I used to be obsessed with Tetris (both on the console and the 40 line clear version on the computer) and ended up programming a version of it that maps one key on the keyboard to one "slot/rotation" combination for each piece. Amazingly, there are enough keys to cover all of the combinations, so each drop is just one key press. Ended up getting some pretty good 40 line clear times for this weird version of Tetris; it felt like I was typing to play the game. I don't know if anyone has done something like that since then—that was probably a decade ago.
That's super cool, what sort of times were you able to achieve? I think it's "cheating" to even use the 180 degree flip button (but obv everyone is free to define their own rules for a game where you're essentially playing against yourself). I can play with zero finesse OR I can sub 50 seconds, but I definitely can't do both at the same time.
I saw this Polygon story on reddit, and deep in the reddit comments was a link to this fascinating 9-minute YouTube video that explains the latest NES Tetris competitive tech which is apparently "faster than hypertapping!" (I did not know even know what "hypertapping" was)
I'm not at all a gamer, but can type decently fast and see much similarity between the "rolling" technique and using all 10 fingers on the keyboard --- e.g. 120WPM is a rate of 10 keys per second, which is extremely difficult to do even with a single finger on one key, but spreading the energy across all the fingers makes it much easier to achieve those speeds. Incidentally, the fastest typers don't use a rigid key-to-finger mapping for ths reason too; they tend to use the closest finger that's available.
> Incidentally, the fastest typers don't use a rigid key-to-finger mapping for ths reason too; they tend to use the closest finger that's available.
Only on QWERTY. On Dvorak there's a very rigid mapping and it very evenly uses all the fingers.
Personally, the ability to distribute the load more is why I prefer the number row over a number pad when typing numbers; though Dvorak helps there by putting the punctuation closer to the number row.
And on my ergonomic keyboard I have the numbers on the home row in the number layer, rather than in a numpad layout.
Dvorak does not evenly use all fingers - it is especially more right-hand dominant and that trait was actually why I hated it as a left-handed dominant person. The amount of finger travelling the right hand has to do for Dvorak is insane. Almost all improvements of typing speed in Dvorak are attributed to the learner finally learning how to type in the first place. The main draw to learning Dvorak should for the ergonomics - which are strictly inferior to Colemak. While Colemak is nearly as right-hand dominant it doesn't require nearly as much finger travel making it more ergonomic for left-hand dominant people as well.
Also - as someone who has learned both - I adamantly believe Dvorak is inferior to Colemak in almost every single way. From difficulty learning the layout to the ergonomics once learned to having to rebind or relearn hotkeys - especially common ones like cut/copy/paste. I only wish I had discovered Colemak prior to wasting time learning Dvorak all those many years ago.
(And as Bradwood pointed out in the response below - definitely biased towards typing English and not other languages. So people who primarily type a language that is not English may have drastically different experiences.)
I went from qwerty to dvorak after hitting a max speed of 160wpm in qwerty and I still found some ergonomic improvements in dvorak. Never hit the old speeds. You're right about the right hand bias, though. I traded my left hand pain from qwerty for worse right hand pain with dvorak. It lasted even after building an ergonomic keyboard, so I switched to the workman layout after that. Things are basically fine now. Workman actually does promise 50/50 hand usage, which is rather unique and not seen in other layouts, whether more or less efficient. This criterion made me choose it over the more extreme halmak layout. Also, I like the name "workman" and that the left side homerow spells "ash".
I never liked the idea of colemak being intentionally similar to qwerty and changing up fewer keys than dvorak. I thought this idea was limiting and gave people the easy way out. Workman applies a similar idea, which again annoyed me at first, but I'm pretty used to it now. I'd say it makes it more confusing to type qwerty on another keyboard as some keys are the same and muscle memory can get mixed up between the two. I don't type qwerty much at all, so maybe this would improve over time. With dvorak I think only a and m were the same for the letters, so it felt more like hitting a distinct switch.
Workman also avoids the issue in colemak that colemak mod-dh had to fix from what I understand. Of course these layouts are not all the same age, so one might learn their layout and become loyal to it before a better one is invented. Dvorak is quite old now, and colemak is at least older than workman.
I no longer remember dvorak at all. I think I used it for 18-24 months or so. I'll probably remember qwerty forever since I grew up on it, and I use workman daily so it's safe for now. I have used workman for at least a year and a half, maybe two and a half now.
