Words with friends or foes?

I have succumbed to the popular game Words with Friends. It’s an interesting pastime.  It represents an opportunity to exercise our brains and to connect with friends and some non-friends (if you play random games). What’s most interesting is the cheating factor that comes into play...

We all know that some people cheat in all aspects of life but in such an insipid game as this, why? What are the signs of a cheater?  Cheaters come up consistently with non-words that the game seems to accept but the dictionary doesn’t.  They strategize and wait for that triple word space to become vacant so they can pounce on it with one of their boutique words that no one ever heard of in any conversation. They suddenly become brilliant with words such as “sixmos” which has an obscure reference in our current world.

What alarms me is my own feeling of having to teach the cheaters a lesson.  Why do I care?  Do they really appear smarter than me or is it just my competitive ego that takes over?  And what happens when the cheater realizes that you know she/he is cheating?  Don’t you just hate it when they resign or decide they are no longer interested in playing because they are bored with the game especially when secretly you find they still play with others...

Words’ cheaters are an interesting breed.  Why bother to play at all if you have to use a crutch constantly.  I was faced with an interesting dilemma: a close friend clearly cheated with a complex cheating program. How did I know?  Well when you know people, you have an idea of their vocabulary usage (former English teacher here). When I started seeing words of the “sixmos” variety, I was unsure how to proceed.  My friend told me that she was probably using an extensive cheat machine so I trolled the net looking for one.  To my surprise there were dozens of cheat programs.  Doesn’t it defeat the purpose of the whole reason for playing at all? Is this how we expand our vocabulary?

I picked one of the programs (which requires you to put in all of the letters used on a sample board and then to establish what kind of cheater you want to be from HS graduate to genius.  Of course I picked genius to see the best option. When we began to play with this cheat program together, he/she abruptly resigned. I have to be careful, she/he might read this.

I lose a lot of games but I win probably an equal amount.  There are people I play with whom I have never been able to beat and there are people I beat regularly. It doesn’t really matter to me if I win or lose; I just like trying to make inane words from bad letters (my chief complaint is I don’t get the good letters Ha). On occasion, I use the chat feature in the game to make an astute remark to my challenger like,” you get all of the best letters and I’m stuck with 7 vowels.)  I guess it is as with all games; to some it’s more about winning than playing.