I've been meaning to get back to posting here for a while. I've been busy.
One of the things that I've been busy with is regaining a Tetris addiction.
And I've been thinking that Tetris is a very deep and symbolic game. Likely in ways the designer(s) did not intend.
I'm going to assume that you, sitting there reading this, know how Tetris works. If not, go play Tetris until you do.
Tetris, you see, is an endless challenge. One does not "win" Tetris. You do not "finish" Tetris. You play until it finishes you. You can be winning at Tetris, you can be really damn obscenely good at Tetris, and perhaps you could keep playing for days, but even if you're just that good you can still be crushed by the statistically inevitable string of many Z-blocks that won't quite fill any line properly.
The point is not matter how good you are and how well you do eventually everything will pile up and overwhelm you and everything you did in that game will amount to nothing bar maybe a series of numbers as the "high score".
And yet the interesting thing is that despite this inevitability, you always come back for another go. Tetris is a hugely popular game, and people love to play it despite that they're doomed to lose.
Why do we do this? What do we hope to gain from playing out a story we already know the ending to?
We know where we're going, what's so great about going there?
Because it's fun. Life and Tetris have this in common, we know it's going to end but what really matters is enjoying it in the meantime. Really, it's the only thing that does matter. The only thing that even can matter.
Or to quote Derrial Book in Firefly, "how you get there is the worthier part.".
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