by Meg Wolitzer
Meg Wolitzer is a novelist (“The Uncoupling”) who has just published a book for young readers, “The Fingertips of Duncan Dorfman,” about kids who meet at a Scrabble
tournament.
MY frequent online Scrabble opponent of the last few days has sent me a message saying he’s sorry, but he can’t play right now. He has a “stomach bug/malaria,” he writes. Such are the considerations when your opponent lives in Ghana.
Though I live in an apartment in New York City, with people who are happy to challenge me at the dining room table, and though I own several iterations of the game, from a flattened maroon box whose bottom is oily with Bain de Soleil from some long-forgotten childhood beach day, to the sleek acrylic turntable board favored by really good players (a category to which I do not belong), I am happiest these days when playing electronically, and often anonymously.
Much has been written about the soullessness of today’s “Village of the Damned” isolates who sit at their laptops round the clock, playing various online games alone or with strangers. But when I log on to the Internet Scrabble Club, via isc.ro, I want not just the no-nonsense feel of playing Scrabble with someone I can’t see and will never meet, but also, strangely, the connection.
There are two kinds of players there: those who “chat,” and those who, when the game begins, shoot out an automated message that says so-and-so “does not receive tells when playing.” Though I don’t play Scrabble to make new friends, whenever I see this message I always feel slightly insulted. Come on, “scrabblerocks121,” aren’t I worthy of the most minimal chat?
The person who does not receive “tells” can’t learn that I am in “NYC,” and also can’t let me know that he or she is in “NZ” or “Galveston, TX.” Without that latter information, I can’t automatically go into pleasurable-fantasy mode, in which I picture my opponent in his or her home. It never bothers me that I’m probably way off the mark. In my mind, my NZ opponent is a retired English teacher sitting at a table eating toast and Vegemite, looking out over the Auckland skyline. The one from Galveston sits in a trailer, with a guitar tilted against the wall.
Online games usually start out the same way. I type “gl,” (good luck).
Sometimes my opponent will get a little fancy, typing “have fun!” or “enjoy yourself!” This is a little too chipper for my taste. I have no idea whom I am playing, but I worry that it might be the girl who works at the local Pinkberry. She did, after all, tell me she hoped I had “an awesome summer!”
Conversation, such as it is, tends to be limited to certain Scrabble niceties. When I “bingo” (use all seven letters), my opponent tells me “n1” (nice one). At the end of the game, regardless of whether it was exciting or glacially paced, we tell each other “gg” (good game), or even the jollier, almost Alec Guinness-sounding “wp” (well played).
Without these signifiers of politeness, I might feel that I’m playing against not the girl from Pinkberry, or a retired teacher, or a down-on-his-luck country-western singer, but instead some humanoid without a soul. Sometimes, of course, my opponent does receive “tells,” but is soon revealed to be horrible: “nice use of an anagrammer, u cheater,” my opponent sneers after I make a bingo.
And then a message comes up that so-and-so “has put you in their no-play list.” Again I feel slapped. But I just can’t bring myself to reply, “oh right, pal, INSTEAD was such an insanely hard bingo for me to make — btw, i could have also made DETAINS or STAINED or SAINTED, etc. — u think i needed an anagrammer??? Boo hoo, u sore loser, stay home and cry into your Vegemite.”
But so vivid is my image of my opponent and so intense our interaction that I do what my parents always told me to do if a stranger starts up with you: just walk away. My face is hot as I shut my laptop. I almost feel as if I’ve slammed a door on Ted Bundy.
When someone finds out that I play online, they often nostalgically describe the heyday of Scrabulous (a Scrabble knockoff) on Facebook, before it was taken down for copyright infringement reasons. The games, like some games still online, could take days or even weeks to complete. I can’t imagine playing that way; it seems to me like one of those long, long Bloomsbury correspondences, which would now, if transplanted to our era, begin inauspiciously:
vwoolf: gl
vsackvillewest: ty, u2!
Everyone is currently wild about Words With Friends, an iPhone variation in which the layout of the board is somewhat changed. This reminds me of an episode of “The Twilight Zone,” in which an astronaut returns home (or so he thinks) only to find that everything is the same but different. His house has a white picket fence that he’s never seen before, and he insists the president is John F. Kennedy, though no one else has heard of him.
To me, Scrabble isn’t about leisureliness or leniency or friendship. Occasionally, though, I do play a friendly game against my cousin Aaron in Los Angeles. When he was 13, he went on the old “Scrabble” television show, hosted by the genial, big-suited Chuck Woolery, during Teen Week and won $25,000. Never mind that that show resembled actual Scrabble as much as today’s Tea Party resembles the original one; he won first prize, and remains a nimble player.
Aaron is much younger than I am, with multitasking abilities that go well beyond mine. Though our games tend to be extremely short (six minutes per side, tops), as we play he sometimes breaks into full sentences, asking me, “So, how are things in NYC?”
“g,” I tersely type, staring at my tiles and the dwindling clock.
“I’ve been performing with my band a lot,” he types. “Are you working on a new novel?” Then he makes an extremely clever bingo for 84 points.
I have time for niceties, but not such thoughtful ones. Come to think of it, he and I haven’t played in a while, and I suspect we share a genetic love not only for Scrabble, but also for the benefits of anonymity. Sometimes when I’m on I.S.C. I am informed that Aaron is there, too, but like friends who find themselves at the same large cocktail party, neither of us necessarily feels the need to seek the other one out.
My 16-year-old son shares the Scrabble gene, too, and he started playing online when he was 9 or 10. Early on, an opponent asked him, “so what do u do?”
My son was taken aback. “i don’t do anything,” he wrote. “i am a child.”
Scrabble is an indescribably pleasurable game, and those who play Scrabblish variations feel the same way about their versions, too. Each time you play, something new happens.
Playing Scrabble with a stranger — and having brief, somewhat human exchanges along the way — lets you acknowledge the greatness of this shared game, the beauty of words, and the skill it takes to see them and place them on the board (n1!). But it also lets you keep control of your time and your privacy, and satisfies that inscrutable desire for a kind of aloneness that isn’t really aloneness at all.
It’s 2 a.m. in New York City now, and I want the buzz and fizz of a quick game before sleep. In Ghana, it’s already morning, and my sometime opponent is also online and feeling better.
“gl,” I tell him, and we begin.
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