When some people fail to secure a preorder for Guitar Hero 4, they sigh to themselves and wait a few months.

Other people hack into someone’s Nintendo DS and threaten them into submission.

I bought Tetris DS for myself the other day and it has reignited my block-conjoining passions.

Seriously, Tetris is probably the first game that made me feel like a skilled gamer. My dad had Tetris on our Amiga way back when, and I remember a day when he and my uncle had a bit of an impromptu tournament to see who could get the best high score. I think my uncle won, managing to score somewhere around 8,000 points somewhere in the middle of level 8.

In the days following that contest, I spent a lot of time honing my Tetris skills, and before too long I broke the 9,000 point plateau, which involved a sustained period of play on level 9. (In that version of Tetris, level 9 was the highest level, and once you reached it you just stayed at that speed until you eventually lost.)

That really was an amazing feeling. Knowing that I was better at a game than my dad… It led me to believe that being good at a game was an accomplishment, and something to be proud of. I appreciate that not everyone shares this point of view, but the sense of achievement I feel at scoring five stars on “One” by Metallica on Expert difficulty in Guitar Hero 3 is the same kind of feeling I get when I score a goal in ball hockey or make a tricky bit of PHP code work on my website.

From my experience, video games still aren’t mainstream enough that good gamers are recognized the same way good athletes or good artists are, but I believe it’s only a matter of time. Demographics will play a significant role in this: over time more and more kids will grow up with that sense of gamer pride that I have felt, and continue to feel, until it isn’t just kids identifying with the gaming achievements of their friends anymore, but parents identifying with the gaming achievements of their children.

By the way, while Tetris DS is a decent version of Tetris, I’ve never been a fan of the Nintendo/arcade approach that allows you to sit a block on top of the pile and move it and rotate it endlessly until you get it in the right spot. Blocks should freeze in position a half second or so after they’ve touched bottom–otherwise, where’s the challenge?

I’m freaking addicted to Tetris. I have been for years, but it seems to come in spurts, and at the moment I am at the crest of one the tallest Tetris waves to ever sweep through my life. The building block game where bricks fall from the sky in many different shapes and colours has needled its way into my brain, hatched its offspring, and deployed its neuron-infesting viral infections through my entire body while slowly sucking away at my free will. Result: Not only do I spend far too much of my free time hammering away at the number-pad of my keyboard (or J, K, L, and the spacebar on my laptop), but I also have these strange mental fantasies where Tetris bricks are falling in my head and I arrange them into beautiful rectangular stacks of perfection. I both dream and day-dream of playing Tetris.

And in my dreams, I never leave any pesky bubbles, or lose. I suppose that’s the nature of fantasy.

Tetris has lasted longer for me than any other game, despite its incredible simplicity. I typically play computer games for the competitive aspect, going player vs. player in a battle of skill and preparation. Tetris doesn’t really have anything like that. The only way to compete against another player is by comparing scores, and that can be pretty lame. “Oh yeah? Well I started on Hard difficulty in level eight and got eighty thousand points! Top that!” Yeah. Lame.

Come to think of it, Tetris doesn’t even really have a player vs. computer aspect, either. I mean, I guess you could think of the randomization of the blocks as the computer working against you, but it can work for you, as well. Sometimes you get what you need, and sometimes you don’t. There is no A.I. enemy actively attempting to defeat you.

In other words, by the standards of today’s games, Tetris really has nothing going for it. You don’t compete directly against other players; you don’t compete directly against the computer. You’re pretty much only competing with yourself.

And maybe that’s the beauty of the whole thing.

Now excuse me while I have a dream about a game of Tetris where only straight line bricks fall the entire time. Drool…