Tetris: The Games People Play

Box Brown (Andre the Giant: Life and Legend) turns his attention to the complicated history of one of the greatest video games ever made in Tetris: The Games People Play. Brown's cartoonish art style--distinctive in its eye-catching black-and-yellow color palette--allows him to break down into accessible pieces thorny topics such as game theory, the psychology of gaming, copyright law and the byzantine bureaucracy of the Soviet Union, Tetris's home country.

Brown starts with Alexey Pajitnov, a computer scientist at the Moscow Academy of Science who created Tetris in his spare time. In explaining Tetris's appeal, Brown's choice of a visual medium is very handy. According to Brown, "Alexey had tapped into something in the brain. The nature of the gameplay causes the player's pre-frontal cortex to be stimulated constantly. People remained motivated to continue to play on and on." The game's addictiveness, in other words, is founded in neurochemistry: tasks create tension in the brain, tension that releases once the task is finished.

Tetris is an ambitious work of history in graphic novel form. It approaches the world-conquering game as a dopamine delivery system, a lucrative product and, above all else, an artistic triumph. --Hank Stephenson, bookseller, Flyleaf Books

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