Tetris Effect is one of the most surprising VR games I’ve played in so far. It’s taken a classic 2D puzzler, and re-imagined it into a multi-modal experience in VR with dynamic difficulty synchronized to music, three layers of haptics, and immersive virtual environments that change progress through a sequential journey. Enhance’s Tetris Effect was originally released for the PlayStation VR on November 9, 2018, and a version for the Oculus Quest was released on May 14, 2020. I’ve played it each day since the Quest release, and I’m really impressed with the range of difficulty within the various effects modes, especially with the Master Level, which apparently has only ever had one person in the world ever complete before.
I had a chance to sit down to sit down with Enhance’s Mark MacDonald to unpack the experiential design and backstory for how Tetris Effect came about. He’s the Vice President of Production & Biz Dev of Enhance in Tokyo, Japan, and so he helped to oversee many aspects of the development process. He confesses that it’s not an intuitive leap that Tetris would make an amazingly compelling VR title, but despite not checking off many of the normal boxes, it’s managed to create a very compelling multi-modal experience that fuses visuals, sound, and haptics inspired by the concept of synesthesia. He talks about the experiential design process, some of the deeper intentions of the game, and how Tetris is a very difficult game to try to tune. After sinking more than 70 hours into the game over the past month, then I can attest that they’ve been able to create a surprisingly compelling immersive experience that has some new twists and turns into one of the best-selling games of all time.
LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE OF THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST
Here’s a Twitter Thread where I shared some of my first impressions:
I've had a chance to dive into Tetris Effect on the Quest, & it's one of the most addictive combinations of gameplay matched with music + haptics + ambient environmental modulation.
It's just so viscerally satisfying & played for hours & hours this past week.
Highly recommended! https://t.co/gNhfh5VPQ2— Kent Bye (Voices of VR) (@kentbye) May 14, 2020
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to The Voices of VR Podcast. So in today's episode, I'm going to be doing a deep dive into Tetris Effect. So Tetris Effect was originally launched for the PlayStation VR on November 9th, 2018. And then on May 14th, 2020, there was a version that was released on the Quest. So this has been a very surprising game for me. I didn't expect to be into it that much. I guess I've played it a lot when I was growing up on the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Game Boy, but there is something about getting into this flow state and how nuanced and complex the game of Tetris can be when you start to really dive into it. So at this point, I've spent about 72 hours playing the game, which is certainly one of the top VR games that I've played. And I'm going to be talking to Mark McDonald. He's the vice president of production and business development there at Enhance in Tokyo. And we talk about a lot of the different game design and tuning and creating this whole experience and a little bit more of the backstory of how it all came about. So that's what we'll be covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Mark happened on May 17th, 2020 in Portland, Oregon, and it was May 18th in Tokyo, Japan. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:28.837] Mark MacDonald: My name's Mark McDonald. I'm a vice president of production and biz dev at enhance here in Tokyo, Japan. And I basically do a little bit of everything. Like we're a really, really small shop. So my title. is pretty broad, but what I do is even broader. We all do all kinds of things, you know, right from my boss, who is a Tetsuya Mizuguchi, ex Sega designer, and then more recently, who's really been doing a lot of stuff in VR. You know, even he is doing stuff like payroll and ordering things, and we're setting up desks and stuff like that. We're about 30 people. We were about 15 people up until recently. We're a pretty small shop. And yeah, we're big, big believers in VR. So our first game as a studio was Res Infinite. Originally for the PlayStation VR, we basically formed the studio to do that project. And the timing of that was for PlayStation VR launch. And so that's been like a core tenant of the studio is very much like emerging technology. Like we're very interested in the edge and what's next and kind of what's just about to happen and kind of what's the latest what's happening. And VR is very much that for us. AR also is interesting to us. MR or XR, wherever you call the blanket term, all realities are interesting to us. So back to myself, I'll do everything from helping concept the game along with the designer, the director and Mizuguchi-san to pitch the game to potential partners, for example, PlayStation or the Epic Store or Microsoft or Oculus. Then once we switch into production, my title on the game itself in the case of Tetris Effect and with Rez was producer, but Japanese producer is a little bit different. The meaning here in Japan is a little bit different It's kind of a little bit of everything from doing approvals, to figuring out the budget, to basically, you know, checking in the game every once in a while, you're not there day to day doing all the fixes and changes. That's more like the director's job. But you are kind of having a large degree like oversight, and then doing PR, marketing, stuff like this interviews. So yeah, long answer to say, basically a little bit of a little bit of everything.
[00:04:05.833] Kent Bye: Well, so this past week, the Tetris effect came out on Oculus Quest, and I don't actually have a PlayStation VR. So I didn't play it when it first came out. And I've only played Resident Infinite at SIGGRAPH when it had like a full body haptic suit that they had there.
[00:04:19.477] Mark MacDonald: And it was like... The synesthesia suit. Yes.
[00:04:21.938] Kent Bye: Did you get a chance to try that? Yeah, I did. It was pretty amazing, actually. So was it the same team that created the synesthesia suit?
[00:04:28.697] Mark MacDonald: Actually, yeah. So the same team created both games. So Rez Infinite and now Tetris Effect. The Cinestasia suit was partially the game development team, but it's partially like a separate hardware tactile experiences team. It's a collaboration with us and a couple other companies. But then again, so are our games. We like to collaborate with other companies and that's how we stay small. So a lot of the same people though. And yeah, the two games were definitely the same team on both.
[00:04:56.714] Kent Bye: Well, my very brief demo from Res Infinite was that the haptics that were in that full body synesthesia suit and playing the game were such that it was really creating this unconscious reward system so that it made me feel more driven to do well in the game. And I feel like in a lot of ways, playing Tetris Effect, doing a lot of similar things with the haptics and the music and the integration. So maybe you could just take a step back because I first played Tetris a lot growing up on the Nintendo Entertainment System and then on the Game Boy in 1989. So I had a lot of hours logged into this game. And what I was maybe the most impressed with was this feels like in some ways a bit of a reimagining of the core mechanics or you're adding new things. And so maybe you could take us back to this moment where you were like, hey, let's take this classic game and try to see what happens when you put it into VR.
