Turns out Twitter with 280 characters is at least good for one thing: Playing 'Tetris'

Crowdsourced 'Tetris' is the best new addition to Twitter.
 By 
Kellen Beck
 on 
Original image replaced with Mashable logo
Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Thanks to Twitter's decision to give every user the ability to tweet with up to 280 characters, we now have twice the amount of bullshit to parse through as we scroll through our feeds.

But it's not all bad; 280 Twitter gave us one thing worth celebrating: Tetris.

There's a new Twitter account called Play Tetris that utilizes the expanded character limit to allow people to play a very slow, crowd-sourced version of Tetris right on Twitter. The account takes all the suggestions for actions tweeted at it and performs the most requested action after three minutes.

You can scroll through the account's replies to see the game's progress. Here's what it looks like sped up:

Via Giphy

People can request that Play Tetris move the current block left or right, rotate it, or drop it down, all while the block is constantly moving down toward the bottom of the screen. It's similar to other crowd-sourced gaming projects like Twitch Plays Pokémon and Twitch Plays Dark Souls, which used more rapid updates to advance games at the wishes of the masses.

The Twitter/Tetris version, dubbed Twitter Plays Tetris, was created by Salvatore Aiello, who uploaded the project to GitHub over the weekend.

In order to get the iconic Tetris blocks to materialize, Aiello uses Braille unicode to create the block-ish shapes.

At the moment, there appears to be an issue with the application program interface, so the current game is on pause while that's being fixed.

People have taken advantage of Twitter's new 280-character limit to play other games as well, including Connect Four and chess.

That's a much better use of the new limit than some of the dumb, horrible, racist, sexist, and generally terrible tirades people have been spewing out in the past week. And, you know, the jokes about the new 280 character limit.

H/T Gizmodo

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Kellen Beck

Kellen is a science reporter at Mashable, covering space, environmentalism, sustainability, and future tech. Previously, Kellen has covered entertainment, gaming, esports, and consumer tech at Mashable. Follow him on Twitter @Kellenbeck

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