Tetris teaches life lessons

Many people learned their life lessons from sports. I learned mine from Tetris.

The fact… Many people learned their life lessons from sports. I learned mine from Tetris.

The fact that I didn’t download the game on my cell phone until last year speaks volumes about my childhood manners – but that’s another story for another day.

Tetris, for those of you who don’t know, is an electronic game in which different colored shapes, composed of four square blocks, fall down the screen.

The player’s job is to move these colorful shapes around in order to create complete horizontal lines. When a line is created, it is removed from the screen.

The game ends when the player hasn’t cleared enough lines that the shapes are stacked so high, the next random one can’t fall. Womp, womp.

Of course, there’s a little more to Tetris than that, but unless you actually like to play the game, you’re probably bored already. (And if you do play Tetris, this is all old news to you anyway).

Post-game, my phone will tell me my score, the number of lines I successfully cleared, the level I made it to and my efficiency (expressed in a percentage).

To give you an idea of how badly I suck at Tetris, despite my yearlong addiction, my high score is something like 66,000. My efficiency: a measly, failing 39 percent.

In an interesting double whammy, publishing all of this in the newspaper gives you an idea of how badly I suck at life.

Anyway, all that scoring information brings me to the first life lesson, the kind that most people learn after they get creamed in a football game or something: It’s not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game.

Tetris, of course, is always ultimately lost. We’ll revise the age-old expression in this instance to say that it’s not whether you lose immediately or almost immediately