Humans 101
Life Advice, as Gleaned From ‘Words With Friends’
Seven lessons that make sense of the scrabble
I think I’m a Words With Friends addict. I blame my mum.
Over the past eight years, my mum and I have played 566 games of this Scrabble-inspired mobile app together. For us, it’s an easy way to connect when we’re not physically with each other. In that time, I’ve placed over 26,644 feet worth of the game’s signature orange letter tiles, played 6,208 unique words, and skipped countless ads promoting everything from stressful puzzle apps to pickpocket-proof cargo pants.
Eight years is a considerable amount of time to spend doing a certain thing. And inadvertently, even though the act of playing Words With Friends is quite trivial, subconsciously, certain habits, strategies, and broader observations have sunk their way into my mind. And so, partly to convince myself that I haven’t wasted all my time playing a pointless mobile app, I thought I’d share some nuggets of wisdom one might feasibly derive from Words With Friends and apply to broader life. Let’s go.
1. It might be easier elsewhere
Here’s the scenario — you’re trying to play a word somewhere on the board, maybe to snatch a juicy triple letter tile on a J worth 10 points. But no matter how many times you shuffle your letters or try to will words into existence, it just ain’t working. You spend so much time focused on this one spot before realizing there’s another section of the board you can play your J for equal impact, and with a little ingenuity, you score a word substantially higher than you would’ve in the original bugbear.
I think there’s a somewhat powerful metaphor for life hidden in this rather specific gameplay quirk of Words With Friends — and it’s this: You could be trying and trying to achieve something in a certain field, perhaps in your chosen career, a project, or in a certain relationship. But for some reason or another, it’s hard, you aren’t getting anywhere, or the squeeze ain’t worth the juice. You feel stuck, stressed, depressed, a victim of the “sunk cost fallacy” — the belief that because you’ve poured so much time or effort into a certain endeavor that it’d be folly to pull out now.
But inevitably, you reach a point of existential cataclysm in which you say, “it shouldn’t be this hard.” And so you make a drastic change. You quit your job, change careers, pivot the project, stop hanging out with a certain friend, or break up with your partner. After some time to cool off, you devote your energy elsewhere (or in a slightly different way), in another pursuit, in another person, and find to your delight that it’s just… easy. Things just work and keep working, well after the honeymoon phase of the new thing you’re now into. You’re still playing with the same letters, the same internal resources, but simply by applying them elsewhere in your life, you’re able to make bounds where before there were just bumps.
It’s a reminder that you have what you need inside you, it’s just a matter of application. So if you ever find yourself stuck, ask, where else on the board could I look?
2. Writing tip: Z’s add zing
In Words With Friends, Z’s are among the top-scoring letters alongside J and Q, worth a whopping 10 points. There’s a good reason for this — despite being hard to use, Z is one of the most exciting letters you can use in everyday prose. It instantly adds zip, zing, zest, and pizzazz to whatever you’re writing. That’s because its short sharp sound can act as a zap of phonetic electricity in even the most mundane sentences. So if you want to zhuzh up your text, consider a well-placed word like glitz or ritz, zodiac, zombie, zoo, bamboozle, puzzle, quizzical, or fuzz, and see if it gives your writing the chutzpah it needs.
3. Treat the elderly with kindness
If you’re a cheapskate like me, you likely don’t pay for the premium version of Words With Friends. This means, like me, you likely get bombarded with ad after ad after ad, after every move you make in a game. In the eight years I’ve played Words With Friends, I’ve noticed these ads skew toward what must be their primary audience — the elderly. Increasingly there are ads for life insurance, arthritis aids, and the aforementioned pickpocket-proof pants.
But there’s also a significant chunk of ads for crypto exchange sites promising the possibility of millions, gambling apps like Bingo, Slots, and Solitaire offering to win “real money,” and other dodgy propositions like these.
It’s a stark reminder that there are many people trying to cash in on the technological illiteracy or neophyte naivety of the older people who make up our society (as also evidenced by the rise in elder abuse). And so this should serve as a sober nudge to do the opposite — to treat the elderly (and generally, the more vulnerable among us), with kindness, patience, and respect, to see their value, hear them out, give them the benefit of the doubt. Because lord knows there are enough people out there trying to take advantage of them.
