When game designer and entrepreneur Henk Rogers first encountered Tetris at the 1988 Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show, he immediately knew it was special. "It was just the perfect game," he recalls. "It looked so simple, so rudimentary, but I wanted to play it again and again and again … There was no other game demo that ever did that to me." Rogers is now co-owner of the Tetris Company, which manages and licenses the Tetris brand. Over the past 30 years, he has become almost as famous as the game itself. The escapades surrounding his deal to buy its distribution rights from Russian agency Elektronorgtechnica (Elorg) were dramatised in an Apple TV film starring Taron Egerton.

There's a phenomenon in video games that people call "the zone": a state of mind-body oneness where your reflexes and senses feel that they are operating without conscious input. The zone isn't the territory of blockbuster shooters or narrative adventures: it is the domain of puzzle and rhythm games, arcade shmups, games about patterns and reflexes. These are games that temporarily and pleasurably hijack your neural pathways. Enter Tetris Effect, fittingly named for the hypnagogic hallucinations experienced by people who've spent so much time stacking blocks that they visualise falling tetrominos whilst falling asleep, or idly imagine arranging furniture into neat lines. First released last year on PlayStation 4 and newly available on PC, it is a sumptuous, mind-altering, humanist interpretation of the classic Soviet puzzle game.

Tech columnist Marc Saltzman gives his take on the best family-friendly video games of the year. Parents who feel they're fighting a losing battle against Fortnite are turning to addiction treatment programs. "Fortnite" may have commanded much of the attention paid to video games in 2018, but plenty of other releases arrived to occupy lovers of the interactive medium. With the calendar turning toward 2019 and the game industry getting ready for its next generation of consoles, USA TODAY's Eli Blumenthal, Brett Molina, Marc Saltzman and Mike Snider offer a look at a few of their favorite video games of the year that was. Technically, it launched more than a year ago, but 2018 has undeniably been the year of "Fortnite."

In recent years, members of the alt-right have, in blog posts and in YouTube videos, courted young men who share an interest in video games. This scheme has proved effective. Last month, a YouTube user uploaded a clip from the recent blockbuster video game Red Dead Redemption 2, a cowboy playpen set in the late-nineteenth-century American Southwest. In it, the player guides his character toward a computer-controlled suffragette who is campaigning for her right to vote, and punches her unconscious. The video, titled "Beating Up Annoying Feminist," has been viewed more than 1.7 million times, with a chorus of support in the comments below. This kind of trolling can easily escalate.

Can a video game be more than just a game? Can it train you to focus? To disassociate yourself from traumatic memories and heal your mind? Can it transcend your personal experience and bridge a geopolitical divide? These aren't just ridiculous claims from a marketer's fever dream -- one video game has done all of this before, reaching hundreds of millions of players: Tetris.