Soccer, Baseball, Football

The world cup has started. I’ve only seen ten minutes of it; they happened to be the ten minutes in which the US scored its goal against England (or, rather, the English goalie scored against himself). Good luck on my part, I suppose, tuning in when I did.

Unlike the great majority of the world, I’m not a fan of soccer. Partially, I admit, it’s because I’ve never spent the time needed to understand the sport. I have a basic understanding of the rules – even the off-sides rule isn’t that hard to understand, after all (compare it to the arcane definition of a balk) but the strategy of the game I’ve never spent a great deal of effort trying to understand. I don’t have much desire to, though; the game is too fluid for my tastes.

This is really the main distinction between soccer and baseball. When it comes down to it, I suspect, there are really only three kinds of team sports: soccer, which is the same sport as hockey and basketball; baseball, which is the same as cricket; and American football, which is the same as rugby.

• In soccer (and hockey and basketball), you have a completely fluid game where two sides are trying to get the ball into the opponent’s goal but possession can shift at any time, and there is no clear division of the action except after goals and out-of-bounds, and thus at each division both teams are back to being equal except for the score.
• In baseball, you have a completely delineated game, where teams take turns going on offense and defense, which involve completely separate goals, and each at-bat is a separate action. The game has basically no fluidity to it, and there are numerous states (having men on base, getting outs) that a play can begin in that make the teams unequal yet with the score remaining the same.
• In football, you have a strange mix of the two. There are separate offensive and defensive squads, but both teams intend to get the ball in the opponent’s goal, and possession can shift at any time. There are clear divisions between plays, and teams can gain yardage and lose downs without scoring. Yet the basic symmetry of the game gives it a sense of fluidity not found in baseball or soccer.

Of all the professional sports baseball is my favorite, and I think  it is because it is so delineated – it makes it possible to describe it is a step-by-step progression in a way you can’t describe a soccer game. Football I can enjoy for similar reasons, but I find myself easily bored by soccer (though I find it easily the most interesting of the soccer class of games); it always seems the same except when someone scores, and once there’s a score, there’s nothing to be excited about because it’s already back to normal.

Still, I wonder if I wouldn’t like soccer better if it were higher scoring – not as high as basketball games, but more like a baseball game, with an average score being 5-4 not 1-0. That’s about an average football score too, once you factor out the x7 multiplier – a 5-4 game translates into a 35-28 game, which is quite reasonable, and since field goals are only x3 not x7, it makes sense that they tend to be a bit lower than that.

So, though I prefer baseball mainly for its divisions and ability to be analyzed, I wonder if the reason I actively dislike soccer, or at least find it boring, has more to do with the low scores. If a 5-4 score, i.e. 9 total scores, is ideal for a 3-hour-game including commercials (so, a 2-hour game without them), does that mean the proper ratio for sports is a score every 10-15 minutes? Anything significantly more than that leads to a repetitive monotony (in basketball it’s a score every 30 seconds, which is way too often), while anything significantly less leads to a boring game (soccer is probably about a score every 45-60 minutes, though I couldn’t say exactly).

How much deviation from this 10-15 minutes can there be, I wonder, before the sport becomes boring? I also wonder if having such a ratio for some reason requires delineation, separation into different plays. At first glance that may seem preposterous, but it makes a sort of sense. All achievements in sports, I suspect, will be either really difficult (and so happen extremely rarely) or be really easy (and so happen quite often). Delineation means you can have multiple steps that are easy to achieve while requiring that many be achieved in succession in order to score. Having a pitch go in one’s favor is relatively easy; scoring a run requires that happening several times without three outs occurring first. With a more fluid game, you can’t do this, and so either scoring is easy (basketball) and happens too often, or it’s difficult (soccer) and happens too rarely. It’s hard to achieve a good mean.

As a simple thought experiment: consider transforming baseball into a game where there were no gradual accomplishments – it was either all or nothing, every time. The game would consist, basically, of team A making one pitch to team B, and if it results in a home run, team B scores a run; if not, team A comes up to bat. I don’t think that would be a very good game.