This has to be a function of what is being typed, not the keyboard it's being typed on. I am assuming you mean English evenly uses all the fingers? Something like Polish, or Welsh, I'd expect to not be very "even" on a Dvorak keyboard.
For me, there's an open question whether games like Tetris should have such hacks. (Is it a bug that should be fixed?) Obviously reaction time is a factor in a game that continuously speeds up to increase difficulty, but should inhuman button mashing offer an advantage over auto repeat? You can't make Mario run 20x faster by hyper tapping the run key.
I don't feel it's a hack. DAS is a mechanism of the game that was intended to aid players and make the game play more enjoyable for the typical player.
If users want to forgo that mechanism why shouldn't they be allowed? If I'm in a typing competition and am typing a word with a repeated letter such as the two l's in "all", you would never expect me to have to press the l key and wait for the computer to automatically type a second l until I released. You'd expect me to just press the l key twice because it's faster and that wouldn't be considered a "hack". Why would you expect anything different for Tetris players?
As for Mario, it's just a slightly more realistic game in terms of you controlling a set of pixels that represent a person instead of blocks. Mario doesn't move from one column to the next, he smoothly travels through all the pixels between columns because people in the real world move smoothly. Tetris blocks aren't real world objects though so they can move one column at a time. If it only takes one frame for a block to move one column, why shouldn't I be able to move the block one column every frame?
Also, in the official game, if you use DAS you move at 10Hz (moving once every 6 frames). It looks like top players can tap at around 20Hz. That's only 2x faster.
I can see why one would take issue with hypertapping, a method which seemed to require some inherent body ability to be capable of, but rolling is merely a more efficient method of human tapping. It's like asking if the fosbury flop should be allowed.
What??? There's no issue with hyper tapping, hyper tapping is literally just being able to press the button faster than most people can, and disallowing it would be like disqualifying somebody who has more fast twitch muscle fiber in the 100m dash.
We're not created equal, welcome to literally every sport EVER.
The real issue with hypertapping isn't that "not everyone can do it," really. It's the question of if it crosses the line into being inherently injurious to the player in the medium or even short term, in which case the advantage doesn't come from either natural or learned skill but a willingness to ruin your hands for silly game points.
Generally speaking regulated sports tend to draw lines here too, though obviously some draw them fairly far into the injury territory. Most of those are explicitly fighting sports though.
At least two of the best Starcraft 2 players, Maru and Byun, are having serious wrist issues. SC2 doesn't involve tricks like the ones mentioned in the article, and still actions per minute (APM) matter a lot and people get hurt. I've never heard anyone proposing regulations over APM.
OTOH, almost every sport hurts at pro level, and I think it's safe to say that all pro sports are unhealthy, except a few of them. E.g. Federer has serious issues with his knees, has had more injuries than an average 60 year old man.
I don't disagree that most sports are bad for the body at pro levels, but even so generally speaking they usually have implicit or explicit rules against deliberate short term damage to help you win.
The most obvious is really that while the case for rules against performance enhancing drugs is usually that they just give an unfair advantage, if you look at what's actually banned and what's not, and how natural advantages are treated, it seems pretty clear that most banned substances are also the most harmful, while others skate under regulation. Esports hasn't even reckoned with this yet afaik, even at pro levels. We'll see where we're at in 10-20 years as it mainstreams.
As you point out in the other branch, that's kind of motivated largely by PR concerns. People are mostly ok with basically anyone ruining their body slowly for a job (unless it's their own), but they balk at rapid injury. My point is really just that hypertapping potentially gets very close to this line, and that's a big part of why there was a drive to find a replacement technique or even ban it from competitive use.
Anyways, there's a lot more research into how to do high APMs with a keyboard and mouse ergonomically than there is with an NES controller, which also has a hard and shallow throw compared to either of those and a very unergonomic shape to begin with. There's a lot of reasons they aren't obviously comparable to each other when talking about the RSIs they can cause.
Gymnastics is also good example. Some routines are just banned, because there is possibility of damage or too high risks. And it is quite fair as long as it is clear upfront and everyone follows the same rules.
That regulations are more in the line "we don't want participants to die or get crippled on live TV". Because gimnastics are absolutely insane for your body, the number of people who end up with totally destroyed knees, shoulders, ankles... before their 30's is horrifying.
