God Mode

"Have you ever been doing something, some lengthy, repetitive, dull task, and found your hands start working all by themselves and your mind begins to wander elsewhere? He was like that with videogames. He was into Buddhism. I'm not sure he bought or even understood all of it, but he really liked that whole meditation thing. He said that when he sat down in front of a television screen, he found that the concentration focused just a small part of his mind, while releasing the rest of it. So he started meditating while playing Tetris. It sounded crazy at first, but the more I thought about it, the less dumb it sounded. I actually tried it out once. Didn't quite get the hang of it, but I got the point.

"What I didn't get was how meditating made him so darned good at videogames. I mean, he must have been receiving distilled wisdom of the ancient gamers direct from Buddha or something, 'cause he could beat us at any game. Even if we ganged up on him. Quake: he'd walk into a room full of rocket-toting veterans and rail them all to hell. Walk out without even getting singed. This probably doesn't mean anything to you, does it?"

"So this one day he got this parcel in the mail, from America. Said it was the fastest version of Tetris ever created. He got it customised from one that was already on the market in Japan. Got a programmer acquaintance to take a look and modify it, take out all the speed restrictions. This thing would run to the limits of the console's hardware and beyond. He was very excited about this. I knew he was. Tetris is his favourite game. 'A combination of white-hot concentration and detached bliss' he said about it once. Probably trying to be deep."

"Yeah, I can tell you who the programmer was, but listen, he isn't a suspect here. I know what happened and I'm about to tell you, and it wasn't his fault. ...All right, all right. Got a pen?"

"That's his number, I forgot his address, but I can find out for you. It's in Michigan somewhere. So my mate was all excited, he cleared an entire weekend, got a whole load of food and drink and settles down on his bean bag to play a single, solid run of one-player Tetris, from Saturday night to as far into Sunday as he could manage. That's a hefty whack of gameplay you've got there."

"No, it's not unusual. He's done forty-eight hour stints before now."

"Well I decided to sleep through the slow early stages, and turned up at his house Sunday morning. Score was already somewhere in the hundred thousands. The tetraminoes were moving very fast - thunk, thunk, thunk, pretty rapid, but he was keeping on top of it, he was doing okay. We had a short conversation, I had some breakfast. He didn't want to stop playing, so I fed him some fruit and water while he played on."

"No, at the time I didn't see anything unusual. That was about ten in the morning. By noon the blocks were going thunk-thunk-thunk-thunk, three or four a second. I was having difficulty following the blocks as they fell. Certainly I couldn't see how he was keeping one eye on the current block and another to see what the next one was. His hands were jittering about the joypad too fast to follow. He wasn't responding to questions until I repeated them two or three times. Obviously his concentration was being eaten up. After he got half a million points I stopped asking him questions, so he could keep his concentration. Sat behind him eating popcorn.

"By one o'clock Sunday afternoon, he was landing something like ten blocks a second. Thunkthunkthunkthunkthunk, I couldn't understand how he was even seeing individual blocks, let alone moving his hands fast enough. I thought he might have got himself a customised, ultrasensitive joypad, meaning he only has to twitch his fingers very slightly to activate the buttons. The screen was a blur. I could just about make out individual states in the playing field as they went past, and I could tell that despite the pressure he was still getting Tetrises."

"You know, when you drop the four-by-one down the side and get four rows at once? So by this stage I figured he was pretty near the end, so I cued up the videotape and started recording. I went upstairs and got his camcorder too, so I could film him playing live. Yeah, that film. Did you see the point where I went in for a close-up of his eyes?"

"Yeah."

"Don't ask me. I haven't a clue. All I know is, by this time his score meter was a permanent blur. He kept going. The blocks went faster. The sound of them falling accelerated until it was like a continuous rumble, then a whirr, then a whine. By this time, the blocks are falling about as fast as the processor can handle... The game, I then realised, had been reprogrammed to handle this. First it cut out the 3D animated backdrops. Gradually it started cutting out visual effects and sound effects and backdrops until there was nothing but monochrome lines, rising and falling like a graphic equalizer. No sound effects, the only sound in the room was the sound of his fingers on the pad.

"At five in the afternoon, the tape I'd shoved in the VCR ran out. He was still playing so I stuck a new one in. It was obvious to me by now that he was in some kind of trance. He was playing far beyond anything I'd ever seen before. The framerate on the screen topped out at about 60Hz. I watched the score skyrocket and figured that he was landing at least five blocks a frame, which, even if I bought the rest, was categorically impossible. By this time I was definitely starting to realise that something was up. Something I've not met before."

"I didn't really know what I was expecting to happen. I don't know that much about deep meditation. For the record, I certainly didn't know there was any risk involved."

