“The blocks didn’t fall right” — Something did not work out as it should have
Tetris is one of the most played games of all time. The player is up against a (pseudo) random generator that determines what kind of “block” will be the next to fall down. And when the stones do not fall right, there is little else for the player to do than taking it with pride and trying to close the gap later on. (Or playing in a way that no matter what block should fall, there will always be a place for it, right!)
Tetris has been described to depict life already in many cases. It’s time to shake of the novelty of this comparison and just use it as an idiom as often as possible.
Interestingly, newer variants of Tetris include their own story, with anthropomorphic cubes called “Minos” and the blocks themselves called “Tetrions” … However, this effort never catched on because these stories take away too much of associative potential. Tetris serves better as a projection ground for real life than for for Roger Dean type fantasy worlds.
Update: After seeing it quoted “the blocks didn’t fall right” instead of “the stones didn’t fall right” i started to believe that “blocks” is the more correct word and changed this post’s title and content.
I feel like this should be “blocks” not “stones.” Honestly, I’ve never heard “stones” used as a synonym for Tetriminos.
Dean, thanks for the comment! Maybe it’s a euro thing calling them “stones”?
Are there more expressions for these elements lots of video games are made of? (The German word is “Klötzchen”.)
How to Talk in the 21st Century - Idioms…
Probably more than anybody else, we here at DeadOn believe in the power of pop culture. When I recently came across a couple of phrases I had never heard over at Idioms - How to talk in the 21st Century, I thought I should share them with the DeadOn …
i’m late in this discussion, sorry. you probably have heard of the “tetris effect” that describes the influence the playing of a game can have on your daily mental states, choices and actions. interestingly, the french entry on wikipedia theorizes the “tetris effect” at another level: the application of natural selection to artificial intelligence. it’s sometimes better to choose an okay solution to a problem (heuristics) that comes quick to mind than to spend a long time finding the exact solution (algorithmics).
so it gives a kind of positivistic attitude to the expression you proposes: yeah in the end it doens’t work perfectly, but until then, we had fun piling up the blocks (we say “bloc” in french), and at least we accumulated points! and maybe new species will come out of the wrongness (game o’ life style?).
it’s too bad you don’t feed this blog anymore…