Well, and Your Humble Blogger has fallen into the Make A Word game, spending too much time and wrist muscle at its challenge. I’m not terribly good at it. I did, once, get a Grand Master level score, but as its funky graphic only takes ten letters, I can’t prove it to my Gentle Readers. Which is fine. Because it would be terribly misleading.
What makes me reflect on the whole thing, and makes it worth posting, is that my usual score is Journeyman, or between the sixtieth and seventieth percentiles. This rank disappoints me. With some frequency, my score puts me in the Apprentice category, between the fiftieth and sixtieth percentiles, which totally bugs me. Now, let’s say that my score was at the very bottom of that Apprentice category, really scraping that bottom edge. I would still have a better score than half the people who played the game. Why should I be down about that? My scores are just about always in the top half, and often enough in the top third (or top two-fifths, anyway). That should be enough to please me, right? Why is it so terribly lame to score so terribly badly? Why do I only do well if almost everybody does worse?
And again, who is it that continues to play even while getting a score in the bottom half? I’m not, I’m really not, I’m not terribly good at the game. I can’t imagine getting much enjoyment out of a make-a-word game where I could only get a handful of words, and short words at that. Or is it my own competitiveness that makes me give up on games at which I truly suck, and only play those games that I can prove to myself my own dominance? Is it an ego thing? Is it a challenge? I don’t feel, for instance, that the Yeti game with the surfboards is much fun, because I can never manipulate my Yeti to get any points. On the other hand, I find the snowboard one reasonably fun, and I suspect I am in the last tail end of the crappiness curve on that one. As for the high scores, well, I just assume that they come from players who have hacked the code.
I don’t know. I like playing Scrabble, even when I get crushed. I don’t, in general, mind losing at games. I would rather play Hearts and get 16 points a hand than not play at all. If I’m down ten bucks at poker at the end of the night, well, I’ve had more fun than I would have had at a movie. But that Apprentice score still bugs me.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.
For me, it varies by game, by mood, and by the company I’m in.
But I’m unlikely to keep playing a game that I’m really awful at; just not as much fun for me.
And I confess that a fair bit of the appeal of certain games for me is that I tend to win them. (I’m particularly thinking Fan Tan here—it’s not that I love the game, or even that I’m especially good at it, but when I used to play it regularly I often got very lucky, and that positive reinforcement gave me fond associations with the game.)
Well, I got all obsessed with this, as I could have predicted. The method for entering the words is pretty irritating — I would much rather just type them out instead of having to use the clunky mouse-clicking system. Anyway, I got up to Living Dictionary for many of my games, but I couldn’t rest until I got to see what the next level up was. (It’s “Super Dictionary”; kind of anticlimactic. I was hoping for “Almighty God of Words”.)
Yes, that was predictable. And I have no doubt that if I could type letters instead of clicking on them, I would double my scores, but then of course so would everyone else, or at least everyone who already scores higher than I do.
And somehow, Super Dictionary sounds almost like an insult. I would have gone with something like Vocabulon or just nerd.
Thanks,
-V.
The clunky method for text entering annoyed me so much that I didn’t even finish my first board.
Meh.
Otherwise, I think I would have liked it a lot because I’m a Boggle whiz. I know it’s not the same as Boggle, but when I play Boggle, I’m constantly wishing I could reuse letters or put letters together from opposite sides of the board.
I would like it a lot more if I could use the keyboard. Which would be bad, because I don’t really want to spend more time playing.
Thanks,
-V.