2

tetris
Rules
Rolf F. N ohr

Abstract: Rules are integral to the functioning of game systems and to the experi-
ences they create; for the puzzle game Tetris, this means aligning blocks into rows
before they fill the screen. But to fully understand how rules breathe life into inter-
active experiences, Rolf F. Nohr contends that we must analyze both explicit, inter-
nal rules and all those implicit, external regulations that color gaming experiences;
playing Tetris is, thus, more than the sum of its blocks.

Certain “classic” video games appear to be characterized by simple, elegant rules.

The success of these titles can often be traced back to a design philosophy that
might be summarized as “less is more.” However, such an assertion is less useful
than it might seem for the way it elides historically specific technological limita-
tions and industrial design practices. Similarly, aphorisms that a game is “easy to
learn, hard to master” or “easy to pick up, hard to put down” reflect a commonly
held view that better games are those with fewer formal rules and regulations.
This design maxim of “less is more” could also help explain the enduring suc-
cess of the puzzle game Tetris. First developed in 1984 by Alexey Pajitnov at the
Dorodnicyn Computing Centre of the Academy of Science of the USSR in Mos-
cow, Tetris is a video game marked by aesthetic simplicity and an elegant rule
set. However, a closer look at this popular game reveals layers of rules—internal
and external—that determine how it is played and explain its continued success
across platforms and decades.
It may seem strange to use Tetris to explore the concept of rules. This particular
game, after all, gives players relatively limited options when it comes to manag-
ing their falling tetrominoes (shapes consisting of four squares) within its fixed,
two-dimensional playfield. The player can move descending puzzle pieces left or

21
22 Rolf F. N oh r

right and perform quick drops, and the shapes may also be rotated clockwise and
counterclockwise. The pleasures of Tetris are borne out of dealing expeditiously
with these limited options in a limited timeframe. Level after level, the game in-
creases in difficulty as the falling tetrominoes descend ever more rapidly. Com-
plete the lines by moving shapes left, right, down, and around. What else is there
to know? This is a true but incomplete picture. Indeed, there are additional lay-
ers of significance hidden in the on- and off-screen regulations that engender its
gripping gameplay.
The initial spread of Tetris in the West is owed to its inclusion in the first
Microsoft Windows Entertainment Pack and to its popularity on the Nintendo
Game Boy handheld system, both released in 1989 (see figure 2.1).1 On the back
cover of the Nintendo Game Boy packaging, the following instructions appear:
“Beams, boxes, zig-zags and L-shaped blocks drop down a narrow passage. Feel
your pulse quicken as you spin, shift and align the shapes for a perfect fit. It’s
challenging and demands split second decision!”2 Simplifying this marketing jar-
gon we might say, “Avoid gap in line for high score.” If this sounds familiar, it is
because it is a variation of the well-known inscription appearing on Atari’s first
PONG arcade machine of 1972: “Avoid missing ball for high score.” One could
argue that it isn’t necessary to know more than this single rule to play Tetris or
PONG before it. Of course, such a functionalist view of rules reduces a game to
those parameters that determine a win condition. But games are more than win-
ning and losing, as the chapters in this anthology attest. Moreover, a game’s man-
ifest rules of play are accompanied by a number of other, often far less obvious
regulations and expectations that shape that experience, a myriad of internalized
(and not-so-obvious) social and cultural codes that orient a player to mediated
rule sets, shaping their gameplay and that of others. Analyzing the rules that give
rise to gameplay reveals a host of cultural values, design beliefs, and social mores.
The word rule possesses at least three definitional inflections: (1) a guideline,
convention, standard, or regulation (“Whoever cheats, is out”), (2) a social regu-
larity (“Don’t go to school naked”), and (3) a predictable phenomenon (“When
you let go of this crate, it will fall to the ground”). Although game rules are most
frequently associated with the first meaning—that of a guideline or standard—
analyzing game rules should also include a consideration of the latter under-
standings. For the moment, let us define game rules as a “set of socially agreed-
upon instructions.”
The idea of the rule-as-instruction is closely intertwined with notions of play.3
Indeed, differing understandings of play invariably affect the relative value of
rules. For instance, the free play of little kids playing “Cowboys and Indians”
or “Princess Teatime” is perceived as possessing an emancipatory ethos because
young people are able to interact playfully with the world through so-called trial
 Tetris 23

