So sad about Words with Friends

Plenty of blogs and articles have been written about Words with Friends (WwF), the smartphone-based game that is similar to Scrabble. But I want to contribute my two cents’ worth because I am very upset and need to vent. Until last night, I was a fairly recent participant in this game. (I am no longer a participant and probably never will be again, but more on that below.) I started playing it this past August. I have no idea why I didn’t search for it in Google’s Play Store app on my phone before that, particularly when you consider that I am a “word person” – I work with words every single day, translating and editing them. I include lots of words (too many, sometimes) in the fiction and memoirs I write. And I speak several other languages besides English, so I know lots and lots of words. But for some reason, although I had heard of Words with Friends, I never downloaded or played it until last August.

Once I discovered how fun it can be, I got hooked and merrily played with many “friends” (none of whom I know or had ever heard of prior to playing), but not with any of my real-world friends or relatives, mainly because in many cases, it’s very hard to figure out what Words with Friends players’ real names are – many of them make up their own nicknames – and I simply had never spoken with any of my friends or relatives about the game to see if they play and to ask what their user name is and give them mine.

In any case, in the approximately four+ months that I was a WwF player, I won a total of 121 games, tied in one game, and lost 81 games. My average word was 14-15 letters. I was not a wildly successful player, but not too bad. I enjoyed playing good games when the scores for me and my opponent were close and it was questionable who would win until the very end. I didn’t really like games where I never seemed to get any good letters, or I could never use the letters I had to get a good word score. I tended to play the same few players over and over again, sometimes with two or three games going with them at the same time. Sometimes I got really bored and started several new games, with around six or eight games going at once. In general, it was a good way to take a short break from my work or have something to do when TV was boring and I wasn’t interested in reading a book or doing other hobbies. I never became addicted to it – it was just a fun way to pass time once in a while.

I did periodically wonder how my opponents could come up with some really unusual words that I have never heard of. I can see how the “Solo Play” version of the game (where you play against yourself and it’s offline, so doesn’t count towards your point totals, etc.) can come up with unusual words because it’s basically a computer and probably has a built-in automatic dictionary and process that finds the best words using the letters it has. But how do humans come up with strange, never-heard-of words? I suppose you could use a dictionary to look up words starting with whatever letter you need, but I think it would have to be a physical book dictionary. I haven’t ever tried this, but it seems like it might be hard to get an online dictionary to list lots of words beginning with “d” or whatever…but maybe it is possible. Anyway, I didn’t try finding words in dictionaries to use while I was a WwF player.

One thing that bugged me with a couple of the people who were randomly chosen to play with me when I started a new game and chose “Select a random player” (or however it’s worded) was that a few of those people wanted to have “conversations.” You can send messages to your opponent in a game by clicking on the message icon. But these people are not my friends in real life – in fact, they are complete strangers – so I could not really see why you would want to message each other. If they were friends (or relatives) in real life, I could definitely understand why it would be hilarious and fun to message each other back and forth during a game. But having message conversations with strangers? I don’t really see why. One or two of these people simply wanted to say something like, “Good game.” Okay, that was fine. One person kind of creeped me out by saying “Hello” before even starting to play and when I didn’t reply – I just got a very weird feeling and didn’t want to reply – he or she then wrote “Oh I see you don’t want to talk” (or something like that) and then resigned the game. If you resign the game, it’s bad. You really want to avoid that. So if someone does that, it means they REALLY don’t want to play with you. And in that case, it was fine with me. I didn’t want to play with a creep!

But now (finally!) we come to the reason for writing this blog and why I uninstalled WwF from my phone last night. I clicked on “Select a random player” to start a new game because I was finished working and bored, and none of the players in the current games I was playing were online or playing their turn. Time to start a new game. I got a random player assigned to me and entered my first word in the game. Then I saw that the player had sent me a message. “Sigh,” was my first thought. But I clicked on the message and it said (name changed to protect the “innocent”), “Hi, my name is “Anonymous Male Name,” I’m 35 and from Pennsylvania.”

