Game Change: from competition to cooperation

I’m beginning to think that on the day they find my dead body, they will have to pry my cold, dead hands from my computer’s keyboard.

It will be a kind of Charlton Heston-NRA death, except it will be benign. My fingers will not be wrapped around a rifle.

But I likely will have been playing “Words with Friends” (WWF) a relatively harmless on-line Scrabble-like game. No one dies in this little vocabulary showdown.

Indeed I recommend it to those looking for non-violent computer games for youth or for the mentally unstable.

But it is competitive, often fiercely so.

So it was that the other day that one of my formidable competitors, a fellow Quaker, suggested that rather than compete, we cooperate and use our combined scores as the  measure of our success. That way no one would have to lose and we might just win together. (Note: she had lost our previous game rather badly.)

I welcomed the suggestion but I did posit that we might run up a higher total score if rather than cooperate we simply competed. Nevertheless, we decided to cooperate. We set each other up and revealed which tiles we had on our rack. If one of us had a “Q” but no “U,” for instance, the other, holding a “U” might strategically place it for the other to use.

We’ve played this cooperative version of WWF a couple of times. In the first game we held out an initial “target” goal of a total score of more than 1000. We quickly discovered that it was unrealistic, so we ratcheted back to 800.

The first time we played we scored 786 points. Clearly we needed to talk strategy. We did, and in our second game, which is about to end, we are going to score something like 865.

Not bad, but then I reviewed past competitive scores. None was more than 865, but some have come quite close. One, for instance, was 839 and another was 836.

Recently, I’ve been reading a few books about how the brain works and it seems to me that comparing scores produced from cooperation with those resulting from competition speaks to the nature of human behavior. Is a competitive world or society more productive than a cooperative one, or vice versa?

I’m not ready to draw any conclusions, but it seems some answers reside in the approach one takes to playing "Words with Friends."

What will it be: Cooperation or Competition?

Foul play and play-offs; Guilt and paranoia

Tonight is our regular Tuesday evening Scrabble game. I play with my mother-in-law and wife, who are, I'm convinced, in league against me.

It's the old-blood-is-thicker-than-water bit.

I'm certain they've devised secret Scrabble signals.

I've noticed that their eyebrows twitch uncharacteristically at times.

Earlobes are suspiciously squeezed and toyed with, like some signal from a Scrabble dugout. One wants the other to lay down a bunt, Scrabble-wise.

The other is calling for a triple-letter pitch out or a seven-letter steal.

Maybe a brush of the sleeve means "I have the 'q'. Play an open 'i'."

You laugh, but this isn't funny. I've seen it happen!

Anyway, between turns tonight I will put aside my paranoia about being duped. I intend to check out the status of Game 2 of the NBA play-offs between the Rockets and the hapless Blazers.

If Game 2 is anything like the Game 1 shellacking by Houston, I won't be gone long from the Scrabble board.

Then there is the little matter of guilt.

Play-off peeking constitutes a flagrant foul during the Days of Darkened Screens, more commonly known as TV-Turnoff Week. See yesterday's poetic post.

Oh well. I'm sure the Screen-time Awareness Network people (That's what the organizers now call themselves) will understand, as at least I will be AWARE of what I'm doing.

Now if I could only be aware of what my mother-in-law and wife were doing. What we really need is a Mother-in-Law/Daughter Secret Communication Awareness Network.

A Cascades New Year

Three days and three nights in the Cascades spliced the two years.

Hunkered, we were, between past and future.

A four-mile walk around Black Butte Ranch. The sprawling vacation development strives to fit into its natural setting. A noble human attempt that inevitably comes up humanly short.

Take it for what it is, not what it seeks to be.

Muted houses, mostly vacant, stand off from the road. Pedestrians separated from cars. A detailed trail map. Open space. Vistas. Hidden lakes. Ponds. Paved and plowed paths that follow creeks and contours.

