After 13-year-old Willis Gibson became the primary human to beat the unique Nintendo version of Tetris, he dedicated his special win to his father, who passed away in December 2023.
The Oklahoma teen beat the sport by defeating level after level until he reached the “kill screen” – that’s, the moment when the Tetris artificial intelligence taps out in exhaustion, stopping play because its designers never wrote the code to advance further. Before Gibson, the one other player to beat the sport’s AI was one other AI.
For any parent who has despaired over their children sinking countless hours into video games, Gibson’s victory over the cruel geometry of Tetris stands as a bracing corrective.
Despite the stereotypes, most gamers are anything but lazy. And they’re anything but mindless.
The world’s top players can sometimes function reminders of the perfect in us, with memorable achievements that range from the heroic to the inscrutably weird.
The perfect run
“Speedrunning” is a preferred gaming subculture during which players meticulously optimize routes and exploit glitches to finish, in a matter of minutes, games that normally take hours, from the tightly constrained, run-and-gun motion game Cuphead to the sprawling role-playing epic Baldur’s Gate 3.
In top-level competition, speedrunners strive to match the time of what’s known as a “TAS,” or “tool-assisted speed run.” To determine the TAS time, players use game emulators to choreograph a theoretically perfect playthrough, advancing the sport one frame at a time to find out the fastest possible time.
Success requires punishing precision, flawless execution and years of coaching.
The major speedrunning milestones are, like Olympic races, marked by mere fractions of a second. The urge to speedrun likely sprouts from an innate human eager for perfection – and a uniquely twenty first century compulsion to best the robots.
A Twitch streamer who goes by the username Niftski is currently the human who has come closest to achieving this androidlike perfection. His 4-minute, 54.631-second world-record speedrun of Super Mario Bros. – achieved in September 2023 – is just 0.35 seconds shy of a flawless TAS.
Watching Niftski’s now-famous run is a dissonant experience. Goofy, retro, 8-bit Mario jumps imperturbably over goombas and koopa troopas with the long-lasting, cheerful “boink” sound of his hop.
Meanwhile, Niftski pants as his anxiety builds, his heart rate – tracked on screen through the livestream – peaking at 188 beats per minute.
When Mario bounces over the ultimate big turtle on the finish line – “boink” – Niftski erupts into screams of shock and repeated cries of “Oh my God!”
He hyperventilates, struggles for oxygen and eventually sobs from exhaustion and joy.
The largest world and its longest pig ride
This list couldn’t be complete without an achievement from Minecraft, the revolutionary video game that has develop into the second-best-selling title in history, with over 300 million copies sold – second only to Tetris’ 520 million units.
Minecraft populates the video game libraries of grade-schoolers and has been used as an academic tool in university classrooms. Even the British Museum has held an exhibition dedicated to the sport.
Minecraft is often known as a sandbox game, which implies that gamers can create and explore their very own virtual worlds, limited only by their imagination and a couple of easy tools and resources – like buckets and sand, or, within the case of Minecraft, pickaxes and stone.
So what are you able to do within the Minecraft playground?
Well, you’ll be able to ride on a pig. The Guinness Book of World Records marks the farthest distance at 414 miles. Or you’ll be able to collect sunflowers. The world record for that’s 89 in a single minute. Or you’ll be able to dig a tunnel – but you’ll must make it 100,001 blocks long to edge out the present record.
My personal favorite is a collective, ongoing effort: a sprawling, global collaboration to recreate the world on a 1:1 scale using Minecraft blocks, with blocks counting as one cubic meter.
At their best, sandbox games like Minecraft can bring people closer to the joyful and healthily pointless play of childhood – a restorative escape from the anxious, utility-driven planning that dominates a lot of maturity.
The galaxy’s biggest collaboration
The Halo 3 gaming community participated in a bloodier version of the collective effort of Minecraft players.
The game, which pits humans against an alien alliance often known as the Covenant, was released in 2007 to much fanfare.
Whether they were playing the single-player campaign mode or the net multiplayer mode, gamers world wide began seeing themselves as imaginary participants in a world cause to avoid wasting humanity – in what got here to be often known as the “Great War.”
They organized round the clock campaign shifts, while sharing strategies in nearly 6,000 Halo wiki articles and 21 million online discussion posts.
Halo developer Bungie began tracking total alien deaths by all players, with the 10 billion milestone reached in April 2009.
Game designer Jane McGonigal recalls with awe the community effort that went into that Great War, citing it as a transcendent example of the elemental human desire to work together and to develop into an element of something larger than the self.
Bungie maintained a collective history of the Great War in the shape of “personal service records” that memorialized each player’s contributions – medals, battle statistics, campaign maps and more.
The archive beggars comprehension: According to Bungie, its servers handled 1.4 petabytes of knowledge requests by players in a single nine-month stretch. McGonigal notes, by means of comparison, that every thing ever written by humans in all of recorded history amounts to 50 petabytes of knowledge.
Gamification versus gameful design
If you’re mystified by the behavior of those gamers, you’re not alone.
Over the past decade, researchers across a spread of fields have marveled on the dedication of gamers like Gibson and Niftski, who commit themselves without criticism to what some might see as punishing, pointless and physically grueling labor.
How could this level of dedication be applied to more “productive” endeavors, they wondered, like education, taxes or exercise?
From this research, an industry centered on the “gamification” of labor, life and learning emerged. It giddily promised to vary people’s behaviors through using extrinsic motivators borrowed from the gaming community: badges, achievements, community scorekeeping.
The concept caught fire, spreading all over the place from early childhood education to the fast-food industry.
Many game designers have reacted to this trend like Robert Oppenheimer on the close of the eponymous movie – aghast that their beautiful work was used, as an example, to pressure Disneyland Resort laborers to load laundry and press linens at anxiously hectic speeds.
Arguing that the gamification trend misses entirely the magic of gaming, game designers have as a substitute began promoting the concept of “gameful design.” Where gamification focuses on useful outcomes, gameful design focuses on fulfilling experiences.
Gameful design prioritizes intrinsic motivation over extrinsic incentives. It embraces design elements that promote social connection, creativity, a way of autonomy – and, ultimately, the sheer joy of mastery.
When I feel of Niftski’s meltdown after his record speedrun – and Gibson’s, who also began hyperventilating in shock and almost passed out – I feel of my very own children.
I wish for them such moments of ecstatic, prideful accomplishment in a world that sometimes seems starved of joy.
This article was originally published at theconversation.com
