Tetris: The Healing Game

Spotlight English

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Welcome to Spotlight. I’m Alice Irrizary.

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And I’m Colin Lowther. Spotlight uses a special English method of broadcasting. It is easier for people to understand, no matter where in the world they live.

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The car crash changed the girl’s life. Her body did not have many injuries. But the memories from the accident still terrify her. They come at times she does not expect. She tries to think about something else when they happen. But these memories stop her other thoughts. It is as if she is living through the accident all over again.

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The girl is developing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD. This is a condition where memories of life threatening events take over long after they happened. These memories, called flashbacks, seem very real. People with PTSD experience many flashbacks in their lifetime. They re-live their accidents over and over again.

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Whenever she has these memories, they have her play a video game called Tetris. Tetris seems to be the one thing that she is now thinking about. The game helps her think about something other than her flashbacks. It makes them seem less frightening. But experts believe that Tetris may have an even greater effect. It may stop her from getting Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder at all. Today’s Spotlight is on Tetris, the healing game.

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Tetris is a simple game. Created in 1985 by Alexey Pajitnov, the game was designed so that almost anyone could play. A player turns different shaped blocks as the blocks fall down the screen. The goal is to fit these blocks together in perfectly level lines. When a player forms these level lines, the blocks flash and disappear.

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This is called clearing a line. Clearing lines gains a player points. It also provides more room on screen to line up blocks. The game ends when the blocks reach the top of the screen. The blocks fall faster as the game goes on, making it more difficult.

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These simple rules made Tetris a success. Today the series has sold over five hundred and twenty million copies of the game. It is the second highest-selling video game in history. Pajitnov spoke about the success of Tetris with the gaming website Polygon:

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“In lots of games you go in and destroy things. In Tetris you have the feeling that you are building something, all the time. It is useful and positive. It makes you feel smart.”

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But Tetris is more than just fun and good feelings. Emily Holmes is a teacher at the Karolinska Institute, a university in Sweden. She believed that Tetris’ simple rules could be useful for treating PTSD. In 2017 she carried out a test on people who had been in car accidents. She asked them to remember the accident. Then she asked them to play Tetris for fifteen minutes. The people who played Tetris were less likely to get PTSD. Their flashbacks were less intense.

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Experts are not yet sure why Tetris has this effect. But much of it may have to do with how image-based Tetris is. Tetris occupies most of the image centers of a person’s mind when playing the game. Flashbacks are also very image-based. Picturing a painful memory involves the same area of the brain. A person cannot concentrate on both the game and the memories at the same time. Playing Tetris stops, or blocks, the memories from happening.

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This block is important for people who has gone through intense mental injury. The more people re-experience the events that hurt them, the more those memories stay with them. Their flashbacks become more difficult to get rid of. They may even fear the flashbacks themselves. This leaves sufferers in continuous states of worry. They might push away help for fear it will hurt them. Dr. Lali Iyadurai is a teacher at the University of Oxford. She wrote in the journal Molecular Psychiatry:

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“This first week after injury can be important for our patients. They have to go home, recover, and look after themselves. These can be hard to do if you are getting memories of the injury, often several times a day.”

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Tetris, the study suggests, is a good way to prevent those memories from forming at all. Or it can at least limit the difficulty that these memories cause.

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The game may also help with other issues. In 2015, scientists from the University of Queensland carried a study on some of its students. The study worked to see if Tetris could affect desires for drugs or alcohol. Students were asked to play Tetris for three minutes whenever they experienced these desires. They reported their levels of desire before and after playing.

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The results were similar to the study on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Playing Tetris lessened the desire for things like drugs, alcohol, sex, and food. The effect was the same for each desire. Tetris reduced desire no matter how many times students played. Professor Jackie Andrade is a teacher at Plymouth University in the United Kingdom who helped run the study. She spoke about it on her University’s website:

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“We think the Tetris effect happens because desire involves imagining. You picture eating a particular substance or being satisfied by a particular action. Tetris is graphically interesting. It takes over the mental processes that support imagery. It is hard to imagine something else vividly and play Tetris at the same time.”

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Playing Tetris may even help cure lazy eye. This condition takes place when a person’s brain cannot take in information from one eye. Eventually, the brain stops trusting that eye. It closes the eye off, causing sight loss. That eye is said to be lazy. It does not work as much as the other eye.

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Sometimes, an operation is the only way to correct lazy eye. But often the eye can be trained. The more patients use the weak eye, the more effective it becomes. A study released in twenty nineteen suggested that playing Tetris is an effective eye-training method. The strong images of the game forced the eyes to work together. Eyesight improved in patients for thirty minutes after playing the game. Playing the game for fifteen minutes a day saw permanent improvement after just two weeks.

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Tetris may not be the only game to have these advantages. Other games like it may have similar effets. Research into the therapeutic possibilities for video games is just beginning. But these studies suggest that Tetris is more than just a game. One day Tetris may be a part in certain therapies for helping and healing many people.

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Have you ever played Tetris? What do you think about it? You can leave a comment on our website. Or email us at [e-mail]. You can also comment on Facebook at facebook.com/spotlightradio.

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The writer of this program was Dan Christmann. The producer was Michio Ozaki. The voices you heard were from The United States and The United Kingdom. All quotes were adapted for this program and voiced by Spotlight. You can listen to this program again, and read it, on the internet at www.radioenglish.net. This program is called, ‘Tetris: The Healing Game’.

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You can also get our programs delivered directly to your Android or Apple device through our free official Spotlight English app. We hope you can join us again for the next Spotlight program. Goodbye!

Question:

Have you ever played Tetris? Do you think video games are useful to treat PTSD?

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