[00:05:50.088] Mark MacDonald: Sure, yeah. So it's an interesting thing. You know, my reaction when I was told that Mizuguchi-san and our director, Ishihara-san, who was also the director on the new bespoke made for VR section of REZ Infinite, which is called Area X. So REZ existed, just quick background, REZ existed as a game, you know, back in the PlayStation 2 era. And then it was remastered for VR plus a new level was created. especially for VR as experiment of what to do in VR. First time I was told, Hey, you know, we also want to do Tetris in VR. I was like, Oh, wow. Okay. What's that going to be like? Like, am I going to be a block falling? Is it going to be 3d? Am I going to be grabbing them with my hands and moving them around? And then they showed me a like a visualization that they had made of what it was going to be like. And it was not that it was Tetris. It was like, wait, this is, Tetris, there's just a Tetris matrix that they call it the play field basically there. And then there was all this stuff going on around it. And as the pieces fell, it was making music and they were using at that time, just for the sake of the imagining the video, the previz, they were using, you know, a bunch of licensed tracks that were evocative of kind of the vibe that they were going for. So there was like some Bjork in there, there were some like really great Music, but it was like well, we're not gonna be able to have that music like this looks really cool But I'm not seeing it in 3d at all. I'm not seeing in a headset. I'm just seeing it on a laptop And so I'm kind of like well, yeah, okay Like but is this gonna be that exciting really like in VR? I don't I don't really know but then we got into prototyping and Once I saw it on the headset with the music with everything in there I got it. And so to your point, it's basically saying, what if we take Tetris and make it this kind of, try to make it like a musical, emotional experience. Like, and I laugh even as I say it, because it sounds so pretentious. It sounds so ridiculous. Like, hey, we're gonna, by the act of playing Tetris, this puzzle game of lining up blocks, we want you to get emotional, you know, we want to make you feel things and remember things and aspire to things. And like all of these crazy, like greeting card emotions, like we want to have you have this whole experience, you know, the single player game, the main single player game is called journey mode. And we want you to have this journey, like this emotional journey. And that was kind of Mizuguchi's the thrust of his thesis behind the game was that we can take Tetris, this kind of language that everyone speaks, right? It's like, who doesn't know how to play Tetris? And if you don't, like, how long does it take you to figure it out? Like, you know, everybody's grandma, a lot of grandmas play Tetris, kids play Tetris, anybody can play Tetris and enjoy it. So let's use this common language And we don't have to rethink that common language. We're going to add to it. We're going to put some twists and spin on it, but let's take that common language and use it as a vehicle to deliver this emotional journey through sites and music and stuff like that. And so, yeah, so that was his thesis. And once I saw it, I came at it like I think a lot of people did, especially people in the VR that specialize in VR. It's almost like there are these kind of boxes that you have to check, right? It's like, okay, Is it fully 3D? Okay. Yes. Are you seated or standing? Yes. Okay. Are you walking around? Are you using your fingers and hands and grabbing things and manipulating things? And it's like, really? You're not checking that box and you're not checking that box. What, like, is this really special in VR? Does it need VR? And we did put a 2D version out. You can play it on PC on Epic Store or the PlayStation version. You can play it in 2D, but the way to play it has always been in VR. Like that is how the game was designed. It's how it was imagined. We feel like it's the proper way to really experience everything that that game has to offer. And I think the reception that it's gotten, the reviews that it's gotten, the things we see on Twitter and the emails that we get and the things like that, I think has very much validated what Mizuguchi-san thought was, which is that you don't need to be doing every different box. You don't need full finger control and you don't need to be manipulating the pieces in some weird way to deliver a special kind of different kind of experience to people just using Tetris as like the vehicle to do it.
[00:10:42.787] Kent Bye: Yeah, at GDC this year, there was a presentation of somebody who was making the argument that you could look at any puzzle game and see it through the lens of narrative. And, you know, this gets back to this old debate within game design theory, which is the ludology versus narratology. And I feel like Tetris is kind of like the paradigmatic example of the ludologist saying that this is just rules. It's just like simple puzzles that don't have any narrative elements, but yet I feel like the narratology is that building and releasing of the tension and the drama. And I feel like by adding in the music and the world environment around you, you're able to build and release that tension in a way that is able to kind of bridge this gap between this debate, where you actually are able to kind of fuse these things together. And I was actually surprised because I wasn't expecting it. that it was going to work that well but just in ways that you are able in the journey mode to in a point of the music that has a big release you maybe are building tension by making it faster and then slowing it down and so you're able to build and release tension by amping up the difficulty level of how fast things are moving or you're having blocks that move faster down or you know there's different ways in which that you're making it harder that the classic tetras the blocks are falling down at the same speed the whole time there's no kind of modulation of that. But that I think was a great way of just all the different ways that you're finding to take the essential puzzle mechanics of Tetris, but to meld it with the music and the environmental design and to really fuse those two together to build and release that tension.
[00:12:17.977] Mark MacDonald: Yeah, what you're talking about is, you know, you got it. Exactly. Like, it's always so gratifying where it's like, yeah, yes, okay. You get it. You get it. Exactly. It was, one of the things that we discovered in playtesting was that one of the things that we were hoping is that it would make it easier for people to feel quote-unquote into the zone which we ended up naming a mechanic the zone mechanic because so much of the game was ended up being really designed around let's get that feeling of people being in the zone and so normally in my experience to get feeling in the zone is a feeling that only comes like when I was playing Quake back in the day, and I played it 40 hours a week or something. Eventually, after half a year of playing a Quake, it just becomes second nature. You're not even thinking about it. And you just, when you get into the zone, you're just feeling it. Everything's happening automatically. It's this amazing feeling, right? I've gotten that feeling writing before also. It's like flow state is another word that people call for. And it's just like, It's almost like it's coming from somewhere and it's just passing through you. And it's an amazing feeling. Like you stop conscious thought, I'm going to move this brick over here and put it over here. And it's just flow. It's just, you're feeling the music and watching the visuals and stuff like that. And the game was designed around bringing that state about for hopefully for everybody, or at least making it easier for people. And a big part of the research that we did Mizuguchi-san and Ichihara-san really focused on that talked about, so what is that flow state or getting in the zone? And a lot of it is this middle area between excitement and relaxation. And so there's like some research that shows that if you're modulating back and forth between those two areas, the two mental states, that it's more likely to bring about that kind of feeling. And that was a big, part of the inspiration behind what you're talking about, which is that the difficulty kind of ramps up and then comes back down and ramps up and comes back down. And it should match the mood and the music. And a lot of times it matches this stage, but sometimes even within the same stage, it'll go one way and the next. And yeah, that typical Tetris game, you start, the blocks are falling slow and then slowly it ramps up, ramps up, ramps up, and then it just gets impossible. And eventually whatever your skill level is, you're gonna back out of it. And that experience is in there, in different modes and master mode and some of the more classic modes like marathon but for the main game we wanted to give people this feeling of yeah like excitation and then relaxation like pump up pump up pump up tension tension release and hopefully through that kind of also telling a story of sorts a narrative maybe at least about who we are here and I don't like getting too specific about it, because I love that people have their own interpretations of it. But there's definitely thought put into, okay, we want people to think about this. And like, this is kind of like a story beat, almost like you would think of in a traditional narrative or a movie or a game, we wanted there to be this feeling that you had gone somewhere and that it caused you to think about things and that sort of stuff. All of this probably sounds crazy to anybody that hasn't seen any of the game or experienced it. And it's just like, wait, I thought this podcast was about a Tetris game. Is this about a Tetris game or whatever? But hopefully if you see our trailers, if you look at just a little bit of gameplay, it'll make a little more sense. And maybe for some people that doesn't happen and hopefully it's just a good Tetris game for those people. That's fine. If they just enjoy it on a good Tetris game level, we're happy. As long as you're enjoying yourself, we're happy. It's always really gratifying. We're always really happy when people have that kind of deeper experience that it sounds like that you were able to have with it. And yeah, that was definitely a big goal of the project.
