Wordulence

I've found a wonderful new way to distract myself from whatever the hell it is I do. It all happened when my friend Meg showed me this game on Facebook that she plays called "Who's Got the Biggest Brain?" It's a flash game that makes you do a few timed tasks and it scores you in terms of how heavy your brain must be, based on your performance. Meg, apparently, has a large brain. More importantly, Meg is determined to make her brain grow larger than her advisor, who is currently beating her high score. Nothing can make you focus on a task like spite... uh, I mean, like having a concrete goal in mind. Anyway, I played this game a few times and I did ok. My brain is medium sized. But at the top of the game screen there's link to go to the other fun games made by the same company. One of them caught my eye: "Word Challenge". Just the title makes you tingle a little bit, doesn't it? Nah, me neither. But I do like word games, so I clicked on it.

Turns out it's a game very similar to Text Twist but legally distinct in two important ways. First of all, after each puzzle, if you get the 6-letter word, you go to a bonus round where the word is the first name of one of your buddies on Facebook. Never have I wished to be a hermit more in my entire life. I've got Facebook friends I've never even met before... how am I supposed to know their names, much less unscramble them from a bunch of random letters? It's giving me all kinds of completely unwarranted hostility towards my friends with unusual names. I'm all for diversity and whatnot, but it doesn't stop me from cursing every time I have to unscramble "Ganesh" or "Sujata" or "Pedram".

The other important difference is that if you get a word that has 4 or more letters, you get some extra time. It's this feature, more than anything, that will ensure my eventual death by starvation sitting in front of my keyboard. Think about it; if you're good, it rewards you by letting you play longer. And like anything, the more you play, the better you get. It sounds harmless, but in actuality it's a devious plan to get nerds like me hooked so that we never ever stop playing Word Challenge. Oh, what's that? You're not convinced? Let me tell you a story...

When I first started playing, I was doing okay, and I could occasionally get the 6-letter word, and I could usually get the Bonus Round too (f***ing Ganesh!!!) and after a few good games I got my score up to about 10000. (I know you have no frame of reference for how good that score is, which is why I'm telling this story. Keep your pants on.) I thought I was doing pretty well, and I was pleased with my performance. If only they measured it in terms of brain size, I was sure they would be telling me that my brain would need a wheelbarrow to help me cart it around. Then I looked at the high score list. It only shows you the scores from your other Facebook buddies who also play the game. At the time, I only had one buddy who was playing, and it was a girl I had met in passing last summer when I was at Google.

I looked at her score. I blinked. I looked at it again. She had 39000 points. I blinked again. This can't be right. I refresh the game to make sure there's no error. It's still there: 39000. This person (who is both an undergrad and a GIRL!) that I didn't really even know had beaten the crap out of my best score, and she did it before I even started playing. Clearly, this could not stand. I made it my mission to beat her score and claim my rightful place at the top of the nerd... uh, I mean Word Challenge hall of fame.

The next few days were not very productive, work-wise. Mostly, I sat in my office at my laptop, typing frantically and cursing at the screen at regular intervals. But my score steadily rose. First I got up to 15000, then 18000. After one epic game I managed to squeak out 20000 points. Another thing you should know at this point is that you don't get very many points per word. So getting a score of 20000 takes about 15 minutes of solid, stressful, clock-racing vigor. But I was determined. I would practice and practice and waste as much of my time as it took to beat that bitch. (Yes, in my mind she had slighted me greatly by daring to take my seat at the top. Even now I'm pretty sure she doesn't even know I was competing with her... her score hasn't changed since I started. It's entirely possible she quit the game before I ever played.)

