Flashback Friday: Games People Play

I’m participating in Fandango’s Flashback Friday today with a post from my old WP blog that I found on the Wayback Machine from exactly 10 years ago. Note: I no longer play Words with Friends. 

Periodic WWF Rant

As some of you know, I love playing Words with Friends. I play with people I know, and I also periodically start games with random strangers, especially late at night when I’m bored. (Hey, it’s a way better idea than wandering onto yet another dating site.) It’s all super fantastic fun until I get so enraged I wanna poke someone’s eye out.

This happens one of two ways. Sometimes I’ll suspect a person of cheating ~ meaning I think he’s using some sort of software to come up with ridiculous 7 or 8 letter words that no one could possibly know. But, then again, if you play long enough, and often enough, weird words stick with you. I know some odd ones now myself. Plus we all experiment at times with different prefixes and combos and such… when the game accepts a word we didn’t necessarily expect, w00t! But still… a few oddball words in a row and I’m thinking, oh come on dude (it’s almost always a man). And if he’s also playing bizarre shorter words too, well, I just end up seething. If he’s a stranger, I’ll finish the game and then block him. If I have a few of these annoying games going on at once, I might get into a big huge mad. It happens.

The second thing that happens is someone may play a short word for major points ~ a short word that I never heard of and that WWF itself can’t even define but says is “valid.” Hey, if it’s valid, then give me a goddamn definition! And even some that are valid are iffy; some WWF words aren’t in the official Merriam-Webster Scrabble dico for sure. (Zen is one.) If this goes on repeatedly, guess what? BIG HUGE MAD.

But again… I know and play some of these words now too. New players might think wtf did she just play? Maybe they think I am cheating!* It’s all a matter of perspective. On the otter otter hand, people do cheat. I know I’m a good player, and I know about how often I “should” lose. So, I will naturally get suspicious at times.

OK, enough about people (bleh, people). Now, about the game itself. Since it’s so popular, why can’t I just download the dictionary, right? Erm, no. I went to the WWF Zynga site and looked up the rules (which are very brief and do not cover everything, such as timing out). It mentions their unique 173,000+ word dico, which includes some of their own words like zen and texting, and links to some weird coding page. I don’t want to click on anything there because I don’t know what it might do to my computer. So, no, I can’t haz their dico for reference, like I can in regular Scrabble.

Let’s talk about some of their words then. Take meh, which is now a word because it is, even though at first I was suspicious. But a word is a word when enough people decide it’s a word. We’re not waiting for a sign from the heavens after all ~ I saw meh in a newspaper headline this weekend. That settles that. But what about feh? MW says no. WWF allows it, though, along with shh, brr, grr, etc., that MW says no to. It’s annoying. (Note: the MW Scrabble dico allows those too, which is also enraging.)

I mean, I can learn all these “words,” nbd. That’s not the annoying part. The annoying part is that the game is called WORDS with Friends, not sounds with friends, not grunts with friends, but words. So, there should be some minimal standard. Like, idk, maybe WORDS perhaps? If we’re playing American English, then the words should be AE words, don’t you think? Not Yiddish, not Scottish, not noises your dog makes (arf is allowed). If brr is not a word you’d use in an essay, then why is it a WWF/Scrabble word? I don’t get it.

And really, we’re talking about rules of a game, not doodling around on a blarg so don’t bother. Do you really think I’d write “poast” in a romance novel? Feh. Grrrr.

Anyway, I may or may not give up WWF. I was hissing mad yesterday, but I’ve calmed down now. It is a huge waste of time… then again, I keep saying I’m going to start writing fiction for real again anytime now, but I don’t because I simply do not feel like it. So, with the Not Dating and the Not Writing, I have scads of time, oodles of time, gobs and globs and blobs of nothing but time…

*This new opponent quit the game after I played gleeking. Wtf is gleeking? Hell if I know. My SOP is to try anything in front of “ing” to see if it works. (It’s archaic for gibe, joke, says the dico.)