actions. Young creatures of many species—humans and animals alike—develop

valuable life skills through playful trial actions without fear of consequences. Just
because play is recreational doesn’t mean that it’s not educational.
The concept of liberating play—which is typical of children’s emergent games
such as “tag”—stands in opposition to the procedurally and mechanistic nature of
strict game rules. The idealized play of children presumes that gamic actions are
free from worldly consequences. Or, as cultural sociologist Johan Huizinga puts it,
“[a]ll play moves and has its being within a play-ground marked off beforehand
either materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course. The arena, the
card-table, the magic circle . . . , are all in form and function play-grounds, i.e. for-
bidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain.
All are temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance
of an act apart.”4 The “bang-you-are-dead” of children’s play does not end in some-
one actually dropping dead. This emergent and dynamic “rule” is, in actuality, the
communicative management of the play situation itself, one that is integral to the
open-endedness of a game’s variability. Tetris, therefore, can be understood as a
liberating game insofar as playing Tetris has no consequences in real life.
But the seemingly borderless horizons of free play are colonized by rules so as
to codify reliable and reproducible game structures: chess uses the same board;
basketball uses the same size hoop; poker depends on the standard 52-card deck.
Game rules serve as a foundational shorthand for justifying and legitimizing
player actions. One who plays Tetris to create beautifully complex patterns as an
expression of free play and not to clear the screen of its multishaped tetrominoes
is no longer playing Tetris according to the stated rules.5 Thus, rules are closely
associated with ethical, communicative, and psychosocial processes dealing with
what is deemed to be socially proper and improper behaviors. This negotiation
is already practiced in children’s play. Children do not just play “Cowboys and
Indians.” They spend a significant amount of time discussing the interpretation or
exegesis of rules: “I’ve hit you; you’re dead; you have to fall over!” and “No, I’ve
got this super magic coat protecting me from your bullets!”
Much of our current understanding of game rules is characterized by the
work of Johan Huizinga, who was quoted earlier. His anthropological theory of
the Homo ludens—“man the player”—sees the game as a voluntary activity that
unfolds within set boundaries of space and time. Rules not only confine games
to specific spaces and times, they also determine the course and character of the
game; to wit, Tetris takes place on a two-dimensional grid of about 10 spaces wide
by 20 squares high, and the game is over when a tetromino breaches the top line
of the game field. If we were to characterize the dramaturgy of Tetris’s action we
might say that it is generally wave-shaped, with ebbs and flows reflecting the dy-
namic tension of eliminating rows of shapes that grow in number until a sufficient
24 Rolf F. N oh r

