This is your brain on quilt pox

Ever since Tetris was the only video game that women really liked, I've been wondering if Tetris Pox and Quilt Pox are related.

Shortly after Tetris was released in 1984, video-game developers figured out that forty percent of Tetris players were women, compared to just one percent for the typical video game.

In Tetris, little squares would float down from the top of the screen, and you had to grab them and set them in the correct column before they landed. This video from August 2013 will give you an idea of how it's played.  

Game developers leaped into studying the woman question with a hilarious "What hath God wrought?" obtuseness. Women, they deduced, didn't like games that were violent or insufficiently pink. Soon there were rosy, no-kill, wretched games that made the typical woman want to put Hello Kitty's head on a pike.  Then there was the "not enough women game developers" phase, followed by the girl-gamer-led "all we want is good games!" backlash.  

There was one sensible comment.  "Tetris is different from many other kinds of video games which appeal to boys and men," said one (female) consultant hired by Gameboy.  "It's more of a pattern recognition game.  It's not a conquest game or a get-rid-of-the-enemy game.  Instead, it appeals to women's sense of order." 

Pattern recognition and a sense of order:
Sixteen Goose in the Pond blocks  (1897)

Pattern recognition.  A sense of order.  What could be more characteristic of traditional quilting?

A good scientific study on Tetris and quilt pox could tell us a lot about the hardwiring of women's minds.

It's easy to see why no such study has happened.  As a group, quilters are as far from the video-game marketplace as a flock of pigeons.  The only people who have a foot in both worlds are--well, you and me.  We don't know many researchers, unless you do.  

Gee's Bend aside, traditional quilting is overwhelmingly the province of aging, middle-income white grandmothers who are focused on their families.  

It's hard nowadays even to find young people who have sewing machines.  Their moms lacked the skills too.  That's probably because our clothing is made so cheaply overseas.   

Wired:  Playing Tetris is
like folding sheets

Still, we quilters can take some of the blame.  From the 19th century on, quilting has been awash in nostalgia about mothers and grandmothers stitching away in their  little houses on the prairie and so forth until you'd think that no one had ever electrified a sewing machine.  Today, a vanishingly small number of Americans can remember having grandmothers who grew up on a farm.  

We aren't fossils yet, but give us time.  So if scientists are ever going to discover the elusive link between pattern recognition, quilt pox, and Tetris, they'd better get a move on.  

In 2009, in "This is Your Brain on Tetris," Jeffrey Goldsmith of Wired wrote:

The Tetris effect is a ... metaphor, if you will, for curiosity, invention, the creative urge.  To fit shapes together is to organize, to build, to make deals, to fix, to understand, to fold sheets.  

To fold sheets?  Grandma, is that you?  


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Note:  In 2012, women made up 47% of all gamers, or so the Entertainment Software Association said.  

Note:  In 2009, a bunch of scientists from Oxford, for heaven's sake, suggested that someone who had been traumatized might avoid terrifying flashbacks if he or she played Tetris shortly afterward, although they refrained from suggesting that ambulances be equipped with Gameboys. 

http://www.theesa.com/facts/pdfs/ESA_EF_2012.pdf
http://www.plosone.org/article/authors/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0004153
http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/1994-05-31/lifestyle/9405281067_1_tetris-video-game-developed
http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2009/06/tetris/
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.05/tetris.html#previouspost
http://www.stlbeds.com/articles/2013/05/23/tips-for-properly-washing-and-storing-your-sheets-and-pillows/