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Tetris: A Metaphor for Nation Building

Posted: February 25th, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »

Tetris Menu

PRESS START!!!!

You keep putting blocks and blocks until everything falls down. That sounds like government. – Me

We here at Baka-TV will dabble once in a while with the witty world of metaphors, approved language and imagery that derives from video games. Tetris is one fine example of its imagery in developing the idea of nation building. You may be thinking to yourself, drugs “This article is a bunch of nonsense! I’m going to go back and watch some more (not) dumb YouTube videos!”, but here me out on this. And this will be a short article. Yes, I don’t have the capacity to type stuff.

I-Shaped and L-Shaped Blocks: Citizenship and Race

taken from wikipedia

taken from Wikipedia

Imagine the blank slate on Tetris as a geographical country. Let’s call this land, “Level 1”. And the first people to arrive is the Red Z-shaped blocks. The settled themselves to the right side of “Level 1”. Then, another block, the Green S-block comes in and settles by the side of the Red blocks. Soon, the T-shaped blocks and the I-shaped blocks come in within this area. Unsettled that the place is packed, this area starts a war and soon, every block on this line dies and disappear. Rinse and repeat, this happens over and over as new blocks come in to take its place.

Does that sound like San Francisco and the Castro to you? Does it sound like how most multicultural nations are formed? I mean, take a look. One block goes in, another goes out once the entire bar is full and filled. This part of Tetris sounds like Castro, a formerly Irish Catholic neighborhood cleared out by the gay community in the 1970s. To see these different blocks, that don’t look like you and sounds like you, congregating in an area, it sounds like a formation of a country. The gridlock of colored, queer, spiritual and working class people, stuck together in a place like, I don’t know… America!? You know, it speaks volumes when they say, “United We Stand, Divided We Fall” and it speaks more when they say, “It Sucks When Something Big Collapses Like Government”.

And The Cradle of Government Collapses: Thank You Z and S-Shaped Blocks

46th President of Video Game Land

15th President of Video Game Land

President Pacman was the 15th President of Video Game Land from 2003 to 2006. His infamous policies mainly dealt with education for ghosts, social security for Pac-kind and the legalization of Pac-dots as a medical drug. He was assassinated by Clyde who attacked him by just floating into him. His final words were his most famous.

Pacman’s Dying Words

Tetris further showed that once governments become overcrowded and overbureaucratic, it fails tremendously. Stuff gets stacked and people get angry. The blocks of people, who are diverse in nature, cannot get along and they are united in seeing one fault: the government. The government already designated housing for the red blocks and the Z-blocks within a three-mile area and the blocks retaliated with a full scale riot.

The building blocks of a country, that founded itself upon justice for all blocks, red and yellow, Z-shaped and I-shaped, was gone. It was on the verge of collapse and it did. It stacked itself too high while solving its economic and racial crisis. Unused lands went to waste as people riot over their rights. It is not how the world should end but the world did, for these blocks.

America is on such a verge, no matter how many times people affirm that race is gone after you had elected an African American president. I’m not for small government and I’m not much for high spending but, Americans need to know that nobody wants to have an end like a Tetris country. Look at the Soviet Union and they were a homogeneous nation. Don’t stack bureaucracy so high that it makes everyone suffer. Be moderate.



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