"So six o'clock comes and he thunders towards the one million mark. I've still got the camcorder running, to catch the momentous score on tape. Did I say that the world record was only about five hundred and ten kay? One million flashes past. Forty-five seconds later the thing which nobody ever, EVER thought possible happens. The score tops out, at one million, forty-eight thousand, five hundred and seventy-five lines. The game freezes, locks up solid, and so does my mate."

"No, I was nowhere near him. You can watch the tape. I was holding the camcorder. I had him and the screen in line of sight the entire time, you can see I never touched him while he was playing."

"Well, the first thing I did after he collapsed was roll him off the pad and check his pulse. Nothing. Fumbled my phone out of my pocket and I was calling an ambulance within about thirty seconds of the game freezing. Gave him CPR as best I could - my last lesson was a long, long time ago - but by the time the medics arrived it had already been about eight minutes and he still wasn't responding. I stood back to let them try to jumpstart his heart, but by that time I was beginning to think. Cogs were whirring."

"No. It wasn't hunger, it wasn't thirst, I kept him topped up the entire time. There was nothing in the water I gave him. He wasn't anorexic, or diabetic, or epileptic. He definitely wasn't on any drugs. Not even caffeine. The post mortem will tell you that. I did nothing to him, I swear. The autopsy will tell you all of this."

"Listen to me. You asked me to tell you what happened, and I'm telling you what I think happened. He did not die, officer. He is not DEAD."

Discussion (38)

2008-05-23 02:36:27 by TheFox:

This story is fantastic; I play Tetris all the time, though not on a Japanese system. Your sci-fi makes me chuckle, when it doesn't make me think. Or both. Don't stop, man, you got a gift.

2008-06-23 02:39:48 by mlah:

This is what I have always tried to achieve in gaming, the point where you become one with the game.

2008-07-23 15:55:03 by TheFinalStand:

Could someone teach me how to do this? I just really want to beat a friend at one of his games that he plays whenever he can and that i dont even have. Plus, it would be cool to play tetris to the extreme.

2008-08-10 00:28:05 by Dante:

*cough* fiction */cough* xD

2008-10-29 23:11:52 by J:

Creepy, but I'm terrible at Tetris so this would never happen to me.

2008-11-11 23:53:40 by Evermore:

Fully realizing that this is fiction, I must say that I myself have experienced something like this, but to an extremely lesser degree, as what he was able to do is basically impossible. Odds are, so have you if you have ever played one of those online top down or side-scrolling shooting games where you fighting ridiculous numbers of enemies and bullets/lasers/etc... are flying everywhere. You know, Galaga on speed. Rather than concentrating singularly on your ship/man/thing, anyone decent at them has an unfocused mind that takes in everything going on at once. The more a person can process on the screen at a time, the faster they can take in all this information and act accordingly, the better said person is at these times of games. Tetris works in more or less the same manner, though obviously you process different kinds of information.

2008-11-11 23:55:46 by Evermore:

Eh, no edit system. *kinds of games*.

2008-12-05 01:40:02 by CedricLaMarca:

Try resetting the system should set him to before he started

2009-05-04 03:51:13 by Chris:

Heh. Actually, resetting the machine would probably turn this into a causality-loop story, as far as the guy is concerned. He'll be 'Oh boy, time to start playing my new version of the game!' ;-)

2009-05-17 21:51:26 by greyreigns:

Yeah I have experienced instences while playing video games where my concentration is'nt even on the game any more and yet I am doing beter than I usually would.

2009-06-02 05:02:07 by Nahww:

I have a friend who played an 3 hours endurance run in GT without realizing it had even begun. We sat talking and he just did it without thinking.

2009-06-18 20:46:34 by XC:

Above have mentioned similar states; I know I've hit it in multiplayer FPS' at least once or twice - I recall a series of games in Halo where I was leagues beyond what I had or have since accomplished - and I'm learning how to do it for danmaku games like the Touhou series.

2009-07-26 11:30:08 by Jay:

Been there done that so many times its hard to count, though not to the degree that I become the Buddha of video gaming. But people start going emo when I hit that perfect spot in my mind, unfocused on the game and taking it all in at once. Especially when you prefer using long range sniper rifles and quick speed attacks up close, and stealth. I usually go with Super Long Range if they have it, and if not I'm a Death by Papercuts kind of guy.

2009-08-02 21:38:51 by notsam:

RE, possibility: depending on the specifics of the game, by the time the game went too fast for his visual systems or the screen to display (whichever is likely to fail first), it's possible that the random number generator for shapes has begun repeating. If he somehow -did- acquire superhuman concentration abilities, it's not such a stretch that he could play at faster-than-visual speeds.

