Tetris, news consumption, data streams

On the eve of Tetris’ 25th birthday, Max Kalehoff blogged:

One of the most innovative and addictive aspects of Tetris is the perpetual, intensifying stream of bricks the player must align without spaces. In fact, this very element foreshadowed how we now consume most news content and personal status updates on the Web: in reverse chronological streams. Tetris’s layers of bricks fall with greater speed and complexity as you master the ability to arrange them in straight, crumbling rows. That is not unlike news feeds and status updates that funnel into your desktop and mobile interfaces, intensifying as your ability to sort and digest them increases.

Max has a point: while my gaming life never made it past Tetris (bar Street Fighter and Shinobi), “reverse chronological (data) streams” just about sums up how I  consume my Twitter and Facebook news updates.

From the Telegraph: "The game was created by a 29-year-old Russian programmer called Alexey Pajitnov, who said he knew he had devised a hit game when he could not stop playing it. Now, a quarter of a century later, the game has sold more than 70 million copies around the world and is still going strong"