When Erving Professor of Chemistry William Klemperer was first asked to be a faculty advisor for the Harvard Tetris Society, he didn’t realize the myriad benefits of the game. It also reminds me of when I was younger, hanging out with the neighborhood kids,” she says, and enthuses that “if there’s a Super Mario Club, I’ll totally sign up for that too!” Grant ’03 says “Tetris is an inherently social activity and the Harvard Tetris Society will help make up for the lackluster social scene during the week.” Asked about the male-female ratio, Grant says, “it’s pretty well-mixed at this point a lot of people play Tetris.” The two members also note that playing Tetris is very relaxing, and they hope the society will provide a place for members to wind down from problem sets and papers.ĭana Brooke Harrar, Dunster House’s resident tutor in Biology, is a member who sees Tetris as “a ton of fun. Rennard remembers proudly that “people were talking about the Tetris Master later-it caused quite a stir.”īut while playing fellow society members, it’s all fun and games. Unfortunately, he soon had to close shop when the Assistant Dean for Harvard Summer School warned him that he could get in trouble because he didn’t have a street license. Challenging people to a dollar a game, Rennard managed to rack up $25 in five hours without losing a single match. Over the summer, he stayed at Harvard as a summer-school proctor and set up a laptop with a Tetris emulator near the Chessmaster in front of Au Bon Pain. But there’s something mesmerizing about the mathematical structure of the game.” Rennard admits, “Tetris is pretty dorky, I won’t say it isn’t. The Society’s constitution describes Tetris as a game that “presents a challenge in precision, timing, advanced planning, strategy and abstract spatial reasoning.” It may sound geeky and a bit too math-oriented, but that’s exactly how the society likes it. To these aficionados, Tetris is not just a game invented in Soviet Russia with catchy music and falling blocks.
Rennard ’03, whose personal best Tetris score is 570,000, finds the video game so fascinating that he started the Harvard Tetris Society as a way to bring together enthusiasts.