Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun

I used to play Scrabulous on Facebook, and then the other version after the Scrabble folks sued, so although I never got into Words with Friends—Zynga’s ultra-popular social Scrabble analogue—I knew exactly what my friend Reeves was talking about when he wrote this piece for The Awl. I’ll let him elucidate the issue:

In short, the problem we face is an epidemic of guessing. Unlike traditional Scrabble, where you can demand, on the spot, that your opponent find “zax” in the dictionary, “Words with Friends” opponents can be separated by zip codes, boroughs, even time zones. The game offers no penalty against guessing—it simply declines your attempt, politely encouraging you to try another improbable-but-high-scoring combination of letters.

The same complaints that commentators have about social networking degrading our interpersonal relationships and the anonymity of the Internet allowing us to adopt bolder and brasher personas apply to Words with Friends: words that you would never have the audacity, much less the knowledge, to place on a board laid out on a table between yourself and your friend become the cudgel you use to bludgeon your buddy via your smartphone and wireless network.

xxqjixghz (noun): the sound of your favorite blogger going off the effing deep end

I got a Kindle Fire for Christmas, and immediately downloaded the Words with Friends app. Since then, I’ve been treated to words like talas, gorals, squeg, and lins. To say nothing of those lame two- and three-letter words that are coincidentally formed when someone lays a real word down next to a group of letters already on the board.

It’s infuriating. Reeves and I have a similar mentality, a belief in playing the game the right way. You don’t throw tiles haphazardly on the board. You don’t play a word you wouldn’t be confident playing on a real board. You don’t immediately look up the definition of the bullshit word you just played so that you can immediately cite it when you get called out. But you can only lose so many games before you wonder what the point of playing the game the right way is, if everyone else is going to play the wrong way.

Regular readers of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun understand that I’m nothing if not dedicated to self-discovery and improvement. As I continued to think about Words with Friends, I came to realize the hubris behind my attitude. I was concerned with playing the game the right way, but what game? In Words with Friends, the game will reject any combination of letters it doesn’t consider to be a word. In Words with Friends, there’s no requirement that you know a word, or are least confident that a word exists, before you play it. I was holding myself to, and more importantly judging my friends based on, a code of conduct that existed in my own head. Because the fundamental fact of Words with Friends is this: is isn’t Scrabble.

It looks like Scrabble. It smells like Scrabble. But it isn’t. Softball looks kind of like baseball; gin looks kind of like 500 rummy. But none of these games are the same! If they were, their names wouldn’t be spelled and pronounced differently. There’s no sense in playing if you’re going to try to impose the rules of one on the other.

It may sound stupid, but it’s been liberating, playing the actual game that you’re playing. However, comma, don’t expect me to be able to use “doit” in a sentence.