My whole family is under one roof again, after my son Charlie’s flirtation with university was halted by a combination of shady landlord and disappointing levels of partying. As a responsible parent, I should have persuaded him to stay, but 3,000 miles was a hell of a distance to be from the one member of the family who both a) can legally drink and b) wants to go drinking with me. I designate our first Saturday night together a Family Game Night.
“There’s a multi-player Tetris on PlayStation Plus,” I suggest, “That could be fun!”
Evil Youngest Daughter groans. “Hard no.”
“Why?”
“Boring.”
“Why is Tetris boring?” I already know what’s coming: Teen Tautology #1.
“Cos it is.”
It’s a clever variation on Descartes’ “I think therefore I am.” It’s boring cos it is.
“I love Tetris,” I say.
“That’s cos you have the ’tism,” she replies, fiddling with the nose ring that she got without asking us first. At least I think she is. I can’t see beneath the tsunami of dyed black hair.
“What’s the ’tism?”
“Autism, Dad,” she sighs. (She’s not trying to insult me. We are a pretty neurodiverse family. She just thinks, like most teenagers, that she knows better than me.)
“When did it become “the ’tism?”
I get a grunt in reply to this. I stop rearranging the fridge magnets into perfectly straight lines equidistant from each other and move on to sorting out the oils and vinegars so the most used ones are at the front. My oldest daughter walks into the kitchen.
“Tell Dad why he has the ’tism,” says Evil Youngest Child.
“You drive round an empty parking lot until you find a single space between two cars. You can’t play a game without completing all the subquests. You have rigid patterns you follow for everything from sleeping to cooking. You talk to yourself whenever you do any task.”
“Best conversation I ever have,” I counter.
“Also, Charlie has it.”
“Charlie also has a mane of blond Aryan hair, and he didn’t get that from me, did he?”
Evil Youngest Daughter shrugs and slithers to her basement lair to play Mario 3D World with her monosyllabic mates.
That’s fine with me. I only need four players. That’s one less family member to wrangle. This is always the worst part of “family gaming”: rounding up the sheep. My wife needs her slippers, my oldest has ADHD and OCD so a lot of things must be set up accordingly, and my son, bizarrely, gets a nosebleed just before we start.
Tetris Effect: Connected should be amazing. Three players team up against a fourth. When they amass a certain number of lines the playfields combine into a single triple-width one, with alternating turns. Get lines in THIS and you throw them at player four.
In theory it’s brilliant. In practice? With my family? It’s a car crash. My wife keeps looking at the wrong playfield. My eldest’s brain setup does not let her wait for her turn on the triple-length playfield. I am barking orders at everyone and getting cross when they don’t do what I say. My son gets another nosebleed. It isn’t fun. It’s just stressful. They’ve taken a game whose very essence was calm and simple, and made it frenetic. This is like dance-remixing the Beatles.
Our session doesn’t last long. The eldest goes off to play whatever Zelda game she has decided to replay for the 10th time this week. My son re-enters the world of Pikmin, trailing blood-spotted toilet roll from each nostril like a dragon. I once again realise I have no idea quite how many Nintendo machines we have in this house. I assume they breed while I sleep.
I beg my wife to play the simpler head-to-head two-player Tetris Effect option with me. She agrees. It goes better. Much better. We bask in that wonderfully warm Tetris zone, effortlessly sliding shape into shape to form beautiful straight lines. Creating order from chaos. Tetris has always calmed me. Especially when played in its original form on the Game Boy. A soothing game on the most comforting machine to ever hold in your hand. A solid dependable brick. The most tactile of buttons. Three soft corners, then that curve at the bottom right. Such witty design makes Apple products look like Nissan Cubes.
My wife and I don’t talk while we Tetris. We can’t. We are in a zen state of mind. At a time when the world is so screwed with such a myriad of problems, it is good to play something that is all about sorting shit out.
But the feeling is fleeting. This is all a mirage, isn’t it? Tetris lies to us like all those deceptively simple arcade games of our childhood. One-sentence instruction manuals that lull you into a false sense of control, until things start to speed up. With Tetris, there is that instant when you don’t manage to complete a line and you panic. Another of those blasted Z blocks emerges, and within seconds you are fumbling desperately at the top of the screen, drowning in misshapen confusion.
All Tetris ultimately shows is that no matter how much you think you are in control, there are limits. And it’s only a matter of time before chaos rules again. All I want is a world where problems arrive slowly with time to slot them into tidy solutions.
I switch off Tetris and drag my son off Pikmin and out for pints.