number have been eliminated, thereby completing the level, or until they over-
whelm the player’s screen ending the game (e.g., its dramatic climax or catharsis).
Rules constitute the official parameters by which one can win within the game’s
“possibility space.”6 Rules likewise limit the player’s range of action; one can’t con-
veniently set the falling tetrominoes aside when they don’t fit. The existential ne-
cessity of rules is often in conflict with the playability and the player exercising
his or her agency within the emergent and contingent field of choices. Rules, af-
ter all, are guidelines for action; they are not actions proper, meaning that play-
ers ultimately decide what they can do within a gamic space, sometimes rules be
damned, including breaking, quitting, ignoring, and cheating (as Steven Conway
and Kelly Bergstrom discuss elsewhere in this book). This brings us to a problem
of defining rules using Huizinga’s formulation. His distinction is based on a clear
separation between the game as a “magic circle” of play and the non–game world.
However, such a distinction is only conditionally maintained for the video game.
Philosopher John R. Searle strikes an important and useful distinction between
constitutive and regulative rules.7 Constitutive rules are those that enable actions.
Without these types of rules, the game and its competition between players could
not exist. Constitutive rules are negotiated, are based on agreement, and are ex-
plicitly stated.
Searle’s regulative rules, on the other hand, are the sometimes ambiguous and
implicit standards that structure intersubjective societal cooperation. They are
closely connected to a society’s “common sense” and are, for the most part, invis-
ible and naturalized. Regulative rules are taken for granted and are social conven-
tions that are accepted without question.
The problem with assessing video games rules is that they only seem to be de-
fined functionally on the basis of their constitutive rules, those predefined terms
for action and computational algorithms that adjudicate player choice. But this
limited viewpoint excludes an essential gameplay act: the rule violation. Breaking
constitutive rules does not lead to the abolition of the “gaming agreement,” but it
is—in fact—part of the game experience (often part of the gaming fun). As Huiz-
inga argues, each game oscillates between the compliance of rules (often judged
by an arbitrator like a referee) and the breaking of constitutive rules to gain some
competitive advantage.
If rules differ in type, so, too, do their perceived violations. The dive in foot-
ball/soccer, the moving screen in basketball, holding in American football—these
are all tactical acts committed with the goal of winning. Cheaters commit these
fouls. Spoilsports, by contrast, are those who rupture the magic circle by break-
ing the regulative rules and shared social contract that cast the holding spell of
gameplay. The spoilsport is the nudist who streaks across the baseball diamond
to disrupt the invisible social membrane between athletes and ourselves, and it is
 Tetris 25

Figure 2.1
Tetris for the Nintendo
Game Boy.

the older sister who reminds her younger brother and his dice-wielding friends
that they are not intrepid dungeon adventurers on the hunt for riches.
Rules are powerful things. Together, explicitly stated constitutive rules that are
inscribed into the functional operation of the game as a technology, and all those
implicit social regulations that help determine how a game is negotiated by players,
have the combined effect of naturalizing and normalizing a game’s metaphysics.
Together, rules create the impression of a hermetically sealed autonomous world.
In the nonnarrative universe of Tetris, certain questions go unanswered. Why do
the tetrominoes always fall down? What exactly spawns the blocks? Where do they
go after they’ve been aligned? Rules have a way of erasing that which lies beyond
the field of play, just as it normalizes actions within the game space.
The rigid system of rules that delimit player agency would seemingly foreclose
the possibility of locating liberating play in such games. Indeed, the presence of
constitutive and regulative rules tamp down opportunities for open-ended play. If
one evaluates games only by their sacrosanct rule sets or by the determinations
of eagle-eyed referees, the medium would be an oppressive one. And this op-
pression would be enhanced by the obvious rigidity of the technical medium on
which the game takes place: the computer.
But, of course, we know that there is cheating and free play in video games de-
spite all the technical and social prohibitions to the contrary. Thus, a possible solu-
tion to this problem of where to find freedom in games, even in one as seemingly
proscriptive as Tetris, is to conceptualize a space of rules outside and beyond the
26 Rol f F. N oh r

