Week, Weekend, Books Read

[shannon_a]

Haven't written here much lately. I'm not surprised because by the time I got to the end of last week I was feeling very run down. Some arguments with K., an RPGnet downtime of about 16 hours, and some hard decisions regarding finances all combined to generally make the week stressful and not a lot of fun.

The weekend, however, was much better. I skipped gaming because I had no ride back, and thus would have had to depend on public transport, which seemed pretty subpar after how tiring the week had been. Thus I lounged around for the most part on both Saturday and Sunday. Read books. Played games on the computer. Read comics. Played games with Kimberly. Went up to Comic Relief to do a bit of shopping and help out the store. Watched TV shows. Not a whole lot of excitement, nor much real work (though I did organize the dining room, catch up on bills, largely prepare a 2004 budget, and revise one review for RPGnet, all on Sunday night).

Since I haven't been writing here much, I haven't written about the last three or so books I've finished.

Child of the River by Paul McAuley is a science-fiction story about a world of anthropomorphic humanoids seeded by some lost ancient species and of one child of destiny, a pure-blood human. It was an adequate read, though often slow. I expect I'm going to read the next two at some point. However, one thing that really bugged me about the book is that the author really seems to be trying to be Gene Wolfe, and just can't help but come up very short. There's echoes of the writing style and the storytelling method. There's also a lot of very obvious parallel to Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun. If the comparison weren't so blatant, I might have liked McAuley more.

Primal Fear, by William Diehl, was of course the source of the film of the same name. The book is overall very good, and we get a much better sense of a whole cast of characters working with Marty. However, I'll have to admit, the climax of Primal Fear came across much better in the movie because of the visualization. This is the first of three books about Vale that Diehl wrote. I'll pick up the second one sometime when I see it used.

Word Freak, by Stefan Fatsis, was a look into the strange world of competitive Scrabble play. I found it interesting for the word play, but also for the insight as a game designer. Competitive Scrabble is played with what I'd personally call a bastardization of the English language. Players are required to memorize lists of obscure and archaic words in order to become competitive, and often professional level boards end up covered with words that 99.99% of the population would not recognize. The author of the book is both literate and erudite, but does terrible in the games until he starts his own memorization programs. That the competitive level of play is so unrecognizable to amateur players and that the focus largely shifts from language to arbitrary organizations of letters points out a core failure of Scrabble's design to me. And I'm sure there's an article in that somewhere for my column.

It's also worth commenting on a very notable comic I finished over the weekend:

Palomar is by Gilbert Hernandez, and it's a massive collection of his most notable contributions to Love & Rockets from 1993-2002--all the stories about Palomar. Palomar is a central American village, and these are the stories of its inhabitants and their lives over a twenty-year span. The longer stories all interweave between the various characters and give us a wonderful view of life. Although I consider books like Sandman and Watchmen beautiful examples of the comic book genre at its best, Palomar is one of those books that instead surpasses the genre.

Right now I'm reading Wolves of the Calla, the much anticipated fifth Dark Tower book by Stephen King, which has really picked up steam since one of the main characters from 'Salem's Lot came center stage, and also Ever Since Darwin by Stephen Jay Gould--I'd been reading one of Gould's more recent natural history collections, then decided to just start at the start, and read all 10 volumes. I've got 4 here already, 2 from Kimberly's pre-merge collection and 2 from mine, but will have to pick up some others from the book store en route. I'd been figuring his 10 books were about a year's read, at one essay a day, but his earliest essays are a lot shorter, so I've ben booking through ESD.

Comments

[dougo.livejournal.com]

I can sympathize with your complaint about all the obscure words in a typical tournament-level Scrabble game. But, well, they are all English words-- the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (OSPD) was compiled from five abridged dictionaries, so it's nowhere near as extensive as an unabridged dictionary or, say, the OED. And of course you can agree with your opponent to use whatever word list you like, if you want to compile one that only has "common" words. I don't really see how that's a failure in game design. Perhaps what bugs you is that the players who memorize lists of weird words don't know or care what most of them mean, because the game doesn't require knowing definitions?

