1344: Digits

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Digits

Title text: It's taken me 20 years to get over skyline tetris.

Explanation

2048 is a popular browser-based game in which players must move tiles in a 4 by 4 grid with numbers on them. When two tiles of the same number touch they can be merged into one tile with a value of the two tiles combined. So when two 4-tiles touch and are merged they form one 8-tile. The player can move the tiles by pressing an arrow key (or swiping in a direction on the mobile version), which will move all the tiles in that direction. Every time the player makes such a move another tile will appear on a random cell. The goal of the game is to get a tile with the number 2048.

In the comic the room number can be seen as 4 tiles with the values 8, 2, 2 and 4. If these occur in the game the player can merge the two 2-tiles into one 4-tile. This will then cause two 4-tiles to lie next to eachother so these can be merged into one 8-tile. Finally the two 8-tiles can be merged into one 16-tile.

The title text refers to Tetris effect, which takes its name from the game Tetris. People who play Tetris for extended periods tend to imagine real-life objects (like skylines) as tetris landscapes and pieces. Randall, as many others,[1] apparently got hooked on Tetris so much when it came out that, for 20 years, he would look at city skylines and see Tetris-like patterns in it. Similarly, he has now been hooked onto 2048 and notices number patterns that would be desirable to obtain during the game.

Comics 724: Hell and 888: Heaven also refer to Tetris.

Transcript

[A guy is walking and Cueball is following him.]

Guy: The talk is in room 8224.

Cueball: Ooh, nice.

Guy: What?

Cueball: ...Sorry. Nothing.

Great, now I'll spend the rest of my life noticing numbers that would make good 2048 combos.

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Discussion

If you want a multiplayer version of the game, go to 2048.mx. (No one ever shows up and it's lonely here.)
ImVeryAngryItsNotButter (talk) 16:54, 19 March 2014 (UTC)

We've been tricked, we've been backstabbed and we've quite possible been bamboozled. Beanie ^talk 11:24, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

Interestingly, the comic number is 1344, and the 2 4-tiles can be combined to give an 8-tile ‎108.162.225.141 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

The title text... I guess that's just seeing how regular Tetris would play out on a cityscape? And not a special version of Tetris that used building looking pieces (I guess regular Tetris doesn't look very city-ish to me) Kirkjerk (talk) 11:42, 19 March 2014 (UTC)

http://shirt.woot.com/derby/entry/2869/chicago-skyline-tetris-redux 173.245.50.84 12:42, 19 March 2014 (UTC)

I thought it was about looking at real life objects and mentally fitting them together. Then I visited the Wikipedia link provided here and I was right! I won't change the explanation because I'm the first one to expose this in the comments. 108.162.219.125 02:55, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

8224 is also (16*16*32)+32 and was a common number to see as a programming error on PDP11's in the 1980's when a (16 bit) integer of zero was stored as two spaces (ascii=32) rather than two nulls (ascii=0) 141.101.70.205 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Dammit, thanks to this comic, I found out this game exists. Now I can't stop playing it! Thanks a lot, Randall! 173.245.56.66 12:08, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

Same here, though thanks to this comic I also discovered explainxkcd. I have since stopped playing 2048.

Redbelly98 (talk) 20:49, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

Whatever that site http://gabrielecirulli.github.io/2048/ is supposed to do, it doesn't do it on my Linux/Firefox setup. The multiplayer one at http://2048.mx/ does, thank you. PS the plurals of PDP11 and 1980 are PDP11s and 1980s. 141.101.70.199 10:48, 22 March 2014 (UTC)

Shouldn't the plural of PDP-11 be PDPs-11? 141.101.70.37 17:58, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

No...that's not a word any more than "Xboxs 360" or "PlayStations 4". The "-11" bit is part of the name. NealCruco (talk) 21:28, 25 April 2014 (UTC)

Yeah, the game only seems to run on Chrome, in my experience. Another interesting link: http://ov3y.github.io/2048-AI/ --Rakiru (talk) 15:45, 22 March 2014 (UTC)

2048 is so close to the weird Hong Kong film about a hotel room two integers lower and the digits evoke the end of freedom in HK (though the preview is so surreal that I can't tell if there is any future in the film or not) But the handover happened in '97 didn't it? This is kindof like naming a movie with 9/11 implications "August 2001" 108.162.219.34 03:05, 25 March 2014 (UTC)

I started seeing 2048 games whenever I closed my eyes. That was scary... 108.162.212.27 18:31, 26 March 2014 (UTC)

I started seeing porn whenever I closed my eyes. Then I joined the Fapstronauts! 108.162.212.48 18:52, 6 June 2014 (UTC)

Why did you post that Beanie ^talk 11:20, 17 June 2021 (UTC)