From Max Kalehoff:

One of the most innovative and addictive aspects of Tetris is the perpetual, intensifying stream of bricks the player must align without spaces. In fact, this very element foreshadowed howwe now consume most news content and personal status updates on the Web: in reverse chronological streams. Tetris’s layers of bricks fall with greater speed and complexity as you master the ability to arrange them in straight, crumbling rows. That is not unlike news feeds and status updates that funnel into your desktop and mobile interfaces, intensifying as your ability to sort and digest them increases. Indeed, there are classical elements of game mechanics in both examples.

It’s true. I was a Tetris addict the same way that I am now a Google addict. A former flame of mine used to complain about my Tetriholism,…until she started playing herself. Next I knew she’d bought a handheld Tetris gameplayer to keep at it.

The truth is Tetris—like Google—hits many of the same nerve centers. The increasing velocity. The sense that you are building something with each addition to your media profile. The simplicity of the color schemes. I’ve often wondered if there wasn’t some great flowering of digital culture before glasnost and perestroika. Not just Tetris, but Paragraph (a predecessor to Graffiti), and of course Triz, which is older (by a generation) but found a new wave of adherents thanks to digital technology.

Too bad Tetris is a locked and closed system…

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