Fit the blocks into the holes? Tehehe, that sounds like sex. Okay, things are a little more sophisticated than that in my Playing Dirty column this week, “We Fit Together!”. 
The piece talks about Tetris as a metaphor for sex, sexual orientation, and sexual acceptance. After all, everyone deserves to find the right hole. Wait, did that come out right?
Not mentioned in the piece is the logical (and of course totally absurd) conclusion of all this sexiness, Sextris, a Tetris clone where blocks have been replaced by naked bodies in various positions. Sometimes the match-ups work better than others. And sometimes it’s just a bunch of people awkwardly balanced on one another by their outspread legs. Why must sex always be so damn funny?
Bonnie Ruberg is a sex, technology, and video games journalist who contributes regularly to publications like The Economist, Forbes, and The Village Voice. By day she's also a comparative literature PhD student at UC Berkeley, where she studies French, English, gender, sexuality, surrealism and perversion. You can reach her at [her first name and last name, all one big word] AT gmail DOT com.
March 15th, 2007 at 9:23 am
Tetris. Rated M for Mature.
Now we’ll have to go back and ensure there are ‘hot coffee’-esque graphic patches for all the existing Tetris iterations, all the way back, at least, to the Gameboy version. What have you unleashed? ;)
March 15th, 2007 at 11:15 am
Sheer sexiness, that’s what ;).
March 15th, 2007 at 1:05 pm
Yay! ;D
March 15th, 2007 at 4:11 pm
As a gay, recently graduated lit major, I’m all for reading sex into every cultural artifact that you can lay your hands on.
As a gamer, I’d have to say that this week’s Playing Dirty is too far a stretch, even for me. Plus, the vague, Czarist decor that generally accompanies Tetris always strikes me as almost anti-sexual, or at least the aesthetic equivalent to a cold shower.
Kudos for the Sextris link, though.
March 15th, 2007 at 4:28 pm
Aw, I think this one actually works well. Then again, I don’t really believe in stretching things too far :). But still, parts fitting together… You really think there’s nothing sexual there?
March 20th, 2007 at 1:27 pm
Maybe fundamentally, Freudian-sexual. But, yeah; I’m envisioning the spiraling turrets and Cyrillic text and that chill-you-to-your-bones, let’s-kick-dance-in-furry-hat-and-boots theme music, and it sort of Stalinizes my sexuality.
March 20th, 2007 at 6:06 pm
What, you don’t like that big bushy Stalin mustache? I’m a Lenin girl myself, but really. It’s that whole I’m-encased-in-formaldehyde thing ;).
March 22nd, 2007 at 9:11 am
I too prefer Lenin. Such impeccable preservation. I’ve been saving a corner on my right side for his long block for rows and rows.
…I cannot believe I just said that.
March 23rd, 2007 at 8:26 am
Excellent :).
March 1st, 2009 at 1:09 am
[...] “We Fit Together!” [...]