Seeing why someone would take issue with something is not agreeing it's an issue. I understand why the Tetris community might have been unhappy that a strategy impossible for 90% (completely made up number, I have no idea how common the ability is) of people became the meta.
I wouldn't have banned it, but I would understand if they decided to have separate categories for hypertapping and "regular" play. Rolling seems to have fixed the problem.
The high jump seems to be more deliberately a test of physical skill? Did the designers of Tetris set out to make a game that measures the rate at which you can push a button? A lot of games have no glitch speedrun categories.
If the designers wanted the game to end at level 29 they could have forced the game to end there. They didn't, instead programming a game that allows users to get continue indefinitely even if the designers themselves were unable to pass level 29.
Sure you could make a no hypertapping or rolling category for Tetris. Calling better techniques a glitch seems wrong, though speed runners often disagree on what exactly constitutes a "glitch" anyway.
The competitive scene is probably also influenced from the speedrun community. And the speedrun community has really worked out the kinks in their ruleset, as in most games, you need to find the sweet-spot of allowing hacks and innovative techniques to break the game, but not too much that it becomes uninteresting.
For example, in Super Mario Brothers non-TAS runs, the rules are based around the controller and execution environment. You are not allowed to modify the controller or tilt the cartridge, but that's it.
Having the rules only limit the tools required, just like in sports, is quite elegant. If somebody figured a way to play faster with their teeth, it would be allowed, and rolling the controller is just something like that.
On the other hand, people found out that you can perform certain feats in SMB by pressing the left and right button at the same time. This is considered impossible with the standard D-Pad (without e.g. cutting it in the middle), so that is banned. At least until somebody figures out a way how to do it with the standard D-Pad.
That’s like asking if Guitar Hero should have tapping, where you bring your strumming hand up to press fret buttons. Speed techniques that work with unmodified hardware and game code should almost always be allowed.
I dont think you’re abstractly asking a silly question. People do debate whether in-game emergent behavior that leverages obviously unintended game mechanics is allowable all the time. But the analog for Tetris here would be something like “if you press input so fast it overflows some counter and gives you free rows”. That’s not what this is. There is no “hack”. This is skill.
Aside from "what is too much" questions, skipping DAS in the nes version of Tetris by tapping is something almost anyone who plays the game will do if they play it long enough and isn't at all unintended behavior. It just makes sense for certain situations.
And while it's not true for most 2d platformers of smb's era, performing repetative button actions to move faster than the standard acceleration curve allows became very possible in 16bit games and a later, and you'll see those used in speedruns all the time. Usually a repeated dash, but sometimes weird stuff like running backwards, jumping in certain ways (smb actually has one of these), or rhythmically pumping the shoulder buttons.
I still recommend watching the video though. It's like the Polygon article but more audiovisual, and shows what hypertapping and rolling actually look like, and the development of rolling
Nice to see some Tetris news here! I've been a little obsessed lately with Tetr.io. For those who don't know it, it's a version of tetris where you can play against other players and send them pieces when, for example, you do a tetris or a combo. It's pretty impressive to watch the competitions :
https://youtu.be/A4SFWfXZsks
Instantly got addicted, and I was amazed to see how good everyone is. 14 year old me with my gameboy would have been stunned at how fast and crazy modern Tetris is. And multi-national! Love it, but had to give it up after a few months because it seemed like it would/or was causing my longstanding RSI to come back.
Pretty cool. Anyone remember TetriNET from the 90s? Similar concept, except there were special pieces mixed in that you could use on opponents or yourself (add line, clear line, quake, etc.)
Yup! I remember the Debian developers would often play it together, I suppose because it was one of a small number of exciting open source multiplayer games which worked on Linux.
There’s a battle royale version of Tetris on the switch that sounds very similar - you can alter your settings of who you attack too, targeting those who attacked you, those in the lead, etc… I never won but got top 3 a couple times :)
Is the method more taxing on the controller? How do such NES events handle controllers? Are modern remakes allowed, do they disassemble and fix them, or is there a fear that eventually all NES controllers will be broken forcing change?
These days I just load up the official site's web version [0] but lately they've crammed more and more ads onto the page and Ublock Origin can't keep up. Sometimes the tab totally freezes. Makes it difficult to enjoy.
