The Tetris Effect occurs when people devote so much time and attention to an activity that it begins to pattern their thoughts, mental images, and dreams. It takes its name from the video game Tetris.
People who played Tetris for a prolonged amount of time could find themselves thinking about ways different shapes in the real world can fit together, such as the boxes on a supermarket shelf, the buildings on a street, or hallucinating pieces being generated and falling into place on an invisible layout. In this sense, the Tetris effect is a form of habit. They might also dream about falling tetrominos when drifting off to sleep or see images of falling tetrominos at the edges of their visual fields or when they close their eyes. In this sense, the Tetris effect is a form of hypnagogic imagery.
So do you experience Tetris Effect in your life as a software developer? I know I do. Share!ter
Latest comments (40)
I see a lot of people talking about dreaming of code etc ...
I've had a few experiences like those, but the most striking one that happened is the following:
Some time ago now, I was with my girlfriend and we were having sex. I kinda hyperventilated at some point, and I got pulled in some kind of astral state of consciousness (I hadn't taken any drugs for the record), where every thought I had, every movement I made and everything happening around me was appearing to me as lines of code. Like I saw through the matrix somehow.
I've had a few psychedelics experience since then, but this one remains in my top even tho I wasn't on the influence of anything.
Would be interested to know if anyone ever had some kind of similar experience ?
I spoke a great amount about code and databases during my sleep while I was on vacation with a friend. It was a stressful time at work so I hope it was just a temporary reaction to that. At least no one else has mentioned it since.
Not as a developer, no, but I have had a similar thing happen when I was a wee 20 year old playing World of Warcraft 16 hours a day. When I was sleeping I'd dream that I was in the game playing still, and when I was out in the "real world" I would try to relate everything to WoW.
Not my proudest years, but they were sure fun haha
When I was in my first year as Computer Science Engineering at the University, I had a lot of electric-related class where sinusoids were everywhere. I started dreaming of driving cars through sine pathways around other cars, realizing that sound was the sum of different sine waves, the wires on my desks (mouse, power cord, etc) were also some Fourier signals compose of different sine waves. That was crazy.
Teddy Ruxpin theme song while thinking about debugging complex SQL queries
I've dreamt in xml when I've worked on projects where xml was the data format. Not that relaxing or useful in my experience. Given that sleep and dreaming has a human database defrag and reorg function, mostly I've woken up with new ideas and approaches which I've eagerly written down to try out later after breakfast and coffee.
Y'all wrong, this is the Bleeding Effect! #assassinscreed
It was a long time ago, so probably DOOM II. I didn't play the first one until after the second, because I always thought it seemed such a pointless game and didn't understand why anyone would like it... until I gave in.
On embedded systems, memory could be short for some things, or you can run out of it very quickly. A couple months ago, a very common practice at my office was to reorder stacks, variables and stuff to fit on 64kb memory. It was so stressful! On the night, I dreamed about it or thinked every time a new product version release came.
Irrelevant, but
"Cupcake Match"
Like if you got the reference