Kasparov on Chess

Arts and Letters Daily‘s links today include this article by Garry Kasparov about computers and chess. It’s quite fascinating, and touches on the issue of finitude that I’ve been talking about recently and find so fascinating; it also ends with the suggestion that poker, rather than chess, is a better fit for the modern age – a suggestion I tend to agree with, for basically the reasons he gives.

Incidentally, the most recent XKCD is among the best; they hadn’t been all that great in recent weeks, but this one completely reversed that trend.

Anyway, for now, have fun with those links; I’ll hopefully have a substantial post up sometime later this week.

Metaphorical Board Games

My younger brother got a backgammon set for Christmas; the nature of the game provoked in me some questions which I will not convey, regarding the nature of traditional board games. Specifically, what is the action of the game a metaphor for? What I mean is, since each game is a microcosm, we must ask, what is the movement of the pieces, the goals of the different sides, etc, supposed to represent in terms of the real world? What follows is an exploration of this question with regards to various different board games:

• Draughts (a class of games of which American checkers is a specific type) is one of the simplest of the well-known traditional board games. Its metaphor is clear and uncomplicated: two sides are fighting each other, your goal, as the leader of one side, is to kill all the soldiers of the other side. Most of the other rules have to do with making the game playable, and do not develop the game’s metaphor. A possible exception is the rule for getting a king when a piece gets to the opponent’s side; this seems to represent how experienced soldiers are more powerful. These games are among the oldest known board games, originating before 3000 BC in Sumeria, and mentioned in Homer; men have always fought each other in war.
• Then there’s chess. The game is similar in many ways to checkers – indeed, it’s played on the same type of board – but it adds differentiation between the pieces. The battle here is not between two crowds of people, but between armies, with footsoldiers (pawns), well-equipped warriors (knights, bishops, rooks), and a queen and king. The king also adds an interesting dimension to the metaphor; the player is no longer a vague presence directing his army, he is physically present on the board; the king is the player. So the game doesn’t end with the destruction of the entire army; it ends when the king is captured. As one would expect, since it involves combat between complex armies with specialized tasks, chess is a significantly newer game than draughts, originating in India in the 6th century AD, and making its way to Europe by the 10th.
• Another interesting group of board game in this general theme is the Tafl games. There are different because they are between uneven forces, and while one player’s goal is to kill the opponent’s king, the other’s is to have his king escape. The metaphor seems to be that a king and his loyal bodyguards are surrounded on the battlefield, and the guards must sacrifice themselves in order to help the king escape from the opposing army. It seems fitting that these games are Scandinavian in origin, since the lord-thane relationship is of such importance in those cultures.
• Another board game that I’ve played very little of, but which is one of the most popular in the world, is Go. The metaphor here, as I understand it, is of controlling territory; the individual pieces do not matter as much as the land they are on, and the goal is to be the one with the most board space at the end. And again, I find that this seems somehow appropriate for its origins; it is an East Asian game, originating around 400 BC in China (though legend traces is back to 3000 BC). Oriental society has always seemed to me more interested in the societal group than in the individual, as opposed to Western civilization; thus Go fits them quite well.
• The Tables family of games (of which backgammon is a member) is the final game I’m going to talk about. These all involve moving around a board past the opponent and trying to be the first to get all your pieces to the finish; the metaphor, then, might be one of racing. But this doesn’t make all that much sense. Neither does war, though; in what kind of war is the goal not to kill the opponent, but to send them back home? It might have something to do with merchants and trade, but I really haven’t figured it out. Backgammon is one game whose metaphor I can’t unravel – perhaps because it seems to mix them. I do know it is one of the oldest board games, being dated to before 3000 BC; perhaps, then, whatever the story was intended to be, it has been lost.

Sports and “Sports”

I’ve been watching some of the Olympics this week (despite the fact that I think the USA probably should have boycotted them), and thinking about the nature of the competitions.

One thing I’ve noticed – and I’m not saying this is a particularly startling insight on my part – is that the sports can, for the most part, be divided into two categories. There’s the ones where you win by earning points, or runs, or whatever, through your own actions, and there’s the ones where you win by convincing judges to give you points. Examples of the former would be, say, baseball or soccer or tennis or the 100 meter dash or something like that; examples of the latter would be stuff like gymnastics, diving, synchronized swimming.