Hmm. Did I care to know this guy’s first name, age and where he’s from? No. But the message was friendly enough and I wasn’t getting any “this is a creep” feelings, or at least not very loud feelings. So I wrote back, “This is Patty, I’m old, and I’m from New York.” And that's when it started to get creepy and weird. The guy played his turn, but then asked why I feel I am old (slight creepiness creeping in...). I replied that I just turned (my age) and he replied back that it’s not old, and that he likes dating older women (now definitely sliding down the creepiness ramp, time to put on the brakes...).

Damn. I had been assigned a random total creep for this game. So I replied back that I am older than my husband (huge brake on the creepiness, or so I though...), but it works with our age difference, blah blah blah. Trying to make it very clear that I am married and not interested in any way, shape or form in being anything but married to my husband in terms of potential dating or any other ideas in that direction this creep might have. Anyway, I don’t remember every detail of the few messages that this asshole and I exchanged, but I tried very hard to keep steering the “conversation” away from anything weird. It didn’t work, though. His last message that I did not reply to was something like, “She had a really great collection of lingerie,” referring to a woman he had dated who was twenty years older than him.

So bam. That was too far – way too far – in the direction I had been trying to avoid with this jerk. I turned off WwF and decided to do a Google search and see if I could find out what other WwF players do when they get a creep sending them weird messages during a game. The search turned up one answer to that question (report abuse and block the player), but also turned up answers to questions I wasn’t asking (typical search engine).

One of the answers was about cheaters in WwF. Cheaters? How could you cheat? I clicked on that link and found out that there are WwF players who cheat by using dictionary websites that provide long lists of words that you can use to play the game. So this is how some of the players I had played came up with words no one has ever heard of, but that give really high scores.

Naïve, you might be thinking. If there’s a game, there are people cheating at it. Yes, I tend to be naïve. Just like I was naïve with this jerk from Pennsylvania who kept trying to turn my innocent messages in another direction. The asshole was probably getting ready to start jerking off while playing the game and sending me creepy messages. But I am not nearly as naïve as I was when I was younger. I have done some things that would be considered downright stupid (and potentially dangerous) by other less naïve people. And it took me way longer to figure out what was really going on in those situations than it should have. But I never got into any sort of huge trouble. I just trusted untrustworthy people for too long.

So. What was the result of getting that last message from the jerk in Pennsylvania and finding out in my search online about it that people cheat at the game? And that what I should do about this creep is report the abuse and block him? The result is that I uninstalled WwF from my phone. I was in the middle of five or six other games with people I enjoy playing with, but I didn’t care.

I had uninstalled the game one previous time when I kept losing game after game (I lost like twenty games in a row) and I was just frustrated. But I installed it again a day or so later and all my games were still intact. And I finally started winning some games. So I know that if I reinstall the game now, just one day after uninstalling it, all my games will be in place…including the game with the creep.

I know – I should have reported the abuse and blocked this asshole. But his creepiness got to me to the point where I am now completely creeped out by the game, not just him. Does he introduce himself to every woman who gets him as a random player? Does he then turn the messaging in the creepy direction he turned it in with me with all those women? If so, hasn’t someone else reported him? If he does this every time, wouldn’t he have enough reports of abuse that he would be banned from the game? How many other creeps are there in the WwF database, just waiting for a naive innocent like me to click on "Play with random player" (or however it's worded)?

None of these questions will ever get answered, but I no longer care. I am disgusted and disheartened (and yes, I know – naïve) that even a nice game like WwF allows creeps like this to be in their database, creeps who try to get women into message conversations that go in a twisted direction. Who knows? Maybe this guy actually gets some of the women assigned to him to respond the way he wants them to. And maybe the women who are bothered by his creepiness just do what I did – uninstall the game and never play again. How sad if that’s the case. Creeps like this should be reported and eventually banned from the game.

But I am simply too sad and disgusted to bother anymore with a game that would allow this to happen. So I am no longer anyone’s “friend” in WwF nor will I ever be again. Sad for me because it was fun. But not fun enough to put up with creeps.