Digits
It's taken me 20 years to get over skyline tetris.
It's taken me 20 years to get over skyline tetris.
2048 is a popular browser-based game in which players must move tiles in a 4 by 4 grid with numbers on them. When two tiles of the same number touch they can be merged into one tile with a value of the two tiles combined. So when two 4-tiles touch and are merged they form one 8-tile. The player can move the tiles by pressing an arrow key (or swiping in a direction on the mobile version), which will move all the tiles in that direction. Every time the player makes such a move another tile will appear on a random cell. The goal of the game is to get a tile with the number 2048.
In the comic the room number can be seen as 4 tiles with the values 8, 2, 2 and 4. If these occur in the game the player can merge the two 2-tiles into one 4-tile. This will then cause two 4-tiles to lie next to each other, so these can be merged into one 8-tile. Finally, the two 8-tiles can be merged into one 16-tile.
This can be done in the opposite direction as well.
The title text refers to Tetris effect, which takes its name from the game Tetris. People who play Tetris for extended periods tend to imagine real-life objects (like skylines) as Tetris landscapes and pieces. Randall, as many others, apparently got hooked on Tetris so much when it came out that, for 20 years, he would look at city skylines and see Tetris-like patterns in it. Similarly, he has now been hooked onto 2048 and notices number patterns that would be desirable to obtain during the game.
