As a child, learning support teacher Mrs. Petra Willette woke up from vivid Tetris dreams every morning. “If I was in a bad mood, I’d have a really bad Tetris game in my dreams, or if I woke up in a really good mood, it was because I had this perfect Tetris game overnight,” she said.
Her fascination began in childhood experiences with the game. “My stepmother worked in marketing before the USSR became Russia….And one of her clients asked her to [host] the game development team that invented Tetris,” she said. “I got to spend the afternoon taking these Russian game developers to Costco. We went on their ship, and I got Tetris posters and pins. Maybe I got sucked into [Tetris] because there was another layer of interest I saw.”
Mrs. Willette’s love for Tetris, the world’s most purchased video game, trickled into Nintendo. “I actually had the first Nintendo ever made. Not the first one, but I got it for Christmas in 1989. And it was really exciting. I still have it,” she said. “I don’t know if I can get it to work again, but I refused to get rid of it because I have my game cartridges and everything. But once they got Sony controllers and stuff that had too many buttons, I kind of got bored. So I stick with my old school easy things.”
Her lifelong hobby carries into adulthood—she and Dr. Willette frequently go on weekend gaming marathons. “Dr. Willette and I really got sucked into Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Hours of our time have been spent with one of us on the computer and the other playing on the console. So I’m a little overly obsessed about that right now,” she said.
When the Willettes name things, silliness shines through their on-game ventures. “[Dr. Willette and I are] the people who when we name things in video games, it’s like here are your horses. What are you going to name them? Stinky. Would you like to take you like to board stinky? Yes. I would love to board ‘Stinky.’ I’m not gonna make up fancy names like Lord Balderdash or something. Although that would be fun, that would be a fun one, too. I come from a long line of very silly people. So I like laughing,” she said.
The blocks that once tumbled down in Mrs. Willette’s dreams now manifest in her lighthearted energy. “I don’t like taking anything very seriously… I like very silly things like my Funkos and watching the occasional cat fail videos. [Silliness] makes me feel a bit happier,” she said.
From Tetris with USSR developers to around the globe in Korea, Mrs. Willette brings her spark along. “Going forward at DIS, I want to keep an open mind and make sure that I remember that not everything is dead serious. You can have a bit of levity at times.”
Just like the falling blocks of Tetris, Mrs. Willette pieces together joy from silly moments. “I’m passionate about having fun. I can’t take anything too seriously. Life’s too short to take everything seriously and get upset about things,” she said.