[00:16:18.987] Kent Bye: Yeah, I'm going to talk about my journey of the experience. But first, I want to talk about some of the challenges I had. Because as I was growing up playing on the NES, the Nintendo controller is a block, your left hand and right hand are connected. And I feel like with the touch controllers, I feel like my thumb wouldn't naturally know which was up and down. I found myself accidentally dropping the blocks on hard drop so much that it would just, I had to change that control because it was messing me up so much.
[00:16:46.922] Mark MacDonald: I saw you mentioned you changed hard drop, which is, you know, for people who don't know that's just dropping the piece instantly where it's lined up. I saw you mentioned you change that to a trigger.
[00:16:55.724] Kent Bye: Yeah, only also on the normal mode, I put it on the down. Right. But on the expert, I put it to trigger because the expert I was hardly ever pushing it, but I found myself accidentally hitting it so much. And it was like ruining my whole run. So it makes sense. I think Tetris in itself seems like it was designed for a controller that's connected rather than controllers that are disconnected. And you have your hands kind of like in different orientations. So I heard another person have similar issues, but I don't know, like as you were designing this, you know, you have your default settings that are set, you know, you can alter them. But if that's the sort of default mode, as people go into this with their touch controllers, you know, there's support for Bluetooth, Xbox controllers or whatnot. But if you're just going to use the default touch controllers, I feel like that was one of the things that I had the hardest trouble with until I figured out how to tweak the settings for that.
[00:17:44.413] Mark MacDonald: Sure. Yeah. I think the touch controllers are different than your standard controller. Like you mentioned, you can use a standard. Bluetooth controller the first thing that I noticed with the touch controllers is that I felt The vibration even more so than a standard controller and to some people it might even be too much But to me, I was really enjoying it. We put a lot of work into The haptics a lot of work into the vibration for this game. I don't know if you even noticed there's two Separate tracks. There's like a main vibration tracks. Basically. There's like a main vibration track and there's a sub vibration track There's also gameplay has its own set of vibration and then you and the options you can set it to one or the other or both of those are all of them. By default, it's set to all of them. For some people, it can be a bit much starting off, but especially the first time that I played because your hands are separated in the vibration and those touch controllers is pretty substantial, it can be that it was like, Whoa, wow, this is really but then I kind of got into it. And I actually really like it that way. Now. I like it more than the controller now. But to your point about the controls, one of the things that we definitely noticed was that everybody's different with Tetris. So many people have played Tetris already. And they've come in at different times. You know, you came in at NES, which is when I came in. Some people came in with like a PlayStation controller. So some people came in from the mobile phone, game version of it. A lot of people come in from that version of it. People played it on keyboards. So everybody's come in differently. When we launched, I'm trying to remember if we launched, I want to say our original PlayStation 4 launch did not have control customization. But if we didn't, we added it very quickly because we definitely yeah, I couldn't it must not have because we got the feedback from people were like, hey, wait, rotating clockwise and counterclockwise is quote unquote wrong. And the reason it was wrong is because it was different than NES Tetris was 30 years ago, 35 years ago. And so we were like, there's no right answer. So you are correct. When you think of something as wrong, then you're correct. So we're going to fix it. So we updated the game with a lot of other options. People wanted a bunch of different things that have since gone in, but that was one of the big ones, which is, really robust control customization. And so now with all the versions, including the Quest version, it was important for us to have people be able to do what you did and have it be right there in the menu. So when you pull up the menu, a lot of the other things are under larger categories, like gameplay, I think is one of them, and visuals is another. But we wanted customized controls, controls to be right there, because we did know a lot of people were going to be looking for that quickly. So hopefully, if we did something to make it to default, as you liked it, probably a giant swath, maybe a lot more people would come back and be like, Hey, what are you doing? This should be this way, you know, so we just tried to make it as quick and painless as possible for people to be able to customize it to the way they did it. And, you know, try to get the biggest swath as our default controls. So you know, hopefully people aren't like, Screw this game, controls are terrible before they even looked for the control customization in the menu.
[00:21:05.855] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, I wanted to dive into the haptics a little bit, just because I did have that feeling that it was really intense. In fact, sometimes it almost felt like something was broken. It was like buzzing, like almost like an alarm was going off or something, you know, like, like, yeah. And I think I went through at least one or two sets of batteries for the last couple of weeks going through and playing it.
[00:21:26.067] Mark MacDonald: So we get rechargeable. Yeah, you're gonna be playing this game. Yeah, we should. We should make a limited edition. physical bundle that comes with the rechargeable batteries or something for there. for the haptics. Yeah, yeah.
[00:21:38.801] Kent Bye: But I'm curious how like, I'm playing the game and I'm sort of noticing more of the music and the sound and the haptics are sort of like such an unconscious level that I'm often not able to even put language to what's even happening. And so like, what kind of notation or how do you even architect something like that, where you say there's like three levels of the gameplay and the sort of the right two levels. And so how do you have a language? How do you talk about it? How do you notate it? How do you design and architect it?