Now, is it just me, or is there something seriously wrong with the latter type of “sport”? I’m not sure they even deserve to be called “sports”. Sports are supposed to be tests of the athletic skill of the competitors. The competitors in gymnastics, diving, etc, are athletes, certainly, but it seems to me that these so-called sports are not testing their athletic skill – they’re testing their ability to convince the judges to give them points. This leaves the ultimate responsibility for determining the winner in the hands of the judges, not the hands of the competitors.

Which means that ideology-related bias (I could easily see a judge from the US not giving high marks to a gymnast from China because those two countries are seen as adversaries), home-field advantage (it seems to just be acknowledged fact at these Olympic games that the Chinese have an advantage in judged “sports” because the roar of the crowd is louder for their athletes, making them seem more impressive), and pure whim play much too large a role.

And don’t try to tell me that the way the judges determine the scores is in some way scientific and they are just applying a set of simple rules to what they see. Even if that is in theory the case, it is clearly not the case in real life – a sport where one judge can give a 10.0 and another an 8.5 to the same dive, for example, cannot be based on objective observation of what happened.

Still, you do have sports that are kind of on the border – I don’t know much about boxing, and so am not sure if it falls into the sports or “sports” category, and while it seems like wrestling is objective, there are apparently judged involved to determine when exactly to award a point. And even with sports like baseball or football or soccer, you have umpires or referees who have an influence on the game even though they are on neither team.

But I don’t think this is the same thing. With calling balls and strikes in baseball, for example, the umpire does have to make the call, but he is saying that an event happened a certain way. He is making a call about facts. With judged sports, they are not making calls about facts, they are translating their opinions into a pseudo-scientific scoring system. They are not saying “this dive was worth 8.5 points and anyone who disagrees with me is in error”, they are saying, “oh, let’s see, he did X, Y and Z well but messed up on W a bit… let’s give him an 8.5, that sounds about right”. And different judges can come to different conclusions, and give different point values, and this is seen as acceptable, even perhaps a good thing.

Good thing, bad thing, I don’t care – but it does make it, in my opinion, not a sport.

It would be interested to see what would happen to the Olympics if all of these “sports” were taken out, though. Most people probably wouldn’t watch if the Olympics consisted only of track and field and swimming and soccer and stuff like that. But it would be more of a contest of pure athletic skill. It would also probably result in the US beating China in the Olympic medal count; right now the US has more medals total, but the Chinese more golds, but I suspect this is largely a result of the Chinese winning in the judged “sports” (IIRC they swept men’s gymnastics, and diving too, and did really well in the women’s of both those sports too) – if you take those out, the US probably wins by a hefty margin. I don’t know, though; the US probably has a lot of medals in those sports too, after all.

Game Review: Portal

So, a few weeks ago (actually, five or six weeks ago… the summer is passing by rather quickly), I was at a friend’s house and ended up playing the game Portal all the way through. It’s only an hour, maybe two, long. Quite a fun game, even if it’s not Free Software.

Anyway, the gameplay of Portal is quick fun. I like the first-person-puzzle-game aspect of it – combining FPSs and geometry problems is quite brilliant. And the storyline is quite compelling and well presented. It manages to show the world of Aperture Science, GlaDOS, the portal gun, and the deadly neurotoxin in an extremely believable manner. But what struck me most was how it presents a rather complete world in such a short period of time. Like I said, the game’s only an hour long.

Now, Portal is not really autonomous – it is tied in with Half-Life (also a rather good game; I haven’t played Half-Life 2), and Aperture Science is presented as a rival company to Black Mesa, the location of the experiment-gone-wrong in Half-Life. However, the idea of a stand-alone story containing a stand-alone world that could be presented in a short period of time in a reasonably complete manner intrigued me. Portal comes close – really, if you ignore the references to Black Mesa, it basically succeeds.

