I am an intelligent person. At least, I thought I was until I started playing the Scrabble knock off Words with Friends against a co-worker recently.
For those who somehow aren’t familiar with it, Words with Friends takes the classic Hasbro letter game and turns the board inside-out like a cootie catcher. It then jiggers with the amounts of the individual letters until my co-worker is able to mercilessly trounce me, repeatedly. I’m the smart one. I’m the writer. I’m the word guy.
Deep breath. In through the nose, out through the mouth.
This isn’t just me taking some time to whine about my bruised vocabulary ego. The iPad and iPhone have made amazing inroads in expanding the definition of who might wear the label of “gamer.” Every weekday, when I ride the Blue Line downtown, I see a healthy percentage of fellow commuters matching candies or slingshotting birds into pigs. As an advocate of gaming and a life-long video game player, I give two hearty thumbs up. Whatever it takes to get different people to find the joy and comfort of becoming immersed in a game full of challenging puzzles and tests of skill, I am for it.
One of the biggest pleasures is competitive multiplayer gaming. In the pioneering days, this took connecting two beige computers with an ominous arcane device called a null modem, but today is as easy as stroking a virtual button. Competitive gaming on a surrogate battlefield has to be one of the progenitors of gaming as a whole, right? Now we get to do it with colorful cartoon fighters and letters that fly hither and tither at the speed of thought.
Things have evolved, and technology has changed gaming immeasurably. There is one development that the ancient Persians and Indians creating the first chess boards could never have conceived of: in-app purchases.
For a meager fee, in many competitive and non-competitive games, players can buy advantages in games. These can be innocuous, just speeding up tasks that are on a long timer. Or they can be game-breaking and give certain people certain implausible winning words which make certain other people question THEIR ENTIRE COLLEGE EDUCATION!
It is no secret that people spend tremendous amounts of money on in-app purchases, even in games that are available to play for free. If you open the App Store and do a quick comparison between the most popular paid applications and the highest grossing applications, you might notice something odd: they are not the same. In fact, most of the top grossing games right now are free to download and play. There are endless screeds on video game enthusiast forums about how in-app purchases are ruining video gaming as an industry.
That, however, doesn’t concern me. I’m worried that in-app purchases (in a game called WORDS WITH FRIENDS) are ruining a friendship.
Every time I look at the scorecard and his score is double mine, I suspect. Every time the notification pops up on my phone reporting that he got an impossibly high score (how many vowels are in this game!?!?), I suspect.
I don’t feel comfortable confronting him. It feels like that would be tantamount to calling him a cheater. But even if he’s paying, he’s still playing by the rules. I don’t dare try to outspend him. That is an escalating race that only Zynga, the developer of the game, will possibly win to satisfaction. So I will keep playing long-ass words and hope his budget or his seemingly limitless vocabulary bottom out at some point.
From now on, however, every time I download a free competitive multiplayer game, I will suspect.
Follow Pete Schwab on Twitter @discopete
