day, despite any skill I have in Tetris, some of my best friends can simply wipe the floor with me in Puzzle Fighter. The conclusion of the study that the skills developed in mastery of Tetris result in an extremely specific form of expertise, but expertise nonetheless. While this sheds a sobering light on the countless days spent playing Tetris only now that we know that the only benefits are a therapeutic high and improved Tetris skills, this observation might help us if we look at expertise more generally.
There has been a great deal of research on expertise and expert knowledge and psychology professor K. Anders Ericsson's work is easily the best place to start. One look at his definitive Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance provides an enlightening look at how expertise manifests from a psychological standpoint. First of all, his initial research backs up the findings from Sims and Mayer, as he immediately calls out learning as an extremely specialized activity from a neural standpoint. However, his studies provide more compelling evidence: a simple review of a pair of MRI scans from a novice and an expert at a particular task conclusively shows something that should not come as a surprise:
Clearly, once you've learned how to do something, you don't have to think as hard to do it anymore. What's compelling about this example is how drastic the difference is. It looks like the expert barely needs any brain activity at all, and could very well be experiencing the same kind of trance that we've been talking about up to this point. This is all moderately obvious so let's see if we can drive this out to something a little more concrete and understand just why the expert brain requires so much less activity. Ericsson recognized this trend, calling it "automatic processing" and finding that regions of the brain are able to be specialized dedicated to this with a little practice:
Automatic processing occurs as the control-network regions are released, leaving task-specific processing regions engaged to support task performance (Chein & Schneider, 2003).
Once again, my decidedly
non-scientist mind interprets that to mean that the brain's natural
impulse when developing expertise is to gradually shut down any region
of the brain that requires active thought. The natural progression of
such a process is to reach an expert state where all that's left are
the aforementioned specialized dedicated regions. Therefore, when you
develop expertise in a game like Tetris, in addition to feeding your
mind activity that improves your mood, your brain is essentially
working itself out of a job, releasing any segment of memory that's not
needed, so to say. Once your application's footprint is small enough to
fit inside the specialized region, your brain can run it without any
active controlled thinking, which allows for the kind of thoughtless
performance that started this line of thinking in the first place.
This line of thinking also provides an interesting theoretical side note. Once your mind is able to execute something like Tetris cognition without even thinking, running purely on the automatic regions of the brain, it's all too easy for those routines to start up when you're not playing. This provides a compelling explanation for the extremely common phenomenon of seeing Tetris blocks in your sleep, in everyday life, or every time you close your eyes.
Once again, this is all coming from someone who is most certainly not a psychologist, but the reasoning seems to make sense to me, and it provides interesting context around something that I'm sure quite a few of us have felt. To me, this touches on a broader issue of multitasking as it pertains to gaming, however, that is another issue entirely, and I'll follow up on that in an upcoming entry. In the meantime, don't worry if you start seeing L blocks walking around town. It's not always in your head.
