The echoing admonitions of my grandfather found their dwelling within my subconscious; he often filled my adolescence with warnings of an impending Game Over—Armageddon, as he called it. Once relegated to the realm of religious eschatology and the discourse of conservative skeptics, this theory is now anxiously awaited by the masses within their rectilinear havens.
From its inception, the Game entertained humanity’s endless conjectures, though its rules have always remained unequivocal. We are the Creative Minority: the poets, philosophers, musicians, artists, and architects. We thrive in the shadows, the intellectual venom with which society has tried to anesthetize itself. Perhaps it will never comprehend the breadth of our agency, but it cannot ignore us, for we are the playmakers. The boxes: the institutions, our tools. The screen: the artistic sphere, our lens.
After humanity depleted the earth of what we once called nature, populating its remaining surfaces with city upon city, horizontal expansion was no longer possible. With no other choice, we built upward, retreating further into artificial environments and away from reality. We stack our boxes, filling the metaphysical space above us with the remnants of our ambitions.
We programmed the built environment to be ruthlessly functional, and from this pragmatism arose prosperity. The Game oversaw the incremental rise of civilizations across millennia. Each sought to fill the void with stable empires, yet these too succumbed to cyclical cataclysm and rebirth. How curious that, at the moment of fruition—when a solid line was whole, its spiritual existence satiated—the Game erased it. We learned to accept this erasure, for it carried the promise of a new epoch, another civilization.
My grandfather believed these completed lines still exist within the Game’s memory, merely outside the frame we deem relevant. Blinded by our obsession with innovation and fictional novelty, we refuse to look to the past for guidance or believe there is anything left to learn. Perhaps we cannot see them because our minds are imprisoned by the frame, our eyes confined to the screen.
Play: that is all we do now.
Our boxes have fallen prey to the accelerated pace of the Game. Time, once an ally in deliberate and thoughtful construction, now demands that institutions falter through the matrix without reflection. My grandfather recalled a time when boxes moved with care, granted an almost enlightened harmony as they found their rightful place. He told me the Creative Minority once dictated the rotation of these blocks—a concept now foreign to their contemporaries. Some even claimed this control allowed for "infinite spins," deferring the deployment of institutions through constant motion. But rotation no longer exists. The tiles now fall faster than the blink of an eye, and in their place lies a mass-produced block, ironically empty and void of purpose.
Then came the perversion of convenience. Convenience became a contagion the Game could not expel—an expression of human consciousness distorted by the lenses of civilization. The boxes no longer fulfilled their intended purpose. They were placed wherever space allowed, decided within the span of a second’s thought. We named stores after convenience while reserving substance for the interstitial. I’ve witnessed the construction of these boxes: vehicles filled with piles of insignificance promising structures that hold up nothing but themselves. Click. Convenience. Speed. Look up.
We hoped the masses would remain oblivious to the unfilled spaces. But they see the voids as failures, as inefficiencies in need of rectification. They will not credit our victories yet are eager to proclaim our defeats. Eventually, we could no longer undo what we had built—a world of void boxes and onerous gaps. The Game stopped clearing rows because they were incomplete; perhaps it stopped caring, or maybe we did first.
We feel ourselves nearing the ceiling, the apogee of space. Immobilized by the futility of seeking a Start Again button, our existence is reduced to that of automatic machines, craving a single pixel of purpose. We live in this Game of Tetris, where the burgeoning structure of civilization can no longer sustain itself, its voids too numerous to ignore. We cannot see the blocks of our foundation because we have chosen not to. The remaining boxes linger, their emptiness weighing heavily as our carrying capacity gently halts to nihility.
Game Over.
