[HN Gopher] Scrabble, Anonymous
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Scrabble, Anonymous
Author : crescit_eundo
Score : 37 points
Date : 2024-05-17 16:00 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theparisreview.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theparisreview.org)
| ZenThereWere0 wrote:
| Thanks for posting. I've been a user of the Internet Scrabble
| Club for over 15 years now. I came to it after learning of
| competitive scrabble from reading Word Freak by Stephan Fatsis
| [1].
|
| I had a background playing internet chess. I started with yahoo
| and gravitated towards lightning (1/0 time controls). I think
| there's more than a grain of truth to the quotation, "I play way
| too much blitz chess. It rots the brain just as surely as
| alcohol." ~ attributed to Nigel Short, English grandmaster. Fast-
| paced board games that deliver rewards are addictive.
|
| As a student of neurotransmitters, I can attest that playing
| blitz chess or scrabble does result in dopamine hits. Particular
| to Scrabble, one can receive such a hit of dopamine from a bingo
| (50 point bonus for playing all seven tiles). In a three minute
| (or less) time control, a medium to expert player can look
| forward to an average of two of these per game. All that's
| missing from this slot machine is the lights and sounds.
|
| Isc.ro is a unique little corner of the internet. It's navigated
| away from a downloaded console to a browser. It has its fair
| share of persistent trolls. There's a chat room, channel 20, that
| used to regularly have over 100 members active at any given time,
| and significantly more than that during peak hours.
|
| Competitive scrabble as a community peaked, IMO, in 2004 with the
| nationals in New Orleans. There's a Sports Illustrated article
| chronicling its subsequent problems [2]. NASPA in particular is
| undemocratic in its governance and pushed a woke agenda during
| the pandemic, resulting in the removal of hundreds of words from
| the official lexicons. The net result is there are now at least 4
| dictionaries, fracturing an already small and arguably dwindling
| community of word enthusiasts.
|
| An alternative to NASPA in the competitive Scrabble tournament
| and club scene is WGPO [3]. My personal experience is that most
| mid-size cities have clubs, and you'll meet worthwhile people in
| them. I liked to say, at a Scrabble club I always felt
| comfortable that I was typically not the most nor the least odd
| fellow there but rather squarely in the middle of the pack.
|
| I've noticed a pattern at the Internet Scrabble Club that I also
| noticed at the Free Internet Chess Server (fics.org), where I
| migrated after Yahoo games was phased out: a loss of members. ISC
| now competes with numerous viable alternatives easily accessible
| from a smartphone. In its heyday, it was unique place where you
| could navigate the interface with telnet commands. [Insert finger
| pun here.]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_Freak [2]
| https://www.si.com/more-sports/2020/10/26/how-scrabble-blew-...
| [3] https://wordgameplayers.org/
|
| Edited: for grammar and clarity.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > ISC now competes with numerous viable alternatives easily
| accessible from a smartphone.
|
| Is there any technical reason why ISC never became easily
| accessible from a smartphone? Have there been attempts?
| masto wrote:
| I have a theory that you are a board game family or you are not.
|
| We were not a board game family, apart from the occasional
| attempt to get through Monopoly without my little sister flinging
| it onto the floor. My partner, however is from board game people.
| When we're with her family, there are dice and cards and tokens,
| words and numbers fly through the air, and I am utterly lost. I
| played Scrabble with her once. I used to think I was smart.
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