As I lay here supplying pressure to my control pad and making sure each and every one of those individual blocks fall into their correct position,

I cannot refrain from simply pausing the game for hardly a fraction of a second to look over all that I've done in these last few moments of game play. Amazed and astonished, I ponder this strange thought:

Tetris is very similar to a game we all play: Life.



Here me out...

From the moment you press "START", you are presented with a blank slate. Tabula Rasa.

You are given but one starting piece, and you are forced to arrange the blocks that descend upon thee from up above. With each piece you take, it merely symbolizes the many phases one will go through in life.

You begin to look at what you have to work with:

In the short term, there are certain actions you must be more than willing to take. You must also know full well when you're going to take them so that you may clean your slate once more. These are your short-term goals that you set up for yourself.


Then, there are your long-term goals.

You have those moments where you see a few corresponding spaces going up in a straight line and you know that if you can just get the rest of the forth line filled up before the next bar tetrimino comes,

You can clear away all four lines at once and earn that really good feeling about it.



Just like in life, many times in Tetris,

Like the great philosopher Mick Jagger used to say: "You can't always get what you want." You can never arrange all of the right blocks exactly where you want them,

But hey, you need to occupy whatever you can claim and use it somewhere, and sometimes, that means temporarily obstructing some of your future endeavors and waiting to accomplish them until later.

However, this specific factor becomes an integral necessity of this game that we must all play.

You need to learn how one correctly arranges their pieces so that you may somehow find a way of clearing your slate and finding your way back down to the bottom of the screen again.

An exuberant amount of video games mimic life in this way. Some in more ways than others. None more than Tetris.

One of my favorite poets made this very same point: Ken Arkind.

He once stated that a game of classic Mario Brother's is similar to life because the decisions you make affect the game and how it's going to end up that,

When you traverse down that little pipe to collect the subterranian coins, you can never go back when you come out the other end.

And when you place those little Tetris blocks into their individual spaces, there's no getting them back out again, no matter how much you want to,

There is only the prospect of moving forward.

So, when you do it, you'd best make sure that you'll have amazing mental prowess and ability to stick it out until the end, but not everybody can accomplish such a task.



And if you can last for a while, you begin to realize that as we progress further on in this "game of life,"

Things begin to haste.

Sadly, some people find that when this happens, they just can't handle the impending doom of the world falling on their heads in little pieces and they lose to their wits end.

Everything begins to pile on itself, leaving more holes of missed opportunities every step of the way. And in life, these opportunities are not just missed tetriminos.

For the unfortunate souls, as they watch their towers get to the point where, if they were real ones, they'd surely fall over from instability and height,

All they can do is watch as the tower falls and the game, metaphorically, ends in unfathomable chaos. They are powerless to change the ongoing course of their sealed fate.



I'm really hoping that none of this happens to me because I am still young and while I have a good idea with what I want to do with my life, I cannot say for sure if the universe has other plans;

If I'm going to have one of those games where I end up with one of those high, respectable scores,

Or if I fail to even generate a fraction of that amount.



I am getting ready to commence the un-pausing of my game, but I have one final thought.

The overwhelming difference between a video game and life is this:

In any game, we can hit the pause button and take a little break.

To me, it makes perfect sense.

Developers create video games that reflect the ideal life that everybody wants to experience. A virtual utopia.

If our lives were so easily designable, I can tell you that I wouldn't be writing this to begin with. I would probably be on the moon, under the sea, ruling a kingdom, and all with the ability to press "pause" and take a break.

Or heck, even hit a reset button if I were to screw it all up,

But, we can't.

With that, it's about time for me to stop writing and journey forth, back into the realm of Tetris.