I should make it clear that I use Facebook for keeping in touch with family and friends, with only a touch of promotion for my editing business. Mostly it’s social, not business. Therefore, I don’t feel guilty about playing a game or two while I’m there.
I’ll look at the games my friends are playing and usually I approach cautiously: I think, (a) will it be challenging or entertaining enough and (b) will it force me to have to constantly bother others for segments of the game I need to “succeed”? Some of my friends are into Farmville and they used to send me requests to join the game. Or, I’d see constant updates from them about their “achievements.”
Trying to keep an open mind, I’ve dipped my toe into some of these games, so far avoiding Farmville or Angry Birds, a game frequently played on smart phones. I was playing Words With Friends for a while, mostly on my Android to avoid boredom on the bus to work. It recently stopped functioning on my smart phone and I wasn’t bothered enough by this to investigate why. Words with Friends, as everyone knows, is Scrabble for Dummies—unlike Scrabble, it lets you guess words without being penalized. (If the word is wrong it simply won’t let you play it; you have to try something else).
But lately I have been reintroduced to Bejeweled Blitz, one of many games my husband plays. He likes various computer games, including the serious role-playing fantasy quests. I like fantasy quests—I did play Dungeons and Dragons in college, briefly—but in the electronic versions I am never coordinated enough to avoid being killed quickly on most of these adventure games. And I didn’t have enough time in my life to sit for hours and practice, as it seems many people can. So I like simple click and shoot games, matching games, or word games—anything that doesn’t have a lengthy, humiliating learning curve.
In Bejeweled Blitz you have one minute to match as many same-colored jewels as possible. That’s pretty much it—you have to match at least three jewels; larger groupings are worth more. You earn points and you can challenge your friends to games and share prizes among them. Like most of the Facebook games, you can spend real money to purchase extra points or prizes, or to play your friends more often (you need to earn “tokens” to challenge someone to a game). I refuse to spend money on a computer game. I just keep playing until I earn what I need.
My husband has been playing Bejeweled Blitz for months, with a variety of friends, but mostly with another married couple we know in Chicago. The three of them are super competitive with each other. I’m not that competitive—yet—because I need to get up to speed. I had the high score once, and it was shortly lived.
It’s harmless fun, but now that I’ve started playing again, I realize how mind-numbingly addictive it can be. I’ve signed on to play thinking, I’ll just play three games to warm up and then play a challenge game. But I’ll end up wasting an entire half hour when I have a project due that week. I’ll justify this by saying, “I just need to wind down from my day job before I start doing my freelance project.” True, winding down is nice, but meeting deadlines is more important.
Recently I found another game called Guess My Word! One of my friends was playing it and because I didn’t already have enough things sucking my life away, I clicked to play. Players are given three words, from easy to hard, and try to get the other player to guess their word by giving three one-word clues. You’re not supposed to use the word in the clues. My husband was sitting across the room while I was playing and I soon started yelling, “People are cheating! What is this!?”
A few of my random opponents had strung a bunch of words together as “one word,” making it really easy to guess the word. Also, the answer is at the bottom amid a bunch of scrambled letters—it’s really not hard, and yet “people are cheating!” See the example below, where the “one word” clue is “Wherekidsplay.” Obviously the answer is “playground.” That’s another violation, in my book, because you’re not supposed to use part of the answer in the clue. Yesterday, someone started a game with me and gave the clue “Notswedenbutdxxxxxx.” Really? Really?
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I am so done with Guess My Word. At least Bejeweled Blitz is supposed to be mindless fun.
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This article is the second of a series of 26 posts for the month of April called “Blogging from A to Z,” an idea first suggested by Arlee Bird of Tossing It Out.
“What if you tweet and no one tweets back?”
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