This is, of course, a form of mythopoeia, but I’ve never heard a word to refer to this particular subset. There is, however, one that basically fits the bill – “microcosm”. A miniature world. As I’m using it, it basically means a fantasy world that is simple enough that its nature can be conveyed in something about the length of a short story. Fairy tales often fall into this category; Sleeping Beauty (my favorite fairy tale), for example, gives you a world of good and evil fairies who have the power to control the lives of mortals. That’s really all you need. Everything else is assumed to be the same as in the real world – even if Sleeping Beauty isn’t set in the real world.

The short story I recently finished writing (but haven’t finished revising, so I haven’t posted it yet) is this kind of story. It basically wants to get across the idea of – a giant spiral ramp, good guys at the top, bad at the bottom, and they fight battles in the middle. The middle is empty. That’s the microcosm “On The Staircase” takes place in. There’s a story to go with it, of course, about one inhabitant of the staircase – but the world is just as important as the story.

Life as a Strategy Game

It’s interesting, I think, to compare the mechanics of “real life” to the mechanics of different kinds of games. In other words, to look at life as if it were a strategy game.

Now, I’m a fan of turn-based strategy games – TBSs, from here on out. But they are, I will admit, somewhat unrealistic. Life is not like a TBS, but rather like an RTS – a real-time strategy game. If life were like a TBS along the lines of chess, we would have infinite time to consider the possible outcomes of our actions. Presuming that we would still have both free will and intellect, then all possible outcomes of our moves could be considered, and we would choose the best one. That would mean we could not do things we would later regret, and would be more like angels than men. We would still have free will, but in a form much different than what we currently experience as free will. I imagine this is the kind of free will angels have.

Though, do angels have absolute knowledge? I could imagine a TBS where you did not have absolute knowledge yet it was deterministic – say, Dark Chess, i.e. chess with fog-of-war. Is the angelic point of view more like that than like chess itself? (I’m fairly certain that angelic life wouldn’t have an element of chance, like, say, Wesnoth does. Angels don’t play dice, I would guess.)

As it is, human life is more like an RTS – it doesn’t wait for us to make our decisions, it moves on with or without our consent. This is one of the implications of being physical as well as spiritual beings. It’s funny how often we forget it, though; there is I think a tendency to approach life as if it were a sequence of decisions to make rather than continuous motion.

A Defense of Brawl

So, Super Smash Bros. Brawl came out Sunday at midnight. A friend of mine bought it then, so I’ve had access to it for the last 96 hours. And I’ve spent way too much time playing it. (according to the game it’s been played for 40 hours, but I myself have probably only played for 10-15 hours. Which is still a lot.)

Sure, it’s fun. For those interested, my characters are going to be Zelda, Pit, Ganondorf and Wolf. I already knew how to play Zelda from Melee; I basically learned Pit on Sunday, since he’s a pretty easy character; I played as Ganondorf for a while on Monday, and I’ve decided I’m going to learn how to use him, but so far I’m not that great with him; I picked up Wolf yesterday and have played him exclusively since then, and have gotten decent with him.

But, I wonder, and perhaps you do as well… Is playing for 10-15 hours not a bit excessive? Am I not wasting my time?

I’ve thought about it, and in the end, I think – no.

Playing video games is justifiable in several different ways. I’ll look at three – (1) It’s a social activity, (2) it stimulates thought, and (3) really, what better stuff do I have to do?