[00:22:03.601] Mark MacDonald: Sure. So basically that is a person's job. They worked on other things, but there was a blanking on who exactly it was right now. But one person's job in addition to a couple other things was to own the vibration and to customize it for every song. And so those songs changed a lot too in development. And so as much as possible, we waited until the end to put the haptics in, but there's no, great easy shortcut to do it. There's no silver magic bullet. It was just basically trial and error, trial and error, trial and error, which is the same thing that happened with the stages and the music and the zone mechanic, which is a new mechanic that we added for this game. Just prototyping, trying it. Does it work? Cool. What works? What doesn't? Cut it, throw it away. Good. Too much vibration, not enough. Doesn't feel like it's hitting on the beat. not really feeling it. I'm noticing it too much. I'm not noticing it enough. You know, it was just a lot of trial and error. And haptics is another one of those things where my idea of just right could be different than, you know, you could have a hundred people and have 80 different versions of just right. And so that's why we really wanted to give those again, options for people. Some people want to turn it off completely. Some people have it on and then it kind of disappears into the music. I'm like you where when I first started playing, I really noticed it and I noticed it too much. And I thought I was going to have to turn it off. And then I kept playing and played a couple more stages and whatever. And then it just kind of, I got used to, I maybe half got used to it. Half it just really, I lost myself in the game. When I started up the game, I'm putting my producer's hat on. So I'm like, okay, what do we need to change? What's wrong? What's happening? What's going on? And then as time goes on, you just kind of forget it and lose yourself into the game and try to experience it like a player does. And then you still want to jot down notes and stuff when you're noticing things where like, oh, that's really annoying. But good haptics to me do not necessarily stand out. Like they should not be like, oh, wow, this is really buzzing. And I'm gesticulating wildly now with my hands, but like, this is amazing haptics. I'm really, it should just be one more entryway into losing yourself into it's one more sense that is being engaged and synchronized to what you're seeing and what you're hearing. And that's the big goal of the haptics is to just one more way to kind of give you a little nudge into like, hey, stop thinking about that you're sitting in your living room right now and you know, dinner's almost ready and whatever you got work to do or how much homework you have or what time you have to wake up tomorrow. Stop thinking about that stuff and start getting back into your body and just kind of like lose yourself into this experience, hopefully. And so Mizuguchi-san, again, my boss, other producer of the game, kind of the main man behind everything that we do, his whole thing is this concept of synesthesia, which is crossing over between senses, right? So a lot of times in shorthand, we call it hearing colors or seeing sounds. Some people are literally born with this thing called synesthesia, where when they see the letter A, you know, it's always red or If they see the color orange, they hear a tone, or if they hear a tone, they see the color yellow. Basically senses are being crossed over. And so what Yusuke-san loves to do is just that. He's trying to like get all of your senses to kind of mesh and meld and sync with each other. And again, add to that feeling of losing yourself, getting into the zone, just kind of basically blissing out. And vibration is a huge part of that. So yeah, practically, In terms of practical matters. It was just a ton of trial and error, a lot of feedback from us. We did some user tests with users. But, you know, a lot of that too is just like an artist like you're never going to know no matter how many user tests, you do everyone's going to be the bright spot. Exactly. And so you got to go with your gut a bunch. And then also at the end of the day, we try to are kind of get out of jail free card is give users the option in the end if they just want to feel The gameplay, when you drop a piece, that's the only time you feel a beat. You don't want to feel beats to the music, that's fine. If you want to only feel it to the music and not worry about the gameplay, it's gameplay is too much, that's fine. If you want to say to hell with it all, it's distracting me, it's eating my battery, whatever, then you can do that too. You know, at the end of the day, the user is king. So yeah, that's kind of our philosophy on haptics.
[00:26:41.590] Kent Bye: You know, I wanted to share a bit of my own experience of playing this game because, you know, like I said, I first played Tetris back in probably 1985 86 with NES played it a lot, played it even more on the Game Boy 1989 afterwards. but it's been nearly 30 years since I've really played it, right? So I'm a little rusty from where I was back like 30 years ago. And what I loved and really appreciated about this was that there was certain ways in which the gameplay was set up that really pushed me to get back and really up my Tetris game to really get through it. So the journey mode, there's like three to four to five different sections and then your high score is being added up as you pass each of these sections, maybe four or five sections. But as I'm playing, I'm honestly not concerned about my high score. The thing that was really driving me was to see the world that was being revealed and how it was changing and how it was like shifting with the music. I felt like that was such a draw for me. And I don't remember if I played through the entire journey in one playthrough or if I stopped, but I think I may have stopped at some point either to recharge stuff. I remember feeling this craving in my body, like my body was like craving playing the experience again. And I was like, that was surprising because it was like, wow, there was something about the fusion of all of that together of the gameplay, the puzzle solving, the music, the building and releasing the attention, the haptics, the sort of modulation of the world environment. And I found myself, I was like, I want to know what's at the end, I want to know, I feel like it's at this journey. And I feel like, once I complete it, I want to see whatever this journey is that you're going to provide with me, like, kind of like when you finish a game, you want to see what the reward is. And I felt really driven by that.
[00:28:27.399] Mark MacDonald: And I did that. What do you think, just to just to follow up on that? No spoilers, I guess for people, but I'm curious what you thought of the of the ending, like, I guess, both the final level, which I know you talked about, but maybe you can talk about it here. And then also the ending, you know, proper once you
[00:28:43.107] Kent Bye: Well, so, so I would say like, as I was playing through, and this is like, I don't know if this is a critique of the game design, or, yeah, but the very last level, you have to do like 90 lines, it's like a significant amount more than others, maybe three times as many. So the level of difficulty of that was so much higher that I felt like I was kind of cruising along and then just like ran into a brick wall. which, you know, is, there's a part of me that's like, I wish I kind of would have failed more. But at the same time, I was being driven by seeing the world. And then once I got to the final, then it was like, I don't know if I would have quit sooner if it would have been like, I'm right at the end, I have to really up my game to like, really complete it. And so it was like this, super intense pushing myself, and then kind of a blissed out chill journey that I go on afterwards that I thought was, again, you were talking about that, the constant dissonance cycles between the building and releasing of that tension that like, there's a lot of stress and tension, and then it was like a release that felt like, it actually felt really satisfying to complete it.
[00:29:48.545] Mark MacDonald: Cool. Yeah, the, I'm really happy with what they did with the ending. The credits are part of the ending as well. And for the quest version, for a long time, it was a movie because they didn't think that they could do the full 3D version of it justice. And then in the last like two weeks, the team was like, ah, like, we really want to hit this landing. And so they worked their butts off and I'm just super proud of what they pulled off. I'm just, I love our, I love our ending. And then there's a little bit of new music in there. And it, to me, it kind of puts a cap on It's really important that we stick that landing, I think, because it is trying to tell something. And yeah, anyway, I'm proud of that. But so to your point of that last level, so this goes back to, again, like, if you watch a lot of people, I'm guessing you sound like you're actually a really good Tetris player. I don't know what you consider yourself as, but if you're playing on Expert, I can tell you, you're probably top 5, 10% of people that play Tetris.
[00:30:55.515] Kent Bye: Just that you're playing on expert at all. I finished, I finished the X, I did the same thing afterwards. And I, I finished the expert a couple of days ago, but it was hard.