limits of the game itself. If we push beyond these conventional boundaries of

technology and sociology, we may arrive at a new sense of gaming freedom.
Let’s begin with “violations” of constitutive rules. On one hand, video games
are perceived as regulated activities in algorithmically structured spaces: a square,
two-by-two-shaped tetromino only fits in a two-unit-wide gap. On the other
hand, the calculated tactical foul is part of the video game landscape. The internet
abounds with sites cataloging hints, cheat codes, and walkthrough tutorials; they
are an integral part of gaming communities. Using a cheat code to best Tetris’s
unrelenting waterfall of shapes is not the overriding of a stated rule but an im-
manent possibility in the source code itself. Without leaving the fixed framework
of the game, the player uses code in a more effective way: an unofficial hotkey
slows the rate of falling cubes; an erase code deletes an inconvenient tetromino or
allows a player to select a better shape.
The “violation” of the regulatory rules is similarly more open than it would
initially appear. The unconventional ways gamers repurpose their gameplay (and
that of others)—effectively deviating from mainstream views of how a game
should be played—is most obvious in sandbox-style games with large worlds; Te-
tris makes for an admittedly bad example on this point. The degrees of spatial
freedom and player choice in games such as Grand Theft Auto V (Rockstar North,
2013), Fallout 4 (Bethesda Game Studios, 2015), and Minecraft (Mojong, 2011)
encourage a wide range of regulative action. For example, members of “trick
jumping” communities organize choreographed stunts. The machinima scene re-
purposes recorded gameplay to produce short films in a variety of genres (see
Lowood’s chapter in this volume on the history of this form). All these instances
of play involve the breaking of constitutive and regulatory rules. These examples
may be regarded as atypical player behavior, yet they are nevertheless expressive
actions that deviate from the presumed norms regarding the way games are “sup-
posed” to be played. Whereas rules are binary, play is a spectrum. This is just as
true for nonnarrative, two-dimensional puzzle games as it is for narrative, three-
dimensional sandbox titles.
The arcade classic PONG may better illustrate the extent to which Searle’s
rule binary explains the contextual dimensions of play in video games. The
imperative—“Avoid missing ball for high score”—is only one of three regulating
sentences appearing on the front of the original arcade machine. The three-part
inscription reads: “Deposit Quarter. Ball will serve automatically. Avoid missing
ball for high score.”8
By unpacking these simple commands, one finds a series of more socially em-
bedded values: video games are economic goods that activate only after a pay-
ment (“deposit quarter”), which then initiates an automated logic (“ball will serve
automatically”), all of which aims to hide a computational artifice and history
 Tetris 27

of design to arrive at a perception of great simplicity and effectiveness (“avoid

missing ball for high score”). Game histories too often forget the first two rules
of PONG even though they are essential for its operation. Thus, taking rules seri-
ously means more than reciting them; it means excavating deeper levels of mean-
ing that they attempt to normalize or elide.
To conclude, rules and regulations shape video games and gaming experiences.
Some rules are quite visible to players; others are not. While playing Tetris we
tend to recognize the obvious, constitutive rules: adjust every falling block to fill
empty spaces below to clear the lines. The invisible rules of Tetris—“You have to
do something otherwise you will lose,” or convincing oneself “this exacting form
of gameplay is, in fact, not work”—are operative but exist outside the formal con-
tours of the gaming technology. It is only by critically examining the multiple
layers of meaning that one can understand how regimes of rules—as expanded
systems of internal and external regulations—play with gamers just as they play
with games.
In addition to the gameplay rules, we must also attend to the more transpar-
ent discursive or design rules that dictate the kinds of games that get canonized
as “classics” and those that are lost to history (i.e., those games labeled as classics
because of their simple rules). Without opening a discussion about the canoniza-
tion of games, it is worth asking ourselves if the normative evaluation of games is
too often guided by the ensemble of visible rules? For certain kind of games (and
players) the “less is more” paradigm seems to be a qualitative argument. Perhaps
a step toward a nuanced game literacy would be to develop a sense for the pres-
ence of invisible rules. In doing so, we can recognize that even Tetris, for all its
celebrated simplicity, may hide more rules than it reveals.

Notes
1 For a detailed explanation of the (more than exciting) history of the development and re-
lease of Tetris, see Dan Ackerman, The Tetris Effect: The Game that Hypnotized the World
(New York: Public Affairs, 2016).
2 Luke Hackett, “Tetris Gameboy Box Art,” Super Luigi Brothers, www.superluigibros.com.
3 For an elaborated differentiation between different forms of play and game, see Roger
Caillois, Man, Play, and Games (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1961).
4 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Boston, MA: Bea-
con Press, 1955 [1938]), 10.
5 For the rich array of activities that surround gameplay, see James Newman, Playing with
Videogames (London and New York: Routledge, 2008).
6 For a detailed discussion of the concepts of possibility, choice, rules, and narrations, see
Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2004): chap. 26.
28 Rolf F. N oh r

7 John R. Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1969).
8 PONG Museum, http://pongmuseum.com.

Further Reading
Consalvo, Mia. Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2007.
Juul, Jesper. Half Real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2005.
Salen, Katie, and Eric Zimmerman. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2004.