We saw no for sale signs marking these get-away homes. A guess is that such commercial intrusions are as prohibited as garish exterior paint. Who wants to think of foreclosures, bankruptcy and tangerine siding while on a mid-winter get-away?

Black Butte Ranch in these sober times is a happy-face Potemkin mountain retreat.

A numbing windstorm whipped through the Cascades on this New Year’s weekend. It closed the Santiam Pass. No trucks or SUVs got through. We managed without The Oregonian with its news of the new year and reflections on the old.

Ah but the Scrabble, backgammon and books. So many books; so few words for a “Q” when you don't have a “U.”

Our walk was too far yet not far enough. Our muscles ached from effort while our eyes hungered for more.

Between the pain and delight. our mountain ramble was enough.

Just enough.

We stomped through the snow-muffled, wind-whistling wood, too thinned to hide hulking dwellings.

At our own rented threshold, we tramped snow from our boots, then settled next to hearth and fire and reached for the warmth of books and hopes for the new year.

Scrabble Football

This morning in the unfathomable void between sleep and consciousness, I conjured up a bizarre game that conflated Scrabble and American football.

Tucked in the primal warmth of sheet and blanket, I had a bleary vision of defensive linemen designated as vowels, linebackers as consonants and safeties as wild-card blanks.

The objective of this fuzzy-minded game was to encourage gang tackling. Players involved in the tackle would “spell out” a two- or three-, or even four-letter word.

(I warned you this would be strange.)

At the end of the play, after the players untangle themselves, the defense huddles — quickly — to decide what combination of letters, worn on the players’ uniforms, makes a word with the most points.

Any word of from three to five points results in a five-yard “Scrabble penalty” against the offense. Five or above brings a 10-yard penalty. If the defense takes more than 30 seconds to confer or fails to form a word of at least three points, they are penalized five yards.

That’s pretty much it. The lifting fog of my semi-consciousness didn’t allow for anything more, which is probably a good thing.

Don’t ask what any of this means. It could be the utter whimsy of random synapse firings or the onset of some age-related dementia.

Then again it could simply result from an inner conflict that I am watching far too little football to qualify as a normal American male — and playing way too much Scrabble (notably with my mother-in-law).

It’s tough to do both at the same time, unless the defense consists of vowels and consonants and ….

Scrabble and the flow of life

Yesterday, I fed my current Henry David Thoreau jag at Powell's by buying a little book titled "Daily Observations—Thoreau on the days of the years."

The editor has compiled Thoreau journal entries for each day of the year.

Be patient. I'll get to today's in a second....

By chance, friends returning from a Hawaiian vacation brought me a Scrabble gift. My friends know that I regularly subject myself to Scrabble humiliation at the hands of my in-laws. (My visiting brother-in-law breezed by me in the final rack last night with the word "viniest" on a triple-word score. I mean REALLY!—"VINIEST"!).

Anyway, the gift from Hawaii should help and offer an intriguing counterpoint to the Thoreau book. The gift is one of those flip calendars that devotes a daily page to some joke, tidbit of knowledge or piece of self-improvement advice. This one offers a Scrabble situation to solve.

So now I have before me today's Scrabble conundrum...and, as promised, the Thoreau journal entry for March 12. The year for him happens to be 1853.

Thoreau: "Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows."

The Scrabble calendar: "The word below has three useful anagrams. Can you find all of them? A G R E E."

What to make of these seemingly disparate offerings for March 12?

Will ferreting out three "useful" anagrams—useful in Scrabble that is—put me as near as possible to the channel in which my life flows?

I think not, but we can't be slavish about these things. Besides my brother-in-law is still in town and I'm eager for revenge.

"EAGER," by the way, is one of the anagrams from A G R E E.

The others: EAGRE (a tidal flood), RAGEE (an East Indian cereal grass). Pretty useful—even to Thoreau, a cereal-eating vegetarian and a keen observer of natural phenomena, including tidal floods.

It's 6 a.m., and Monday, March 12, is dawning. With a little cerebral straining, the day is making some sense—here near the channel where my life flows....