[00:31:05.821] Mark MacDonald: It was really hard. If you finish on expert, you're now into like top 2%. Because I watched, this was something that was really interesting to me as somebody that had played a lot of Tetris games, you know, casually, but never really worked on one, never had to really think about it much more than you would be a player. We brought it to, what would that have been, E3 2018. We announced it that June, right before E3 on World Tetris Day. And then like a week later, people were playing it. And it was the first time people outside of the studio were playing it. And that was an education. Like we had three levels that were not designed at all to be difficult. It was like, let's just make it so everybody can finish the demo. let's just make it super easy. And people could not handle it, like at all. So the fact that it basically goes back to Tetris is a really difficult game to tune, to basically tune the difficulty to, because people are all over the map in skill levels. And especially now with quote unquote guideline Tetris, which is the differences you might've noticed between playing Game Boy or NES Tetris back in the day and Tetris nowadays, you know, you can store one block away, right? And you can swap it back in and the pieces behave differently. They're not as random. There's something called like a Tetris bag where basically you're not going to ever go too long before getting like a long bar, right? In modern Tetris. Back in NES Tetris, it was truly random. Like you could go 500 pieces, you know, it's possible. the odds are against it, but it's possible. It's truly random, like what pieces were going to come out. So that has kind of shorn off some of the rough edges of like the difficulty and kind of brought it a little more like a baseline of what people can expect and how to tune the difficulty. But there are some stages in there up to that final level that even playing on normal, I don't have numbers to back this up, but just based on watching people, levels like Bali Passion, there's a couple levels that we get people cursing on Twitter all the time, where it's like, God, I can't get past this level. Because we wanted it to be that like, challenge, challenge. Okay, you made it. Okay, you're back down. You're safe again. Okay, challenge, challenge. Okay, back down and you made it. And then that final level is the one time we feel okay saying, okay, now you have to really prove it. You have to prove that you've passed these things up until now. you have to really do it. And so, yeah, the line count is higher. It starts off not too bad, but does get intense. And whereas before, up until that point, it gets intense, but if you can survive and clear like 10 lines, it's gonna come back down, usually. Whereas in that final level, it just keeps ramping up. And so that was our final thing where a lot of people are like, really curse that last level, because they don't wanna have that. be challenged, experienced. And then, you know, a lot of them once they get over it, they're like, Oh, that was amazing. Like I had to work for it. I was really challenged or whatever, but, but back to your point. So that's where we wanted again to give users the option. You know, we don't want to advocate our responsibility as game designers and just say, ah, screw it, like make it skill level one. And if they want it harder, they can set it themselves. You know, we wanted to give the most amount of people that being challenged and overcoming, being challenged and overcoming experience as we could. That said, we also wanted to recognize people like, honestly, like yourself, which you might not know it, but I guarantee you, you are in the top 5% of Tetris players. We wanted to give them options and modes and things like expert that they could feel like a little more challenged on. And then that holds through to the effect modes too, not just in the journey, but all of the different modes. there was something called master mode that we literally couldn't even finish ourselves by the time we released the game. We knew it was theoretically possible, right? Like we knew it worked if we did all of our cheats and whatever, we had to make sure that it wasn't buggy or anything like that. But I think there might still only be one person in the world who now works for us. We hired him, by the way, it's kind of a funny story, but I think there's one person in the world that has actually finished master mode, I could be wrong, there might be a second person now.
[00:35:41.526] Kent Bye: I played through all the, these are the effects modes, right? Yes, right. I completed all the effects modes. I did play, the hardest one for me was the mystery mode, actually.
[00:35:50.551] Mark MacDonald: So mystery mode is a challenge, but master mode, you might not even know that master mode is finishable. Like Master Mode starts, yeah, go back and try Master Mode. You probably have gotten, probably got an SS rating, but you can actually also additionally finish it. You can actually like, it stops, the game like throws up its hands. It's like, okay, you win.
[00:36:14.539] Kent Bye: Okay, no, I haven't done that. I think I got scores on each of them and I unlocked the, whatever the award or the achievements.
[00:36:22.521] Mark MacDonald: The one for getting the top, the S rank in all of the different.
[00:36:26.750] Kent Bye: No, it's the just finishing all the effects modes. It was like, okay, okay, it's just gonna get scored on each of each of them, but I did. But so okay, so let's take a step back. So my journey, I went through all of the normal mode. And then I played through the expert mode. And like I said, like when I played through normal, to get to the final level, I had to like up my game just to even finish it. And I felt like for each level of the expert mode was kind of like that just to even get by it And then I got to the end and it took me a couple of days honestly to get through it It was like keep coming back and I finally finished it, but I felt like doing that I felt like okay now I feel like I've like upped my skill level and I went back Then I was able to basically complete a set of three for the first couple of them. Oh nice So without losing all the points. So after I finished the expert mode, then I was like, okay, what are the other modes here? And then, so then there's the whole, the effects modes where it's like these little mini games that have like a slight variation that actually, when I look at it, there's a little bit of like, if you really want to tune your skills, there's certain contexts you go in to be like, okay, now you're just kind of, kind of clear levels here. You're trying to like see the next four blocks. And it's like, when I was playing Tetris, there was a bit of like, I never actually used the store block, just because I'm not familiar with that. I just didn't use it.
[00:37:46.993] Mark MacDonald: And it that's amazing. You finished expert without using the store block.
[00:37:52.111] Kent Bye: Yeah, it just was, it was a bit of like, I have to like have to see the next block that's coming. And it becomes like, it's kind of out, it's my peripheral vision, I can't actually see it. Like, I have to kind of like, intuit it or see it. And like, sometimes there's like a ghost block, and sometimes there's not. And so it's like the challenge of being able to like, place the blocks and to know where they are going. But I feel like in the FX mode, you're able to really expand that out more because there's different modes where you're trying to like, okay, here's the next five blocks and you have to plan out your next five moves. And I was like, okay, that's a whole nother level. But I feel like there's a lot of those little mini games that you have all of these unlocking avatars, unlocking other things. You have like an overall score that you're keeping that is trying to keep people engaged and community rituals and lots of stuff that you have there. after you finish the journey mode to play around with these other effects modes as well.
