![]() We certainly don’t want Zooey and her sparkly pink, purple, and chartreuse travesty of our beloved word game. We don’t want to stream the entire run of Seinfeld or Star Trek (or, like me, we already did). Some of us don’t want to grab the game controller and blast holes in people with a shotgun. They just cancelled much of the baseball season, which was our other staid, boring, intellectual pastime. We will be shut up in our houses, especially the oldest and sickest of us. Those who like sparkly games have plenty of other choices that don’t require literacy and accurate spelling. It’s an ironic choice of name, since it’s not even worth playing on the toilet. It is an obscenity, characterized by childish interactions, lurid colors, nagging reminders to invite your friends to play, and some sort of incentive system based on (gag) jewels you can earn. Those of us who play the Scrabble app received this message a few weeks ago: We need this now.īut Scrabble is going away. Scrabble is like the voice of Alex Trebek - calm, authoritative, and intelligent, reassuring us that the world remains sane and that we can take comfort in something trivial but engaging. Millions of people want something other than flashing lights, flickering Instagram, and angry news headlines to divert us. (She’s awesome at it, by the way - she’ll clean your clock.) When you are 85 years old and the authorities are telling you to stay shut up in your house, Scrabble is more than a diversion. The Scrabble app also essential for my mother, who needs something to occupy her mind during my father’s cancer treatments and at other stressful times of day. I Scrabble before going to bed, and before dinnertime as I relax from the day’s work. I need a challenging intellectual diversion that has no political agenda, one that will wait patiently as I puzzle things out. In the time of Coronavirus, Scrabble is a crucial resource. (“ Squeg?” “ Dogvane?” Every day brings an opportunity to learn a new word.) Even so, I often beat it, because of superior strategy, or because by random chance I get the Z, Q, X, and J. The Scrabble app is quite an opponent it never makes a mistake or misses an opportunity, and its vocabulary includes words you’ve never heard of. My opponent is the app itself in Expert mode. Who plays this silly game? Word nerds and old people. (Why yes, that is me scoring 149 points in one turn for “REVALUES.” A fairly typical play for me, actually.) ![]()
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