1.  Clearly Smash is a social activity (as long as you’re playing in a group, not by yourself). And it’s truly social, not like sitting in a room with a bunch of people and watching a movie, which is either a solitary experience in a group setting or extremely unpleasant. You interact with the other people playing – taunting them, allying with them against the leader, yelling raucously, and generally getting into the competitive spirit. If you accept that social activity is a good thing (and I think you have to – if we were not intended to participate in society, we might as well not be corporeal beings), Smash seems like a fairly good option as far as social activity is concerned.
2. Indeed, I do think Smash is good for the mind. I have been gently mocked for using the term “strategy” in relation to Super Smash Brothers, but I think I had a point – playing Smash, or really any video game of decent complexity, does more than just train pattern recognition and quick reflexes. Take a stage like Hyrule Temple. It requires thought to decide when to go into the “cave of infinite life”, to decide when to charge the enemy and when to use ranged attacks, to figure out the best places to place mines, to decide who to target and who to avoid fighting (and this depends on the skill level of other players as well as the in-game situation). Really, Smash presents the players with a fairly complex system they must try to manipulate – and I think that probably helps with system manipulation in general. (I’ll stop now before it sounds like I think Smash should be taught in schools.)
3. This isn’t to say I think Smash is the ideal activity or anything. But, really… what do I have to do that’s more important? I can only spend so much time every day processing knowledge, by which I mean the verb “reading” generalized beyond literature, or producing knowledge, by which I mean writing generalized beyond literature. I honestly couldn’t stand spending 100% of my waking hours doing that, and I don’t think it would be natural for me to do so either – like I said above, man is meant to be a social animal, not just a knowledge processing/producing machine. So I might as well play Smash. It’s better than going out and getting smashed.

That said, I could probably stand to spend a bit less time playing Smash and a bit more working on Orbivm, etc… and I probably will. I only played for 10-15 hours over the past four days because the new game had just come out. Isn’t not a permanent thing. Really. I promise.

Crime and Punishment

A simple question – what is the purpose of punishing criminals?

A common answer is that you want to deter future criminals by showing what will happen when they commit a crime. Punishment as deterrent. Makes sense, right? Well…

The obvious problem with this is that you’re not showing what will happen when they commit a crime – you’re showing what will happen when they commit a crime and are caught. In a sense, this turns it all into a game of odds. As a potential criminal, you just evaluate what you will gain from committing the crime, what you will lose from being caught, and what your chances of getting caught are. If it ends up being an average gain for you, commit the crime; otherwise, don’t.

Following this reasoning, “an eye for an eye” is only effective if your chances of catching the criminal are greater than 50%. Otherwise, he gains an eye if he succeeds, the changes of which are >50%, and he loses an eye if he fails, the chances of which are <50% – the estimated result is a gain of a fraction of an eye.

Of course, most people don’t actually consider taking an eye from an enemy to be exactly equal to losing one of their own eyes. They’d rather have the eye themselves even if it leaves the enemy with the eye. But consider theft – there, you actually do gain something from the crime. Let’s say I’m planning on stealing $10,000. If I get caught, I’ll have to give it back, and I’ll go to jail for, say, 10 years. Let’s throw in that I’ll pay a $10,000 fine. So if I get caught – if I lose the crime game – I lose $10,000 and 10 years of my life. If I win, I gain $10,000.

Sure, that looks like a bad deal, but only if my chances of getting caught are fairly high. Let’s say I value a year in prison at $50,000 per year (in other words, that’s how much I’d be willing to pay to avoid that punishment). So, in defeat, my total losses would be $510,000, and in victory, my total winnings would be $10,000. That means that if my chances of success are over approximately 98%, I should commit the crime – it averages out to a benefit, not a loss. It all depends on how much risk I’m willing to take on, of course, but to reduce risk just ensure that your chances of success are higher. 99%? 99.5%?…

The point is that some people will have those chances at success – or at least they will think they do – and so people will still commit crimes. Even with a literal eye for an eye – at some point, if I want to harm the other person badly enough and I think my chances of success are high enough – I will take his eye even if there’s a chance of it costing me mine. It’s actually an even better deal than the theft because they can’t make me give the eye back.

And, as Saint Thomas More pointed out, you can’t just increase all punishments to be extremely harsh because then people have no incentive to commit lesser crimes not greater. If I’ll get hanged for stealing, why not kill the witnesses so there’s less of a chance of getting caught? If I get caught, I die either way. Might as well decrease the chances of that happening. So you need punishments that are fairly reasonable. But then people only have to have good, not even great, chances of success before it’s worth it for them to commit crimes – 70%? 60%?

So how exactly is punishment a deterrent? It deters criminals who were likely to get caught. It doesn’t deter the ones who will probably succeed. But that’s really what we need to do. They’re probably the more dangerous kind anyway. An executive at a large company who can steal $1,000,000,000 and probably get away with it is far more dangerous than someone who can rob a convenience story, get $100, and have a fairly good chance of getting caught for it. “Deterrence” might stop the latter, but it won’t stop the former.