It's fun to give someone without telling them the whole view rotates whenever you rotate the piece because it's extremely disorienting if you're not used to it, but after a bit of practice it becomes easy
My favorite version is Puyo Puyo Tetris. It's on Steam, Switch, PS4, Xbox. Also a Puyo Puyo game but you can easily just play Tetris if you want. It's fun, it's colorful. Also has multiplayer, online and split screen. No ads but you do have to buy it for $20.
You could play a version that you wrote yourself...
It's actually not that difficult --- it's probably one of the most cloned/ported puzzle games, but almost always called something other than Tetris because their lawyers really don't want you using that name. "Russia Block" is/was a relatively common synonym.
It’s easy if you just want to get the basic game up and running. If you want an authentic experience, however, then you need to put in more work to replicate the quirks of the NES original (the version used for CTWC). There’s everything from the NES’s 60.0988 frames per second to the Nintendo rotation system, delayed auto shift, soft drop speed, to the random piece generator (which is biased against line pieces). There’s also the scoring rules, gravity level progression, and more.
The game mechanics are actually quite complex when you include all of the details. Sure, you might say those details are superfluous, but there’s a reason many people prefer classic Tetris over more recent versions. Nintendo’s original mechanics are much more challenging but also very satisfying to play with.
Truly amazing to see this new generation of Tetris play.
On a semi-related note, this article stirred some nostalgia for a related game, "Welltris" (sort of a 3-d version of Tetris) that was popular among the MS-DOS crowd in the late 80s/early 90s.
Not sure if it's mentioned in the article, but this documentary is worth watching if you haven't seen it. It pre-dates some of the newer techniques people are using.
Years ago I stumbled onto competitive Tetris because the YouTube algorithm pushed the Jonas vs Joseph match on me. I didn't expect it to be exciting, but it was actually captivating and I've followed CTWC (very) passively ever since. The excitement from the commentators is also very infectious.
He was the one in our household and social circle to figure out that the counter on the PC version of Tetris was only 16 bits. You maxed out at 65k, not 1 million.
He hit that not by maxing out the score before level 29, but by just learning to push through level 30. He would sit in that office for hours playing a single game, chair pushed back, elbows on knees, looking like a baseball player waiting to clear the bench.
Slightly off-topic: Does anyone know what happened to Angularis [0] at https://angularis.mondaybits.com/, or how to contact the author? The page went down a couple of days ago. I hugely enjoyed that Tetris variant.
OK when I was in high school.. and we are talking 1991 here, there was a programmer in a class I was taking who wrote a head to head tetris game as his project for the class.
31 years later the world figures out that head to head tetris is pretty cool.
My son was obsessed with this for a while and is probably ranked top 20 globally, what's the excitement of this game is beyond me. That ended up hurting his college application quite a bit, and he showed no regret and is still in love with it.
The only thing positive I see is that they actually have a closed circle from different nations, so he made some "online friends" there.
Believe it or not he's learning a ton of soft skills that college fails to teach that are paramount for real life success. During college I "wasted" my time playing videogames, speedrunning, striving for high scores, and forming communities. I graduated with sub par scores but I still managed to be more successful than any of my college buddies (even those with perfect grades).
Here are some ways it helped me kickstart my self taught software engineering carreer:
- I learned how to enter the zone almost on command. I recognized my triggers and exploited them.
- I learned how to moderate a community. Now I see the fruits of that because somehow in the two companies I've worked at I've been seen as a leader even when I was a junior developer.
- I learned that learning stuff wasn't really that hard. It mostly requires dedication. I memorized speedrunning routes from google doc files for several games and it translates well into the experience I've had of reading documentation to learn a tool.
- I perfected my English. As a non-native speaker, practicing English with natives gave me the tools to now work for companies abroad that are astronomically better than local ones in every conceivable way.
I'm sure there are other benefits as well. There are also some risks such as social isolation, but that really depends on the player's surroundings more than anything.
I guess you might have missed the "are ya winnin son?" meme from a few years ago. Life isn't about the college you get into. Being in the top 20 of tetris players is going to be very rewarding, and they can go to college later if they want
> Being in the top 20 of tetris players is going to be very rewarding
I was a pretty high-level Scrabble player, devoting a handful of years of my life to it, and it’s one of the biggest regrets I have. Total waste of time and only a attempt to ignore the other things I hated about my life.