2009-09-07 07:41:00 by Rena:

Yeah, ultimately, it's a computer program, which means (barring input from a radio or similar) it has no true random element. Only pseudorandom generated from an algorithm. Someone who's achieved that state, by that point, has probably mentally decoded the entire algorithm and can calculate exactly what the game will do and what button to press, without even having to have any input. Only thing that bugged me about this story is the score. That much, and only a million points? I find it hard to believe the score meter was "a blur" for that long and still only managed to reach one million.

2009-10-24 08:02:51 by eidolon:

To be fair, tetris calculates the positions of blocks and takes input once per frame, so it'd be completely impossible to land 5 blocks per frame.

2009-10-25 22:34:26 by Candlejack:

@Eidolon Tetris, from a programming standpoint, is a relatively simple program. It would not be too difficult, given sufficient computing power, to reprogram it (like was said in the story) to take input in close-to-real time.

2009-11-07 03:34:08 by RetroBLM:

Wow. Hey, just stumbled on one of your stories here, and I gotta say I love your work. Keep it up. Now excuse me, I'm gonna go play Tetris.

2009-12-04 05:33:14 by Kettchup:

1048575 = 2^20 - 1. That's why it froze. And I think it was supposed to be that many *lines*, not points. Loved the story xD

2009-12-14 05:05:08 by Magna:

There actually are players these days who can play at around 3-4 tetriminoes-per-second... It's almost hard to believe.

2009-12-17 02:33:00 by RetroBLM:

This is relevant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDCpv8gEC4w

2010-02-09 19:40:58 by DaGodfatha:

I Know the guy this story's about. he refused my offa

2010-06-06 04:45:34 by Charles:

I find that listening to music and kinda concentrating on the music helps my performance in games, even when I'm looking directly at what I'm doing. I've done tests on myself in the game cube runner on my iPod (like writing down the time until I die). I am definitely a better player when I don't concentrate on it. If that makes sense.

2012-02-20 15:34:47 by Ruadhan:

Interesting story... I question the end, why wouldn't he be dead? That said, I have had long discussions with my (anti-entertainments) dad about exactly why I play video games...the conclusion we jointly came to was that I'm in it for the Zen, that perfect continuous moment when you do everything right. When you're in the Zone and its all going your way. I'm consistently miles better at games when I'm relaxed, with good music, and I'm not thinking about what I'm doing, just about what might happen next... I get accused of having Teh Hax because I can nail a guy through a wall by -guesswork- when I get seriously in the zone...I start doing stuff like predicting the locations of players through walls, accurately hurling grenades clear across the map, or any number of ridiculous shenanigans. I described the zen moments once as turning the game into a martial art, where every move is keyed to further the simple goal of progressing the game, things get ultra-efficient and utterly awesome. Those are the moments I play for, so I can well get behind this guy meditating while gaming :P it doesn't sound in and of itself very far-fetched to me.

2012-08-09 09:14:44 by zermr:

nice story :D

2012-10-04 03:51:44 by Nameless:

He's not dead 'cos he's still playing it in his mind. He hasn't realized that the game's stopped.

2014-12-13 05:12:47 by Sam :

I would really love if you expanded this one to novel-length.

2015-10-18 08:21:43 by sillylaureate:

Incredibly confused about this comment. Is it Sam??

2015-10-18 17:29:51 by qntm:

No, it was "Sam ". Botched SQL update.

2016-11-12 20:09:37 by Luke102Dobson:

Becoming one with game. Next time someone turns the game back on, all that will be seen is the friend inside the game picking up tetris blocks and placing them in their spots.

2017-02-14 06:09:58 by Ari:

...is this a spin-off of the StickmanStickman series?

2018-05-30 09:52:09 by Andy:

So its a story in the court room right?

2021-01-22 20:08:37 by Mitsu AT:

Well, it's nowhere near 1 million lines, but there are people dedicated enough to sit down and clear 10000 lines in a single sitting :P https://twitter.com/fire_storm58/status/1344115616605753345 The first 10kL sprint on Jstris took 4.5 hours. The current world record is something like 1.5 hours o.o

2021-06-08 06:02:27 by Tasha:

Hey this is the best story I ever read in my entire life!

2021-08-29 01:16:08 by Fnorfensuld:

See, this is why we need to move past NEStris as the skill-testing game of choice

2022-10-13 15:16:28 by Clint Stone:

I had a similar experience with Q*Bert. I was at a 7-11 one saturday night . I had the game up so high that it wasn't displaying what level it was on, just randomly cranking out play fields. Unfortunately I had to take my little brother home from roller skating and I had to give the game up.

2023-01-17 02:43:39 by Andrew Hoerner:

Soo, is the title merely a reference to becoming a Tetris God? I was expecting his superhuman Tetris ability to generalize somehow to the wider world. Like dropping blocks from nowhere on his opponents.

2024-01-22 19:27:49 by xeranes:

Sooo... Took twenty years to disprove it, but it happened.

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