Box Brown takes up pop icons for comic book biographies that are often overlooked by others as unsuitable for comics. But be it pro-wrestling champion or a blockbuster electronic game, cartoonist Brown weaves a picture-text interplay that surprises his readers.
His latest work, Tetris: The Games People Play, surprises the reader right from its title. Brown uses the title of psychologist Eric Berne’s bestselling book Games People Play: the Psychology of Human Relationships as the subtitle of his work. At first glance this line appears to be just another catchphrase, but a couple of pages into the long-form comic, or graphic novel if you prefer, the cartoonist’s intentions become clear. The birth of Tetris and its subsequent growth, according to Brown, is the offspring of a happy marriage between pentomino puzzles and psychology.
Tetris is a bestselling game that took the world by storm immediately after it was created by a Russian scientist Alexey Pajitov in the early 1980s while working as a computer scientist at Moscow Academy of Science in the former Soviet Union. Playing Tetris is simple. The players see shapes made from four squares drop at random from the top of the computer screen. The goal is to turn, rotate and eventually guide them in such a way that every single square in a row is filled. The row disappears once it is filled, and a new one appears along more falling shapes.
Brown’s work is an organic biography of the famous game – whose name is a play on the word tetra meaning four – told with a clever interweaving of multiple narratives involving characters, companies and ideas. It is almost like watching Tetris anchoring a TV show with multiple guests. The plot is well-laid out, and the sequencing of events is perfect. It is difficult to believe that Tetris is a nerd’s dream object as the narrative progresses.
According to the scientists at MIT, technically, Tetris is an “NP-hard” game, meaning that “there is no efficient way to calculate the necessary moves to win, even if you know in advance the complete order of pieces, and are given all the time you need to make each move”. So what makes players search relentlessly for a win in Tetris?
Brown’s work uncovers Pajitov’s discovery of a concept that originated in a Vienna pub in the 1960s, which the Russian scientist used in designing the game. Pajitov could lay his finger on the workings of the reward system of the human mind. That, according to the Russian as told in the comic book, makes game-playing so alluring an activity.
The graphic novel has quite a few pages devoted to the search of that elusive “thing” that leads humans to love playing or watching games. Brown portrays this as a thought that consumed Pajitov in the early days of Tetris. The writer takes the reader deep inside the mind of the Russian creator to let themselves discover for themselves what made the game tick. Here the nerd is more human than the android they are perceived as.
In a few early panels Brown also successfully portrays mathematics as a search for beauty and links it, in a way, with the architecture of Tetris. These little techniques make the comic accessible to the lay reader. The book is not only for the geek to have multiple mental orgasms, but also to initiate a wider swathe of readers to the mystique of Tetris. Possibly unintentionally, the book does lift, albeit partially, the smokescreen of the fear of the unknown that one confronts on venturing into the world of numbers.
The escape of Tetris from behind the Iron Curtain and the fight between multinationals over its rights reads like a thriller at times. Brown uses intrigue, Cold War negotiations between heads of states, Robert Maxwell’s suicide and of course the KGB to give the narrative a racy touch in places without losing touch with the game.
Box Brown can spin a yarn in a way that very few can in American comics. Yet, this work falls a wee bit short. Brown’s artwork and the use of colour do not always do justice to the fantastic narrative. A graphic novel reader many find the sparse panels and character development a bit underdeveloped. Was he trying to imitate the simple design of the Tetris screen? Still, this is an audacious attempt to create a graphic novel biography of possibly the world’s most popular electronic game.
Tetris: The Games People Play, Box Brown, First Second, 2016
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