How old were you when you first played Tetris?
The famous puzzle game of fitting together block shapes has been ubiquitous in arcades, tablets, and smartphones for decades, earning its place as one of the best-selling video games of all time. I had Tetris on my iPod Touch, but different versions of the game are on nearly every platform imaginable. Back in high school, a handful of sneaky students managed to download Tetris onto their Ti84 calculators. In January of this year, the Tetris community was rocked when a 13-year-old from Oklahoma became the first human player to beat Tetris by reaching the highest score possible. At level 137, the game-crashing score was 999,999 points. Talk about an arcade record that won’t be beat!
Tetris’s impact extends beyond the virtual world. The author of a 1994 Wired article coined the term “Tetris effect” to describe the phenomenon of seeing phantom Tetris shapes in real life or automatically imagining how real-life objects fit together after playing too many hours of the puzzle video game. My roommates and I often played “dishwasher Tetris”: fitting one more plate into an already-crammed dishwasher. When I organize the boxes in my closet, I think about how they fit together like pieces in Tetris. The game clearly transcends the screen!
If Tetris noobs like me think about the real world in terms of tetrominoes, then would a really great Tetris player have genius-level mental rotation skills? Do the skills of Tetris transfer to real life?
Well, probably not. Many studies have investigated whether video game skills can increase our abilities in related tasks outside the digital space, but the results are inconclusive. In their recent publication in Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, J. David Timm, Markus Huff, Stephan Schwan, and Frank Papenmeier conducted a high-powered conceptual replication of the previous studies attempting to ascertain whether Tetris enhances mental rotation abilities. If there is any transfer between video game skills and real-life abilities, then Tetris and mental rotation should be our best chance at justifying those late nights of gaming! Spoiler alert: unfortunately for most of us, Timm and colleagues found no evidence of any skill transfer.
As shown in the figure below, participants took three commonly used mental rotation tests at the start of the experiment. Then, they were divided into two groups: one playing solitaire, the other playing Tetris. The plots below show the difference in the scores on each of the mental rotation tasks before and after playing their assigned game.
Seeing these results, Timm, Huff, Schwan, and Papenmeier dug deeper to address concerns raised by previous studies. They instructed participants to play Tetris for ten hours across four weeks, which struck a balance between the various playtimes and duration between sessions from previous relevant literature. The control group, meanwhile, spent the same amount of time playing solitaire. Before and after playing their respective games, the participants were given three different mental rotation tasks, all of which came from that same previous research into measuring the potential connection between mental rotation abilities and Tetris. Using a well-above-average sample size of over three hundred participants, Timm and colleagues brought their conceptual replication to the next level.
As a bonus level, Timm and colleagues also investigated the claim from some previous studies on this topic that showed a gender difference, where only men or only women benefited from the Tetris transfer effects, depending on the study. In their own data, however, Timm and colleagues found no difference between genders.
All participants did get significantly better at their respective games over the course of the experiment, so there was no concern about insufficient increases in video game skills. Participants also improved in the mental rotation tasks, but there wasn’t a significant difference between the groups that played Tetris and the groups that played solitaire, so this was likely due to a simple practice effect. Interestingly, participants thought that playing Tetris instead of solitaire would improve their mental rotation abilities, but even with this positive bias, no significant difference was observed.
It is interesting to reflect on what this means for video games in general. Research continues to show that reports about video games’ effects are overhyped and not supported by real data. Perhaps this is for the best. Video games are meant to be fun, an escape from the real world. In an age where everything seems to be getting more chaotic, this is an opportunity to free our minds and simply have fun again.
Featured Psychonomic Society Article
Timm, J. D., Huff, M., Schwan, S., & Papenmeier, F. (2024). Short-term transfer effects of Tetris on mental rotation: Review and registered report—A Bayesian approach. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 1-9. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-024-02855-0