My name is Michael, and I play video games. However, I have been very lax lately. I do not have any next generation consoles. Hell, my only TV is older than I am (though I do play my Nintendo 64 and Gamecube on my monitor). I don't even know where my Gameboy Advance is. This latter, in particular, has led me to consider buying a Nintendo DS, something I am still unsure about doing. However, one of the main points in the Pro-DS category was that I could play Tetris. Tetris, as you may or may not know, is the shit. However, after reading the Wikipedia page on it, I am.. concerned.

If you have played any amount of video games, you will know about the Tetris Effect. It's that thing where after playing a video game for a while you close your eyes and see the images of that game. The video game starts to bleed into the real world, in other words. This happened to me first with working on pipes in Sim City 2000. Most recently, it has come predominantly from Crack Attack, a lusciously addictive game that's available for Windows, Linux, and OS X.

From the Wikipedia article on the Tetris Effect:

Stickgold et al. (2000) have proposed that the Tetris effect is a separate form of memory, likely related to procedural memory. This is from their research in which they showed that people with anterograde amnesia, unable to form new declarative memories, reported dreaming of falling shapes after playing Tetris during the day, despite not being able to remember playing the game at all.

People like Guy Pearce from Memento see the falling colored blocks even though they don't know why! Do you really want something like that happening in your brain? This is not your brain thinking of new pathways and whatnot, it is the evil little device in your hands reaching out through the invisible ether, grabbing a hold of your gray matter and sucking it dry, leaving only a residual imprint of its ghost-self.

But, it's gotta be better than what you would otherwise be doing.

I'm going to go buy that DS.