Digits
Digits
[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.

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 each other, so these can be merged into one 8-tile. Finally, the two 8-tiles can be merged into one 16-tile.

This can be done in the opposite direction as well.
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 , 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.
[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.
