Friday, August 6, 2010

the linguistics of tetris

The University of Edinburgh has a new language experiment/game up and running:

Tetris Experiment

In Tetris, you must place falling blocks to score points.  If there is no more room to place blocks, you lose!
Steer the current block using the left and right arrows.  Rotate the block with the up arrow and fast-drop it using the down arrow.


You will play one of two versions of the game:
Tetris – Whole horizontal rows are removed.
Coltris – if more than 4 blocks of the same colour are touching, those blocks are removed.

A word will appear with each new block.  This is the name of the next block in Tetro – a strange and ancient language.Your task is to learn the names of the blocks in Tetro.  You will be presented with each block and the name for it in Tetro in a Training round.  These will appear in the top right window.  You will be tested on your knowledge in a Test round! First, you will play Tetris or Coltris for 2 minutes, then you will be trained on Tetro, then do a short test. You'll play the game for 2 more minutes, then be trained again and you'll do a long test.

HT: The Adventures Of Auck.

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