Friday 1 February 2008

Scrambled

I'm really quite ridiculous. I'm addicted to the game of Scramble on Facebook and find myself in the live rooms frequently. I feel this determination to get onto the leaderboard, which features the top ten players. But every time I do I get freaked out and stop playing until I drop off the board.

That's nuts right?
Yesterday I was staring at the board and typing away, word after word after word, feeling quite smug that I was finding a steady stream when I realised, out of the corner of my eye I had, by some freak of nature, hit the number one spot. I immediately stopped typing until I'd dropped down!
Just moments ago I made it to third place and had to close the screen down when I'd officially had the best result ever. Why is this?

The chat window within the game is always filled with conversations, and nine times out of ten the conversation revolves around the fact that those on the leaderboard must be cheating.

This intrigues me. Why is it that, as soon as people are seen to be better at something we must assume they can't possibly be capable of such feats. We're happy to accept that if we tried to compete in the Olympics that the likelihood is we'd be beaten shamelessly in every event, but in something simple like a Boggle-style game we can't conceive that someone might just be good at that.
There are a number of videos on youtube evidencing the fact that these people type so fast and recognise words at such speed it scares me a little. I touch type, but I make frequent mistakes when I'm trying to enter the words and end up repeating some and neglecting others.

At the end of each game when the list of words that would have scored appears there are usually a huge amount of words that I don't recognise and I've always felt I had a real passion for words. Whilst my vocabulary is some distance from an impressive level, I like to think it's decent, but as from the last game, words like; miaoued, mabes, geoids and beedi have never been used in speech. Indeed, I have no clue what they mean. With the exception of the first one, which I have suspicion about.

Anyway, I have to deal with my obsession. My desk is littered with papers, and on each is scrawled word combinations, so that I remember to get them all. Such as: teas, taes, seat, tae, tea, eat, ate, tae, eta...
Oh good god, I really must get out more.

2 comments:

Domster1974 said...

Scramble has fried my brain, look what you have done to me lol

Flibbertigibbet said...

I'm very, sincerely sorry, and damn I think I'm going to have to go and have a go. At this time of day I stand a chance of hitting the top ten again. I'm trying to beat my fear of it!