Tetris and Communism
Left. Left. A. A. Down. Move!
Literature and media compose the broadest spectrum of personalities and ideas known to mankind - fiction. Any idea that has sprung up in the history of minds has had the potential to endure as a book, a poem, a movie, a video game. So many of these thoughts have shaped my beliefs and character that I cannot choose one most important one, but one particularly memorable one is the video game, Tetris.
The premise of Tetris is that blocks fall from the sky. These are not ordinary blocks. Each block contains four directly conjoined squares, but their permutation and location are random. At first, the blocks seem harmless, perhaps even decorative. As you watch them fall, forming the oddest of shapes, you become vaguely aware that you can minimally manipulate the falling of the blocks. Suddenly, you realize how small your world truly is. The structure formed by the blocks rises unsettlingly fast to the sky. The falling blocks perfect a ladder joining heaven and earth. Another block falls, and the pressure upon the ladder is too great. The ground gives way beneath it, and undefined pits swallow you up. The only way to succeed is to coerce the blocks to form nice, neat rows, causing them to disappear temporarily. But the process requires quicker and quicker thinking, until your human reflexes simply cannot match the speed at which blocks fall, and you die.
Tetris teaches the rise of Communism in Soviet Russia, a critical element in understanding Russia's rich history. Complex and disturbing are the multiple metaphors that reside in the falling blocks. On one level, they operate as the collective farming system that overtook Russia as the Communists began their reign. Haphazard arrangements of little square units unite and fall upon the bottom of the screen. They are often in such awkward positions as "S" shapes or "T" shapes, sometimes in the more preferable "L" shapes or "box" shapes, indicative of the arbitary carelessness with which the Revolutionary government grouped its farmers. The impossibility of "winning" in Tetris reflects the futility of the struggle to fit all of the farms together into a comprehensive union.
In addition to the inherent failure of collective farming, the blocks' crushing element represents the inexorable pressure of Stalin's industrialization. You, as the peasants, try to strike the balance between agriculture and industry, but the System viciously drops more and more weight upon you, until you run out of ways to balance it or simply collapse under it and perish.
The most disturbing aspect of the blocks' symbolism discusses not the economic progression of misery in the Soviet Union, but the sociopolitical helplessness of the situation. In this interpretation, the blocks are the laws that the Soviet government imposed upon its people. For someone who does not pay close attention to the ever-changing policies, the descent to social hell is quick and inevitable. On the other hand, those who know how to toy with the rules and bend them to their advantage will gain more and more points with the government and rise higher. Significantly, however, the progression of bending rules makes the next set of rules faster and more difficult to avoid, until again, they overwhelm you. Stalin's vicious purges of the Communist party targeted those who favored former policies, and Tetris acknowledges this with its shameless mantra - The question is not whether or not you will die, but when.
Tetris provided me and countless other Americans with incredible cultural insight. A classic of the early 1980's, its ability to convey decades of national frustration united American and Russian under one flag: the flag of gaming. Games naturally tend to age fast, and today's gamers often consider five-year-old games outdated. Tetris, however, remains one of the most popular video games of the twenty-first century, and its lasting power is a tribute to its significance in the art of understanding differences.
SD
Aug. 1, '06
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