4. A small word is just as good as a big word
In Words With Friends, just because you can play a long word, rarely does that mean it’s the highest-scoring word you could play. Sometimes, small words do the trick. It’s true outside of the game too — we’re all guilty of the utilization of hyper-elongated and unnecessarily involuted language, often in the context of work, usually to sell our smarts. But a clear connection in normal speak can jut out just as well, if not better, because your counterpart isn’t lost in word soup. Rather than the style of what you’re saying, they’re able to engage with the substance of it. Having a substantive point, something worth saying and not just florid, is harder but far more compelling and respect-earning. It’s the difference between chewing gum and a meal. One tastes nice but does nothing — the other feeds you. So be a feeder.
5. Show off mindfully
That said, there are times in playing Words With Friends when you play a cool word like derided or clockwise or peacock, that mightn’t get you the most points but brings you a certain glee. Hell, I did it earlier with that damn neophyte word. Doing this all the time is self-sabotaging (that is, it lowers your score over time) and self-aggrandizing (that is, it’s just trying to show off how clever you are to the other player), but peppered here and there, it can add some pep to stale gameplay.
I think this is the correct way to show off in life too. The pursuit of cool things solely to flex to friends or family or colleagues is empty, bankrupting, and self-destructive if untamed. Unfortunately, it’s lauded today, especially on social media. But if done responsibly, every now and then, by buying a nice bit of furniture or appliance, a bold and colorful piece of clothing, artwork, or rare sneaker, even a fancy meal out or holiday, and done as a self-expressive flourish, not a performance directed to others, it can bring you a disproportionate amount of well-earned joy. Perhaps even more if it’s kept a secret just for you, or you and your partner. Bring these items and experiences into your life consciously and meaningfully, and they’ll go much further than if they’re brought in vacuously and self-aggrandizingly. Treat yo’self with cake, but know that an all-cake diet is trouble.
6. Qi is powerful
Any Words aficionado knows that the little word qi is a lifesaver in a pickle. On a triple-letter tile that sucker easily pumps out a 30+ point word, 60+ if you’re playing two words at once. Having played it so many times over the years, I was curious as to what this word actually meant. It turns out qi is a concept in Chinese philosophy, one I belligerently believed was spelled chi my whole life, and which I had a passing knowledge of via tai chi.
Qi refers to the psychophysical energies that permeate the universe — translated crudely as “air.” I’m no Daoist, and so this description inevitably falls short of the complex nuance contained in this tiny word. But just as air flows in and out of us, so too do words and ideas and thoughts and feelings and other energies, from others into ourselves, then back out into others. My interpretation is that we are mere momentary carriers of consciousness, a greater emergent consciousness, that coalesces around us and through us. I know I stand to be corrected (please comment). Nonetheless, this two-letter word offers an exciting portal into a more poetic way to think.
7. Sometimes you’ve gotta open up the board
Finally, there are times when you’re playing a game of Words and you’re in a bit of a stalemate. Neither player wants to play in a spot that will potentially mean the other player can use a triple-word or triple-letter tile. And so neither gives an inch, meandering around and building upon existing words, adding on S’s or bricklaying on two-letter words to form dense word sardines. Sooner or later, someone has to open up the board and take a momentary loss for the greater good of the game.
“Opening up the board” in life might look like asking a dumb question to spark a more honest or fruitful dialogue. Or admitting an error to a loved one during an argument to discuss what might have more deeply caused that error. Or being vulnerable with a partner (if they are trustworthy) in order to become closer. Or making a small compromise in a creative project so as to protect a more integral part of the vision. Or writing a page of shit to overcome writer’s block. It’s deliberately but temporarily “losing” something, to gain more in the bigger scheme of things. We’re hardwired to fear such losses, through a psychological quirk known as loss aversion — but leaning into the aversion can sometimes be the wiser thing to do.
This is just some of the knowledge you might realistically glean from Words With Friends. Of course, this is the first step, and application is another matter. But thinking consciously about the things you do, no matter how trivial-seeming, can be an enriching and worthwhile endeavor. After all, if you’re doing something often in one part of your life, it isn’t a stretch to apply those behaviors elsewhere.
So shuffle those letters, play qi against your mum, and skip those pickpocket-proof pants, knowing that doing so might just be helping you live a more enlightened life.
If you enjoyed this, I wrote a similar story a few months ago which extrapolated life advice from the popular computer game, The Sims. You can read that here.