[00:38:53.253] Mark MacDonald: Yeah, we wanted to give people an excuse to pick the game back up weekly. Like Tetris should already be a game that is timeless. And that's not due to us, that's due to Alexey Pajitnov. But we wanted to give people a reason to play the game beyond the initial couple weeks or even months. And literally we wanted to give people, you know, reasons to keep playing it, you know, maybe pick it up once a month or so, but for years, you know, we want to really want to have people keep playing this game and give the game legs. And yeah, a big part of that was effect modes. So effect modes, I want to say there's about 12 or maybe 13 of them. They're divided up into categories based on how you want to feel. So if you're like nostalgic and you know older Tetris, not as old as you or me, Tetris, like NES or Game Boy, but there are these modes that have been in a lot of Tetris games like Marathon, which is you try to clear 150 lines. There's Ultra, you know, there's modes where you try to clear, you have a certain amount of time, you try to clear as many lines as you can. There's these set modes that kind of people expect, and that's like classic. So that's if you feel nostalgic and you want to do that. If you just want to relax and chill out and zone out, there's modes for that. There's modes where you're not so worried about score, where you can't actually lose the game, or if you, even if you reach the top, it just explodes and the pieces disappear and you can start again. So if you just want to show somebody the game on your quest headset, or like show your, your mom or your grandma or your boyfriend or your girlfriend, or somebody who doesn't normally play games, and you just want them to be able to like relax while they play the game and not worry about stressing the finish or, or game over or whatever, there's modes for that. there's like new kinds of modes where people want to be challenged in new ways. And then there's modes for people who want it really intense. They want to be engaged and challenged, like attacked. And so, like you're saying, a good Tetris player has all of these different skill sets, you know, it's like a, like a boxer is going to be like good on their feet. They're going to be fast with their hands. They're going to have quick reaction. And there's all these little mini exercises that a boxer will do to fine tune each one of those little different skills. And this wasn't the design from the outset, but just kind of how it ended up. These little side games, the effect modes, do kind of challenge those specific skills. So like you were talking about, like thinking ahead, like that is a huge skill that a good Tetris player, when I'm not playing, you know, at my best or whatever, I'm not even looking at that next piece. But if you know, and are taking that account into that just even one next piece, much less two or three, you're going to play a totally different way and be way more successful. And so also clearing lines as fast as possible. Sometimes that becomes an important skill in the game. And so that has modes that test that. Things that are just complicated setups where you don't want to clear the line, but you want to make a well so that when you get a long bar or a long bar is going to drop, there's a specific mode that basically is built around that skill. And so, It's really difficult. We have an achievement that to be honest, I regret, which is you have to get S or double S. You have to get the highest rank in every single mode and then you can get this achievement. And that is really difficult because a lot of people have certain skills that they bring and then certain skills that they lack. I certainly do as a Tetris player. And that achievement is just basically impossible for me to get. I will never get that achievement. I mean, I don't even know if I sat and played Tetris eight hours a day for the rest of my life, if I would ever get some of the achievements, if I'm just deficient in certain locations. So I will take a mea culpa for that. I actually regret, I think that achievement is too hard. Luckily, I'm not a person who cares that has to get every achievement. And you could argue that anybody should be that way, but I do know now that there are those people and it feels a little unfair to those people to not be able to get that but we did want to give that hey here's the world of tetris there's all you might not even think about it while you're playing a normal game but there's all these different skills that come into play and all these different implications of the game different ways to play the same basic rule sets about clearing lines and whatever but just different tiny spins on it and basically like explore those and hopefully everybody finds three or four of them that they really like, and that keeps them coming back days and weeks and months after the initial bloom has fallen off the rose of a new game.
[00:43:35.274] Kent Bye: Yeah, I feel like that a lot of the ratings I was getting were in the level of D or C. So I'm hesitant to say that I'm in the top five in the percent of the world just because I'm not on the list. Trust me, you are.
[00:43:48.521] Mark MacDonald: You finished expert mode. The fact that you finished expert mode without using the whole piece is like really puts you up high. But yeah, you got skills. It's just a matter of developing the different side things. Everybody's gonna get a CRD the first time that they play a new effect mode and probably for a while, but I bet if you stuck to it, that you would actually be capable of a lot more.
[00:44:13.355] Kent Bye: Well, I know that there's games like Beat Saber that I know that there was this experience of like, when you first play it, going into Expert Plus feels impossible, but yet there's a way that the scoring is done that actually encourages you to show that actually you're getting better. Right. And then I feel like there's the achievement, like you're leveling up. So you have like, you're going up these levels. And so that's like pulling you. It's like, okay, now you're unlocking these different achievements. You're getting new avatars and there's other things that are more ambient. There's also like, and this is a little unclear, like there's things that are getting unlocked and it's like, this has now been unlocked. And then like half the time I'm like, okay, what just got unlocked? I have no idea what I just did. And sometimes I'll go try to find it and I can't find it. but I feel like there's a bit of the game where if you do want to make it like a daily practice you could sort of stress test each of your skills and then you have your your local high score and that you're able to potentially track and for me I played through Expert and I was like struggling to finish each level on its own right and then after I went through and played the whole thing I was like okay let me see how much better I got I went back to the beginning and then I was able to like clear like three levels in a row like twice in a row, like get to the end. So I feel like there's a bit of that little things like that, where the game is set up where, yeah, you can pass each level. But like, if you really want like to get the high score, then you have to like, play through the entire level without ever dying. And then that's the people that are on the leaderboard. I don't know, the leaderboard is going to be the thing that motivates me. But, you know, maybe the master level or, you know, it's, kind of hard for me to know how persistent this will be. But I do like that feeling of getting into those flow states. And I feel like in order to solve the Expert Plus especially, I really had to get into a deep flow state and to just like get onto another level. And then I don't know if I'll be able to do that. I did that in the mystery mode and I don't know if I'll ever be able to finish it again because I tried to do it again. I was like, how did I finish this? It's like, this was like, I was just in another flow state. That's like the rewarding of getting into flow states and being rewarded for those flow states. And then going through the struggle and the thrashing of like failure and trying to find to up your skills to the point where you can really have that challenge meet with what your skill level is. And I feel like there's enough in this game where you can kind of tune up your skills and to achieve those flow states.
