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Tetris had to cheat to feel random
Nobody can see a probability distribution. You only ever see a sequence, and sequences are where human intuition falls apart.
[]That’s a square.
It isn’t. It’s two characters borrowed from a writing system, printed side by side on a machine that couldn’t draw a picture. Alexey Pajitnov built the first Tetris in 1984 at the Computing Centre of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, on an Electronika 60 with, in his own description, “no graphics, no sound, and just 24 lines of 80 ASCII symbols in one colour.” Vadim Gerasimov, who wrote the PC port that carried the game out of the building, describes what Pajitnov had built: “The tetramino squares were drawn as a pair of square brackets [ ].”
So the most recognisable object in video game history began as a typographic accident. You read it as a solid block because your visual system closed the gap. The square was never in the terminal. It was in you.
The film about Tetris is about who owned it. The brackets turn up in it for a second. The thing I went looking for afterwards isn’t in the film at all.
Hold on to the square, because I want to try something else on you first.
Here are two sequences of Tetris pieces, fourteen each, written as the letters players use. One came from a generator picking uniformly at random, each piece independent of the last. The other came from a…
