I’m going to get the video games bit out of the way now, so that I can get back to the original point of these posts.

I finished the last post talking about how a Hard (Packing) Problem can be made into a slow, time consuming, puzzle. Tetris turned the same type of puzzle into an arcade game. A deep analysis of how that was done is something I’d like to return to at some point, but it mainly comes down to incremental rewards for good moves – small areas of perfect packing are rewarded with a little more time – just enough time to fix areas of pretty good packing.

I assume Tetris wasn’t designed to be a ‘gateway game’ – to lure the player into the world of packing puzzles. It simply uses mathematics as a rich source of complexity, for fun.

And, really, that was the point I was trying to make.

There are a lot of hard problems which can be used as a source of complexity for puzzles and games. And, since many of them are geometric, you have a good idea what they’ll look like before you start.

- Oh, the reason this post is in two parts is because I was trying to find a reference to the polyomino puzzle toy which is supposed to have inspired Tetris. Couldn’t find one, sorry.