If you want to understand Hegel’s dialectic, imagine you’re playing Tetris. The pieces fall chaotically, and your job is to organize them. Now replace “pieces” with “ideas” and “organization” with “dialectic”—you’re almost there. Let’s break it down.

First, forget that talk of “thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.” That was Fichte’s bullshit solely, which Hegel actively worked to surpass. After all, it’d be like trying to play Tetris with only straight blocks—simplistic and boring. Hegel prefers something more engaging. So instead, let’s frame the dialectical process in these terms: Being, Nothing, and Becoming.

The real counterpoint here isn’t Fichte but Descartes, who in his Discourse on Method (1637) elevated the “I think” to the status of indubitable first truth. For Descartes, the “I” was like a Tetris block that never falls. Hegel, however, understood consciousness not as a static block but as a continuous movement.

In the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Hegel explains: Being only becomes effective as a “living substance” when it assumes the “movement of self-positing” (§18). How so?

• Being (Thesis): You start the game thinking you know everything (“I think!”).
• Nothing (Antithesis): The pieces fall too fast, and you realize you know nothing (“Why won’t this piece fit?!”).
• Becoming (Synthesis): You learn to rotate the blocks, completing lines and racking up points. In short, both are reunited in the same synthesis—or, put another way, the subject recognizes itself in the object.

This is sublation (from the German Aufhebung): negating the mistake, preserving the successes, and elevating your game to a new level. This process doesn’t erase earlier moments but integrates them into a “rejoined plurality” (§107). What Hegel ultimately demonstrated was that Descartes’ immediate identity of the Cogito is merely an insufficient step in the dialectical movement: “Indeed,” Hegel writes, “the matter itself is not exhausted in its end, but in its actualization; nor is the result the actual whole, but the result together with its becoming” (§3). In other words: you only get good at Tetris by playing, not philosophizing about it.

In video games broadly, the dialectical process is embodied in their interactive structure. The game’s feedback isn’t just a mechanical reaction but a triadic process mirroring the logic of Being-Nothing-Becoming. While literature, for example, allows contradictory interpretations to coexist, video games block all unprogrammed interpretations, materializing dialectics into a closed system. If a player insists on an action incompatible with the code (e.g., trying to jump in a game without a jump mechanic), the system responds with a “determinate negation”—say, a game over screen—forcing the process to restart. The falling pieces (contradictions) only make sense when rearranged into lines (syntheses), and the player’s “spirit” only actualizes itself in the continuous motion of interpreting, erring, learning, and restarting. Final defeat, far from failure, is the moment consciousness recognizes the limits of its interpretation and prepares to reboot the cycle at a higher level of understanding.

Hegel saw dialectics as a play of spirit. Marx and Engels, in turn, transformed it into a play of matter. And Tetris? Well, Tetris is both at once. That is: as a Hegelian metaphor, the game is an “objective spirit” where the player recognizes themselves in the becoming of its rules. But as materialist praxis, the digital game imposes contradictions demanding transformative action. If Hegel saw spirit as history’s engine, the digital game shows that it is in matter (code, hardware, interface) where contradictions truly update and the philosophy of praxis is realized.