That's kinda cool. I did that too, albeit on a much lower level with other games like WoW. But they don't need to be that, and there's nothing inherently destructive about it. At some point you realize that you're relationship to the thing is destructive (hopefully) and you step back and make changes. If it wasn't scrabble, it could just as easily been something else.
A more appropriate analogy for me would actually be frontend development in my early twnties. I was genuinely interested in the technical bits, independent of the fact that I hated various aspects of my life, but I escaped into it and later realized that it wasn't worth it because I was fired anyway. But I don't regret building up skills in that.
Point is, your kid finds something they're good at, maybe you cultivate it rather than try and repress it. Maybe they get too obsessed because they feel repressed by their parents in other areas, that's a thing. But you teach them appropriate life balance skills and hopefully they have the framework to step back when it's time.
Is is though? What’s the point. You’re in front of a screen during the best years of your life attempting to get good at something that is at the end of it trivial from a lot of perspectives. It’s kind of indistinguishable from smoking pot and sitting in front of your TV.
That being said, I’ve followed the scene for 6 years and always found it very interesting to watch.
I guess I could have qualified it with might be very rewarding. A lot of people go to Uni and feel like they've largely wasted 4-8 years of their life and compromised their financial future as well. Tetris is a relatively innocuous pursuit.
Pot and TV can be fun too, and is mostly indistinguishable from what most Suburbanites do in their late twenties anyway. In my view you want to teach your kids how to assess if something has become a destructive obsession.
Likewise, if the kid is objectively good and entertaining, there is a market for it just like any other
This simply isn't true. Many of my closest friendships started online - with people who share the same interest as me, which is rare to find irl. I have since met a handful of online friends in person and they're always as lovely as they were online.
Online friends were very important to me growing up, and still are today.
Everything you’ve said is true, but also you literally cannot replicate in-person interaction. Perhaps one day we will be able to trick our lizard brains with virtual interactions, but we can’t do it at present. There is no replacement for touching, feeling, smelling, and seeing. You can have meaningful relationships online but you are absolutely missing out if you’re only interactions are digital.
But literally no one in this thread is saying otherwise. We’re just saying online friends are real and shouldn’t be demeaned with scare quotes, and also you’re probably missing out if your only interactions are local.
But nor does what you said really answer my question. Online friends are real, and often provide things that local friends can't. No one here is saying they're a substitute for local friends, but that doesn't mean these relationships should be denigrated.
There's a level of human connection and validation that can't be satisfied virtually. We're animals, that contact is important. We wouldn't settle for a virtual significant-other, and by the same token the experience of quality time with buds over extra-curriculars isn't going to be fully replicated in a chat-room, blog message or email.
As recent decades have progressed and more of our lives have gone digital, self reported rates of loneliness, isolation and depression have been skyrocketing. It's sometimes called the Internet Paradox - a technology that is supposed to increase our connection is correlated with increased feelings of isolation.
It's been the subject of study but it's impossible to truly reject the hypothesis due to the ubiquity of the effect - there's no control group. Obviously correlation is not causation, but I think the severity of the effects warrant further thought and investigation.
I personally had a shaky scholarity due to playing video games too much. No regret either. I’ve ended up in a pretty good spot and have a lot of memories making friends and being competitive at something
I respect a top 20 Tetris player more than I respect a college graduate since the college graduate just has to convince the teachers to like him and do exactly as he's told compliantly. The Tetris player has to be the best at something difficult and competitive that shows intelligence.
Can hardly blame your son for not taking something seriously which is mostly taken seriously because everybody thinks that everybody else takes it seriously and you can't just opt out of impressing others because it will limit what you can do and earn in the future. College itself is just a glorified game but a far more boring and unfair one than Tetris.
after reading the comments I found another thing that is unexpected but related, he has been trying to write a program beating Tetris since high school, from initial python to AI. He was competitive on math(ranked in top 30 nationally at HMMT at 9th grade), so his missing out tier1 school(e.g. MIT) disappointed me a bit, but it's what it is.
On the other hand I had a MIT PhD colleague who graduated 11 years ago and is a senior software engineer just like the rest of other colleges' graduates. I guess school does not define everything(no offense).
It's the same excitement as speedrunning if that helps you get it. Having a community where you are all trying to get better at something while having fun doing so.