And then it happened. After one game that must have last 45 minutes (even though you only start with 2 minutes on the clock) I managed to get over 30000 points. I still had a way to go but now it seemed inevitable. I was going to beat her, it was just a matter of time. A couple more days and I got a few more 30000+ scores, but not quite enough. At this point I decided I could rejoin the world a bit. Get some work done, shower, eat, etc. All that unimportant stuff. I was taking a break from work sometime in the afternoon and I decided to play Word Challenge (you know, for a change). I wasn't really in competition mode, I just wanted to kill a few minutes while I ran some tests. So I load it up and start playing.... and pretty soon I'm up to 20000 and I have most of my 2 minutes left. Then I get up to 30000 and I have about 1 minute left. Then I get up to 35000 and I have about 45 seconds left (you should be getting an idea of how far one can stretch these precious seconds). And finally it happens; I get 39000 and I've still got 20 seconds left. I inch my way closer to her score, hundred by hundred, and then KABOOM! My icon and hers swap places on the right-hand side of the screen, signifying that I, Michael, son of Lawrence, have beaten her best score in Word Challenge!! I was so overwhelmed that I stopped paying attention to the game, and only got about another thousand before I ran out of time. My final score was around 41000 points. I had done it. I had beaten that smug, self-righteous skank (ok, ok, so I only imagined that she was smug and mocking me and telling me I had tiny inferior genitals... you gotta hate your enemy or else your victory means nothing) at her own game! I could now retire in peace, knowing that I was the best wordmonkey in the world (where "the world" = "all of my facebook friends who played the game" = "one of my facebook friends").

I think it would be fair at this point to say I got a bit smug. I had worked hard to get that score, and I knew it was impressive because I had just impressed the hell out of myself. I wanted my friends to know exactly how lucky they were to know me, and to be able to bask in the awesomeness of my score. The game has an "invite" feature, so I invited a couple of my friends who I know like word puzzles. It was a dick move, but I basically wanted them to play a few times, get the idea that it would require a ridiculous amount of work to get a score as high as mine, and quit with a mixture of respect and disgust. But I didn't count on Brian.

Brian values his time as little as I do mine. And he likes word puzzles. That's why I invited him. I also really wanted something to lord over him, because he's annoyingly smart (most of my friends are annoying and/or smart). He started playing, and he pretty quickly got a respectable score, around 15000. The game also has a challenge feature where one person challenges another to beat his score. The challenger plays a round of the game and the opponent tries to beat his score. So just for fun I challenged Brian to a couple games and soundly beat the pants off him. My ego, uh, I mean brain, was now so enormous that it required several large office blocks just to house its operating manual.

But Brian persevered. His scores kept rising... 20000, 25000. And there was one embarassing challenge where I didn't do very well, and Brian actually BEAT ME! Oh, the shame of it all! But it was okay, it was just a challenge. I still had my precious High Score to lord over him. He'll never be able to take that away from me....

Well, unless you're a member of a typical TV audience you can see what's coming here. Brian beat my f***ing score. He got something like 45000. It was so on. I began neglecting work like there was no tomorrow! Just playing and playing and playing until my back was all hunched and my eyes didn't need to blink anymore. I began rearranging letters everywhere I looked. I couldn't read the newpaper without finding several 4-letter words in each sentence. I got my score up to something like 50000. Ha! Beat that, Brian!!

Hold on, hold on... I didn't mean it! It was just a taunt! Holy crap?!?! How did you get 60000 points?? I feel I should mention that when the game tells you your score, it also tells you what occupation has the same wordiness level that you do. So when you do pretty well you get "student" or "librarian" or "poet". Above 40000 is well into "Anagram Cyborg" country. The picture that goes along with it is William Shakespeare with bionic implants. That's me, baby. If you take this telescope and look out past Venus you can just see my brain orbiting the sun. I had to get it off-planet because it weighs half as much as Jupiter. The latency's a bitch, but the throughput is excellent.

But I beat Brian's score, and for the first time I was engaged in an active Word Challenge war. I got up to 75000. And then the next day I got 80000. Brian starting catching up and made it to 70000. But he started getting busy with school, so he didn't have as much time to play. Also, I think he was just getting bored with it. So I was playing much more than he was, and my score steadily rose. And he stayed at 70000.

When I'm old and I look back on my life and I wonder what it is that I did that in some way has made the world a better place or has been a boon to humanity, I generally imagine it will have something to do with my work in Computer Science. Maybe I'll come up with an important theorem, or invent a cool new programming language. Maybe I'll work on an important piece of software that everyone uses, or start a company that becomes world-famous. But now I know that none of these things will ever come close to my Word Challenge high score. Tonight I
played a couple games and the last one scored 242000. I may never have children, but I can rest easy knowing that my brain-progeny will outlive me, and serve as a shining example to future generations.

I am Mike, and I like to play word games. Fear me!

(Brian is still at 70000, what a pussy)

(Update: Brian 100000, Mike 450000)