Anyway, that’s why I’m wary of the idea that punishing criminals is useful as a deterrent. So what is it good for? Education? Retribution? The former sounds absurd (the criminals who get caught aren’t the ones who need to be convinced that crime is wrong) and the latter potentially blasphemous (who are we to decide who is guilty and deserves punishment?). It might well be that deterrence is really all that punishing criminals is good for – the idea being that you don’t have to deter all the criminals, just enough to have some semblance of order in your society. Anarchy tends to be unpleasant.

But I suspect that so long as we have to punish criminals at all, there’s no hope of creating some sort of crime-less society… that would, after all, be a Utopia, a no-place. And any claim that a change in how criminals are punished will somehow drastically reduce crime should be examined very, very carefully. The only way to reduce crime is to reduce the criminals’ chances of success.

Today is Thursday

I went to my Philosophy class at eleven o’clock in the morning. I did the same thing on Tuesday, and the same thing those two days last week, and the same the week before that. I’ve done it six times so far now.

Is that enough for it to be a “routine”?

It does seem like I’m already in the habit of getting up, eating breakfast, walking over to the building the class is in, spending an hour reading or whatever, and then going to class. But I’ve only done it six times so far – actually less, because on some of those days I haven’t done exactly that, instead, I’ve slept in, or went to Mass, or whatever.

How many times must you do something before it becomes routine?

It’s an interesting general question. I think our instinct is to say it’s a rather high number. In the book Pushing Ice, by Alastair Reynolds, an alien artificial intelligence is set to destroy any life form that acts in a routine, unvarying manner. It takes the same guy taking the exact same route hundreds of times before the alien reacts and instantly kills him. (It then takes them the death of another minor character and several more pages to figure out what the heck happened, but that’s a different story.)

This idea that it takes hundreds of repetitions seems flawed to me. Think of the game of chess. There’s an unofficial rule that if you get in the exact same situation three times, the game is a draw. The reasoning is that if the same thing happens three times, it’s going to keep happening, again, and again, and again, and the game will never progress. That sounds about right to me. After the first three Thursdays of waking up and going to the same class, it was almost instinctive to do so.

I’m not sure what to make of the fact that we only have to do something a couple of times for it to become habit. At one level, it’s kind of disturbing that after only three Thursdays I know what my Thursday routine is for the rest of the semester. But, there are only around 15 Thursdays in the semester. I’m sure some of them will be out of the ordinary with one thing or another, and so really, it took over 1/5th of the available average Thursdays to find out what the average Thursday is like. That seems like a long time.

It’s because, I think, we don’t think of days in terms of how many there are, but of how frequent there are. There’s a Thursday every week -  but we don’t consider that the semester is only 15 weeks long, and after that, everything changes again. We’re already 5/52nds of the way through 2008. Etc. Really, our lives aren’t as long as we think they are. A year is 52 weeks long, and we live on average 80 of them; I will only experience around 4,000 total Thursdays in my life.

When said like that, it sounds like I should know exactly what I do with each of them. But again, routines come into play. I can’t remember many of my Thursdays at all. A few, perhaps, the most recent ones. I’m sure some of my memories take place on Thursdays, but I’m not sure which ones. Should that disturb me?

I think perhaps it should. By similar calculations, I’m only going to live around 30,000 days. It really doesn’t seem excessive for me to expect to remember more of them than I do – surely I can hold many more than 30,000 facts in my head, would it be too much to remember at least one thing that happened each day? In fact, it seems like most of my life I do not remember. Day-to-day living is just not interesting enough to make an impression in our minds – it’s too routine, too mundane. Nothing really interesting happened today, nothing I’m likely to remember. Perhaps I’ll remember that at one point in the vague past, I wrote about this subject on my blog, and I could then go back and look at it and see that I did so on Thursday, February 7th, 2008. But in a few weeks the particulars of this day will be gone forever.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I doubt I would enjoy the ability to remember the minutiae of every day of my life – why will I care, in the distant future, what I did today? And it really does seem to me that there is something fundamentally flawed with the practice of keeping a diary, of writing down every day something about the day itself (as opposed to just writing down interesting thoughts and doing so on a regular basis, e.g. this blog, which consciously is not personal in nature). Still – I do wonder what has happened on the 900 Thursdays I have already experienced, and what will happen on the several thousand that still await me. And it kind of scares me that in the end, all of that will be forgotten – my life will be summed up in a few defining events and the fact that the majority of my life did not have to do with those events will be forgotten.

