There are, generally, two modes of Tetris. There is the methodical mode, a game of precision, planning, and geometry. It's the beautiful game, the king's game, where you fit the squares into their rightful place, eliminating line by line, tetromino by tetromino, tetris by tetris, frame by frame, block by block. This is how most of us like to imagine that we play Tetris.

The second mode is a mode of chaos and hubris. A game of failing to spin a single plate. You clumsily misplace a block or, you're managing your board and -- fuck, how are you supposed to fit that piece in here? And from there, you desperately try to dig yourself out of the hole. This is how most of us actually play Tetris.

Tetris tends to ping pong between these two modes of play. Even professional and grandmaster Tetris players will eventually find themselves struggling to manage the eternal avalanche of bricks.

Ostensibly a shitpost, Not Tetris is actually a reinvention of Tetris that highlights its most chaotic mode of play. Instead of the cold precision of a grid, this is the messy physics of rigidbodies. There's no way to play this game and not fuck up constantly. There is no precision. You press one button trying to rotate your piece, and it immediately begins to spiral. And once you place it, odds are its going to topple over eventually. Try to get these pieces straight, fucking try, I dare you. Eventually, it's not a tower with a few nooks and crannies, it's mostly crannies and a few nooks. When you finally manage to clear a line, slices a straight line across the board, with bits and pieces left behind, as you build higher and higher on a mountain of debris. "How did I let it get this bad?", you ask, knowing full well how and why it got this bad.

It's a novelty at first, but you get the creeping sensation of familiarity: you made the mess. Now try and clean it up.

So like, in June 10th 2011, Stabyourself.com released Not Tetris 2, the sequel to Not Tetris, a Tetris clone in which pieces don’t rotate in delimitated 90° movements, but instead followed a more open and physics oriented control.

The game is a mess. The first time I tried it I found it incredibly unplayable, stupidly complicated and so easily fixable. But yet, I didn’t drop it. For a reason, I believed I could make myself play and enjoy it if I stuck around for one more round, so I did.

As soon as I stopped playing it like regular, vanilla Tetris I got hooked. I was then positioning pieces using my walls, trying to combo my way through hard times and pushing my down key HARD in an atempt to push down more blocks every turn.

I learned how to Not Tetris (2).

And ever since that moment I was obsessed. When my ex roomie’s cat murdered my old computer by way of a glass of water spilled over it, my first thought was “shit, I won’t be able to play Not Tetris in my work computer”.

And then, a week or so after, when I got this new laptop, the first thing I downloaded into it was this stupid game.

Mind you, I’ve never gotten to a point where I surpass the 22000 points. That’s my peak performance right now and it’s still a tricky goal to get to. I’m in no way competitive in it (as I think I am in regular old Tetris). It’s more of an idle passtime.

But gosh, as far as idle pass times go, this thing is the king.

I spend my lunch hours playing, my moments of solitude and while I have friends over. Hell, I remember playing it after sex -and sexting-, during more complicated activities, while drinking, while being high and while watching cartoons.

Not Tetris 2 has turned not only in my comfort food but also my coping mechanism when I’m feeling bad. And that kinda sucks tbh.

Spending so much time playing this game has made me think about the many times I’ve sinked my fears and worries into repetitive videogames just to focus on self imposed goals and repetitive activities at least for some minutes.

I’ve been thinking about 2010 and 2011 when I was obsessed with my phone’s port of Snake. I played it to avoid the typical struggles of highschool, like my first hormones ignorer.

I also thought about Windows 10’s Solitaire, which turned into my escape route for harsh times in what was maybe the saddest time in my life until now, that last year before transitioning.

And as those, many games have filled that space. Be it Team Fortress 2 or Picross 3D, videogames haven’t always been art for me, they sometimes are just… fiddle machines.

And I’m not trying to take merit off of Not Tetris 2 or any of these other games I’ve mentioned. Hell, I’d call both TF2 and Snake some of my favorite games ever. Of course I’m not trying to guilt trip software. I’m trying to guilt trip myself.

Through my last few weeks playing Not Tetris 2 I’ve felt tired more than anything. Exhausted by the game, setting some dumb goals for myself and saying I’ll absolutely delete the game once I reach it. That goal is 20000 and I still haven’t reached it. Not in this leaderboard.

I fantasize not about playing the game, but about being done with it. I want to let it go, but I can’t go without one last rush of congratulations. I want that.

So now I use that idle time to think about what I’m actually trying to run away from. What emptyness I’m trying to fill and what do I really want to get from videogames.

Some days these thoughts bring me to the perfect mechanics of Not Tetris 2, the way it’s clumsyness works as a trait, the many strategies and the randomized piece sequence as more twists around that formula I’ve decomposed ever since I was a 9 years old evading her problems with a bootleg portable console that only ran Tetris.

Is it dysphoria? Yeah, it totally is. The hit of Puberty 2, work, the need of human contact and the contrasting desire to run away from everybody and just writting and writting and escaping from any distraction until I make something truly great.

Games like Not Tetris have turned into thinking machines in the worst possible way. I guess stopped enjoying them for good so now are just things that prevent my brain from entering the “not doing shit” mindframe.

So, I guess this is my atempt to promise to write more and develop at least some kind of critial thinking around the games I play. To learn how to enjoy them without guilt and love them as I love a good film or album.

It’s also a proposition to myself of stop being such an evasive person, to, uh, develop healthier relationships with my enviroments and find the beauty again in videogames.

Gotta start somewhere.