I haven't read Word Freak, but it seems strange that he goes from "terrible" to "competitive" simply by memorizing word lists. There's a lot more to the game than word knowledge: I haven't memorized any lists (except the 96 two-letter words, which are so essential that most Scrabble clubs let beginners use print-outs of the list during games) but I can beat pretty much any casual player and maybe 30% of club players. I guess I've absorbed a lot of useful obscure words (like OURIE, a good vowel dump), but mainly I've learned over the years the strategies of rack management, positional play, closed vs. open boards, etc. And I've just gotten pretty good at anagramming.

If you really want to think about Scrabble and game design, maybe you should try out games like King's Cribbage and Equate, which are more or less the same as Scrabble except they use cribbage hands and valid mathematical equations, respectively, as their lists of acceptable plays. Since order doesn't matter (much), they're more like Clabbers, which is a variant of Scrabble where each word you play only has to be an anagram of a valid word. Even so, the space of valid plays is much larger in King's Cribbage and Equate than in Clabbers, and so they have a much different feel.

[shannon_a]

I think my prime issue with Scrabble is philosophical. The game purports to be about creating English words on a board, but I really don't believe that's the case at the competitive level. As you said, many of the professional players don't know what most of their words mean; many also seem to admit that they're playing a game of arranged letters, not words. From the philosophical level, I'd find King's Cribbage and Equate much more pure, because they are what they proclaim to be; thus from the core design of gameplay level, Scrabble is sound, it's more an issue of the thematic underpinning.

On the topic of whether words are English are not, I find exactly the method for selecting them to be the problem. They choose words that appeared in any one of five dictionaries, one of which (F&W) uses pretty obscure terminology. I would have found 2 of 5 or 3 or 5 or even 5 or 5 a better fit, because then you actually allow words that are common in usage rather than ones that were used somewhere sometime. Since usage defines language, I'd find this to be a much truer analogy for a game about the English language. (The general refussal to remove words from the lists is also a problem.)

And, yeah, you're quite right on rack management, positional play, closed vs. open boards, etc. For whatever reason Stefan decided to largely ignore those issues in writing his book, though clearly he was aware of them, and presumably improved with them. I guess it wasn't sexy enough, which is too bad, because I would have liked to see more discussion of these strategic elements, as opposed to all the rote memorization.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Again, I sympathize with your philosophical issue, but practically speaking I don't see how any game about "creating English words on a board" (or with cards, even) won't become "a game of arranged letters" when played competitively. Perhaps if the game insisted upon knowing definitions somehow, but that strikes me as almost more of a trivia/party game than anything else.

As for the word list, I agree that it seems like a better idea to be more restrictive than any single dictionary, not less, but the OSPD has been in use for over 20 years and players who have invested some effort into getting to know its quirks (not necessarily through study, but just lots of play time) are going to be loath to unlearn this knowledge. Generally players are more in favor of expanding the word list; many now use SOWPODS, which is the OSPD combined with the OSW, the official word list used in the UK. Personally I think the OSW's inclusion of QI and ZA really detracts from the game-- the 10 point tiles are supposed to be hard to play! The second edition of OSPD added QAT, which is bad enough; I remember reading somewhere that someone had run a Scrabble AI against itself some large amount of times, and QAT appeared in something like 50% of the games.

Anyway, I still feel that one can play a good game of Scrabble without knowing lots of arcane words, and outside of tournaments, it's more than sufficient to just have a large vocabulary, however ordinary. I went to a Scrabble club about 3 or 4 times and had some words challenged that were quite surprising to me: JASPER and LOGY. The latter is pretty well-known to most David Letterman fans, so maybe that makes it a pop-culture reference; the former is a birth stone, but maybe it's more well-known as a proper name.