Tetris

Recently I have spent a considerable amount of my free time (and I have a lot of it, until Jan 22nd when school starts again) playing tetris – or, rather, Gnometris, a Free tetris clone. It is a form of procrastination, yes, but it is also a good de-stresser, and it exercises the brain, according to Wikipedia. So it isn’t a complete waste of time.

Anyway, it’s quite fun, like I said, but I have one complaint with it. The scoring is absurd. The reasoning being that making harder clears should be worth more, you get 40 points * level for clearing one row at a time, 100 points * level for clearing two rows at a time (a 20 point * level bonus), 300 points * level for clearing three rows at a time (an 120 point bonus), and 1200 points * level for clearing four rows at a time, the maximum (an 860 point bonus).

This makes sense on paper – accomplishing what is hard should be worth more, right? – but in practice it rewards poor tetris playing. Take a look at these two screenshots:

About to get one row and 40 points:

About to get four rows and 1200 points:

The former is playing tetris well – clearing lines quickly so as to get to a higher level and more points. The latter is playing tetris poorly – stacking up as many rows as possible and waiting for that line-shape (that might never come) so as to get that giant bonus. The good strategy works on any tetris level – and indeed, I can get up to level 14 using it. The latter crashes and burns by level 10 – you just can’t stack up bricks forever, you know? But at level 10, if I’m playing using my so-called “good strategy”, I’m nowhere near my limit.

The problem is, playing using the so-called “good strategy”, my high score is 47520 (and I think I got lucky there and got a four-clear without intending to). After I sat down and decided to play a game using the “bad strategy” – without any practice at it, mind you – I got 79840 points, blowing my previous high score out of the water. This makes sense, after all; at those low levels, the blocks move so slowly you can afford to use that strategy, and doing so racks up an enormous number of points before you even get to a decent difficulty level. Someone using my “good strategy” simply can’t keep up.

It might be excusable if the “bad strategy” was advisable for the first ten or so levels, and then you had to switch to the “good strategy”. But this is simply not the case. The number of points possible in levels 10-14 using my “good strategy” is significant, but nothing compared to how many would result from one lucky four-clear, so the best strategy would still be the “bad” one.

Now, if the “bad” strategy works and the “good” one doesn’t, why am I calling it “bad”? Because it doesn’t require skill in the same way that the good strategy does. You play by stacking up as high as possible and leaving narrow craters for l-shapes to fall in, not by trying to keep the blocks as low as possible and leaving yourself room to maneuver. If I could capture video off my desktop, I would film myself playing using the good strategy and then the bad one. One clearly requires skill, and the other doesn’t. It feels wrong to have to play in a style that requires no skill in order to rack up points – when that’s necessary, it means the way points are given out is flawed.

So what would I suggest? Well, the bonuses could work if they were reasonable – 1200 points for a four-clear and only 40 points for a one-clear is absurd, and, like I said, leads to bad tactics, but 40 points for a one-clear, 90 points for a two-clear, 150 points for a three-clear, and 220 points for a four-clear, or something similar, might work.
Even better, though, would be to remove the bonus for clearing multiple rows at a time altogether. The fact that you’ve reduced the height of the structure by several rows and thus gained valuable maneuvering space is reward enough, and you shouldn’t gain extra points for getting into a bad situation and then escaping it. If you insist on having scoring variation – not a flat 40 points * level for clearing a row – give bonuses for dropping the bricks quickly. That actually takes skill – being able to decide quickly where the next block should go.

P.S.: The Tetris effect is very real. I see multicolored tetraminos…