[00:46:41.331] Mark MacDonald: That's, that's cool to hear. Yeah, like a lot of, you know, we tried to give as much motivation as we could for people to do what you're talking about, which is, yeah, to get to get better and to get that feeling which becomes its own reward, but you don't necessarily know that until you're like, well, I want to, I want to get, get this achievement or I want to, you know, so achievements or unlocking avatars, being able to show off, you know, your avatars, having your friends' avatars be automatically pulled in to that effect mode lobby. You're all flying around the earth. And if any of your friends, registered friends are playing the game, they're pulled in first. So you should be able to see their avatar, the avatars have like rarer colors to them and things like that. And also there's just rarer, harder to get avatars, but also the level of a person is something that we wanted to be a motivating factor, which is even if you're really bad playing is getting you something every time you play, you're getting like quote unquote experience points. And that is going towards your level. As your level goes up, you're unlocking, you know, music and avatars and things. And also it shows off your level, what level you are along with your avatar flying around the globe. So your friends are, are seeing it. And hopefully, you know, you have that thing like, whoa, you know, so and so is Bobby is level 25. And what does that avatar he's got, I want to, I want to get that, you know, I'm, I'm gonna beat Bobby, or I'm better than Bobby, or whatever, whatever your your motivation is there to give people that kind of thing. And then, you know, achievements, and that kind of stuff to be like, Oh, well, I get an A in this mode that I'm not good at, I get something else. So maybe I will actually like, I'll grind on that mode a while and end up getting good. And sometimes, you know, that ends up being the mode that people ends up people's favorite. But yeah, motivation like that is really important. And then hopefully, like you're saying, people start to notice themselves getting better. And then that becomes like, its own reward. And you're like, Oh, great. And then the game has milestones to help you yardstick and things to post on Twitter and stuff and Facebook for you to show off with hopefully. But yeah, there's nothing better than that feeling of like, you know, it's a feeling in RPG where you come across some monster that was really strong before and you had such a tough time with and then you're just like, just like smack him out of the way. Being able to do that in actual skill based puzzles, skill based gameplay really just feels amazing. So yeah, hopefully the game encourages people to have an experience like you did.
[00:49:18.593] Kent Bye: Great. Well, finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality might be? And what am I able to enable?
[00:49:28.737] Mark MacDonald: Well, I, one of the things we think about VR is that we think we are just barely starting to scratch the surface, like we've had, we're very lucky, we feel very blessed. We're very proud and humbled by the reaction we've gotten, you know, we've been blessed with with good enough sales to keep making more games with really vocal fans, a great community, but we feel like we're just getting started. Like we feel like we're at like Pong of VR. Like we don't even know what we don't even know still. You know, we've learned so much in the two games that we've done, but there's just so much more. Part of it is the technology side. You know, I think the Pong comparison is very apt because Part of it is very still early from the technological side. Part of it is people's perceptions of what is this thing and what is this new thing and how do we use it and how is it fun and what have you. But also like Pong, there's already something there. There's already something really fun. There's already something that you want to share with friends that you really are having fun relaxing with. There's something that's new that didn't exist before. And so there's so much more for us to explore. When I was talking earlier about The fact that Tetris Effect does not use finger manipulation and it's not using room scale and that kind of stuff, that doesn't mean we're not interested in that stuff. We are very interested in that kind of stuff. We, along with everybody else, super excited at exploring that. And hopefully our games show different kinds of potential of VR. You know, not necessarily, hey, this is the most realistic environment I've ever been in. This is amazing, but more like, Oh, I was able to really zone out and bliss out. And I had a headset on, so I was listening to the music more than I would if it was just sitting on my TV. But we're so excited to explore all those different facets of it. You know, we play the other VR games as well, and people are doing some really amazing stuff. You mentioned Beat Saber, Resident Evil 7. If you don't have a PlayStation VR, I feel so bad. You have to play that. You have to play that game and play it in VR. That was life-changing for me, that game. Still my favorite VR title, but in terms of just showing what this thing could be to me was just, that was the mind-blowing moment for me. I guess that would be my message is just that we still feel like we're just scratching the surface and this is, VR is here, it's here to stay. It's only gonna get more and better and wider adoption. And yeah, just the limitless potential of what it has is why we make games, you know, is really what motivates us. And so it's not to say that every game that we make is gonna be VR, but I can say that we are still gonna make VR games. We're just never been more excited about the medium and the future and the potential of it. It's really like, a big part of what gets us out of bed in the morning. Even if our games have also had 2D versions to them, it's absolutely VR is just a huge motivating factor for us. And yeah, couldn't be more excited. Super, super positive, super, super excited about the future.
[00:52:59.740] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[00:53:08.120] Mark MacDonald: Uh, just I guess that, you know, I hope that you'll give us a try. We would really appreciate feedback. We always love to hear from people. Our Twitter account is pretty active. That's enhanced underscore exp. You can search for us at enhanced dash experience on the web. But just yeah, that, you know, if you if you try to sound joyous, please let us know. Please let a friend know our community is is all that we are so that I hope that that we hear from you. If you have constructive criticism, we love to hear that as well. You know, I was really happy to hear your points, Kent. I think they're really well considered and they're, they're very important to us so that all that feedback goes along to the team. We spend a lot of time listening to feedback, even stuff we don't respond to directly, but that goes for the media and reviewers, but also just anybody that that mentions Tetris Effect on Twitter or emails us. So, yeah, just that. Please give us a shot and let us know what you think.
[00:54:12.530] Kent Bye: Yeah, my only feature request is I found myself in the last couple of weeks singing the classic Tetris song. Yes. I don't know if this is like hidden in there as an achievement or if... Don't Google it.
[00:54:28.994] Mark MacDonald: Don't Google it. I will just give you a wink and say, don't Google it.
[00:54:36.853] Kent Bye: Well, I will keep playing until I unlock that. If it may or may not be there, you can either confirm or deny.
[00:54:42.857] Mark MacDonald: There's your motivating factor to get better, to figure that out, to answer that question.
[00:54:48.422] Kent Bye: So yeah, well, I just want to thank you for joining me today and for making this game. I mean, this is really tapping into some deep nostalgia for me personally, but I think that also being able to really reimagine the game and for me to be able to enjoy it in a completely new way and just how almost addictive the gameplay is and how I find myself being drawn to continue to improve, but an amazing experience and all the experiential design that you did into this and congratulations on the launch here on the quest and keep up the great work so thank you.
[00:55:21.227] Mark MacDonald: Thank you and that goes back for you as well I think one of the things VR really needs is it needs people like yourself that are really thinking deep on it and it was really like I said gratifying you know when I when I found out about this interview and was checking your Twitter account to be like all right Is this guy cool? Is this going to be, is this going to be all right? Not, not hated. He liked the game or not. That was a bonus, but just, you know, you're not like some crazy person or whatever, but looking at what you're doing and your, yeah, your Twitter account was immediate follow because I think, you know, people like you are going to be the people that are going to drive VR forward that are looking for. The stuff that are bubbling up the stuff that is worthwhile. They're asking the questions that need to be asked and all of that kind of thing. I think your Twitter account was super interesting, even just like scrolling through the top 30 was like, okay, cool. This guy is totally on the ball. So yeah, please keep doing what you're doing as well. Thank you again for having me on the show. I really appreciate it.
