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Tetris Can Correct a Lazy Eye
The Tetris Company
Tetris, made popular in the '80s by its inclusion with the Nintendo Game Boy, was the Candy Crush of its day -- a stupidly simple game that was so addictive you expected it to be outlawed at some point. You'd just fit falling geometric shapes into rows until your mother yelled at you to get your ass outside (to look for a job, because suddenly several years had passed and you now had to pay rent).
David De Lossy/Photodisc/Getty Images
Hey, there are worse ways to spend puberty. For example: any other way.
Until recently, the only societal benefit Tetris had given the world was a generation of people who are really, really good at packing for vacation. But that all changed when researchers at McGill University discovered that the game could be used to correct amblyopia, more commonly known as a lazy eye. Previously, the go-to treatment for a lazy eye was to patch the "good" eye and force the patient to use the "bad" eye until it shaped up, but success was limited at best and pirate jokes get old so, so fast.
In the Tetris treatment, patients wear head-mounted video goggles that display a high-contrast version of the game. Their good eye only sees the background image, while the lazy one has to get its ass up off the couch and focus on the task of stacking a never-ending supply of falling blocks.
Graham Hughes / THE CANADIAN PRESS
The only side effect is the doctor's uncontrollable giggling.
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