[00:56:20.328] Kent Bye: Awesome. Great. Thank you so much. And yeah, everybody go check out Tetris effect. So thank you. So that was Mark McDonald. He's the vice president of production and business development at Enhance in Tokyo. And they did the game called Tetris Effect. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, well, I just loved learning all about the different nuances about this game and went on to play it for another 50 hours after this conversation. There's a couple of things that got me. One was that I wanted to unlock that song and there is a way to do it. You can Google it. That was a big motivating factor for me. But then there was also this master level, which is actually extremely difficult. And I'm not surprised that only one person in the world has completed it. And after playing it for a number of hours now, I've gotten to a certain point, but also feel like I've plateaued and, you know, I'd have to keep working on it. And it's going so fast. I risk getting a repetitive strain injury, just playing it. So I have to kind of spread it out and practice. And I don't know, I've, I guess, found myself turning to Tetris a fact over the last month or so after doing this interview just because it's really a chill experience and it's very relaxing for me at the end of the day. And there's still some challenges that I've put out for myself to be able to try to do. So there's lots of different those mini games in the effects modes where you can get different ratings and the two that I've been drawn to the most were the master level which i've been playing a lot and i have gotten up to 143 lines on the master level that's an s rating and then i got into this really deep flow state for the infected clears where you try to clear lines as fast as you can and as many of those different infected clears and at one point i had 313 after like three minutes and then Somehow I got like 414 one time, which was enough for an S rating. And I was like, I don't think I'm ever going to be able to get that good again. But I think that's the thing about Tetris is that it has different aspects about the challenge and the skill. And then if you meet that, then you can slip into this flow state. And I've been really trying to like analyze and figure out what that state is. What Mark was saying is that they had figured that it was some balance between excitement and relaxation. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talks about how flow states are a balance between the challenge that you're faced and the skill that you have and that flow states are often induced when the challenges that your face is just slightly past your skill level and you have to actually take it to another level where you just shut off your mind and just enter into like another realm where you're into this flow state. And I feel like Tetris Effect, more than a lot of other games that I've experienced within virtual reality, is able to do that in a way that maybe it's because Tetris is a game that, like Mark said, it is actually very difficult to tune. And some of the things that they do in Tetris Effect that makes it harder is that they'll drop the blocks to the point where it's already like landed. And sometimes when you get to the higher levels and also when you get into the master level, You can't actually put blocks anywhere and if it was actually falling down it would give you a little bit more time but it's just instantaneously dropping and if you build it up and it's blocked by something else because it's dropping down then there's only like a certain number of possibilities that you can do. So it's actually reducing the number of places that you can get. That's just one of the ways that they've been able to tune it. Also the balance of how the blocks are coming out is pretty balanced as well in terms of like you can I think set it to be like just totally random but having it a little bit more of a Tetris bag helps as well because you start to get a little bit of an intuition as you're expecting certain pieces to show up. So you kind of keep track in your mind a little bit once you get a certain point. you go through the journey mode it actually is building and releasing the tension and it'll go super fast and you will make mistakes and then you have opportunity to kind of slow down and clean it up a little bit and it kind of has that building and releasing of that tension and just the way that they're able to tie together all the music and the haptics and the sound you know there's certain key moments when there's shifts in the music after you hit a certain point and it just feels really good like they said they're trying to create this feeling of synesthesia of hearing colors and seeing sounds now I can't claim that I've been like induced into some sort of synesthetic experience into this but I did really enjoy the haptics over time when I first was playing it I I found myself craving haptics as I was playing the game. It's surprising to me because it's something that's still very subtle and even when I play now, I actually have to turn off the sound to be able to really pay attention to what's happening to the haptics just because it's so immersive with the visuals and the music that it's actually very subtle to try to even pay attention to it or put any language to it. And I have found that the type of gameplay within Tetris Effect is, I think, very similar to a game like Thumper, where you're using the buttons and the controllers. And it's less about using your whole body, which Mark was saying that there's a number of different checkboxes that you are supposed to check when you're doing a VR game. And it's like using your body, using room scale. And, you know, Tetris Effect is actually not doing a lot of that. So what is it that they're doing that's different? Well, the way that I think about it is that there's a mental social presence, there's embodied presence, active presence. emotional presence. So it's really like this abstraction of the mental and social presence. It's a puzzle game. And so you have to abstract your agency through pushing these buttons. So your active presence is translated into button pushing and solving these puzzles, spatial puzzles that are coming down. And the emotional presence with the building and releasing of the tension and the music gives that sense of time where building that tension and releasing it and It has this level of emotional immersion because it's got actually a really great soundtrack. And I think recently they released all those files as well that you can listen to. But the embodied presence is that you're not actually like moving your body and you're just fully immersed within this environment. And I think what that does is it just helps to eliminate all other distractions. And so if you just need to kind of like tune out and then Jump into a whole puzzle world then the VR makes a lot of sense in that way But it's not like Beat Saber where you're actually moving your physical body around and feeling like you're getting a whole workout if anything it can make you feel a little bit dissociated if you play it too much because you know You're just using the abstractions of the buttons to be able to express your agency So that's just a little bit of how I think about it and make sense of it. And after playing it for over 70 hours now, I can definitely say that it's one of my favorite VR games that has been released. And I don't have a PSVR, so I didn't have a chance to play it when it first came out, but I'm definitely happy that it's on the quest and it's so easy to kind of like pop on and just chill out for a little bit. And there's lots of different mini games within the effects modes that, you know, maybe I'll get into and try to get S ranks or SS rank or, you know, like you said, they can get all of the different ranks. I actually found that the master mode is one of the hardest for me. I'll probably keep on continuing to chip away at it, but I expect that I'll plateau at some point, because there's 30 different levels. You have to complete 300 lines, and you can actually go up and see what it's like to play on level 30, and it's totally impossible. What I've found actually with the master mode is that I do better if I start from scratch and kind of incrementally go up. I can start at level 9 or 10 and get up to over 100 lines, but it's not until I start at 0 and go up incrementally that I get 143, I think is my max that I've gotten at this point. and you can go up to level 15 and i've cleared like 40 lines at level 15 and so you can like test yourself to see like if you can actually get to that point so i don't know i'll probably still continue to play it a little bit but what i do fear is that if you practice too much of that then you start to get these repetitive strain injuries because you're just like pushing the button so fast So there's some other effects modes as well that I might get into and just kind of like tune up my Tetris skills. Because like you said, it's like being a boxer and there's lots of different skills that you need to have. And I think I have a very particular set. I really like it going fast in the master mode and the clearing lines fast is kind of the mode that I prefer to play in a lot of times rather than, you know, trying to get like the highest score. So, that's all that I have for today, and I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoyed the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a listener-supported podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So, you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
